The Smithsonian Network Movies

The history of the people and the planes that first broke the speed barrier in 1947 and the impact it has had on aviation and how we fly today.

A visually stunning portrait of one of nature's most agile and fearsome predators, the Goshawk. This secretive bird of prey can be hard to see in the...

Ascension Island, a remote Mid-Atlantic outpost famous for its big game fishing, is under siege. Tiger sharks, hammerheads, even great whites, lured h...

Before he wrote the book that revolutionized the way people understood evolution, a young Charles Darwin found himself, by chance, on a strange sea vo...

A colorful portrait of Uganda's gamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary, a place where orphaned and rescued chimpanzees - victims of the illegal exotic pet...

Brazil's massive Pantanal is a land of extreme contrasts, ruled by dramatic cycles of torrential rain and arid heat. At the peak of the dry season, th...

During the rainy season in Africa, a herd of buffalo can create thousands of pounds of waste in a day, which would be an environmental disaster if not...

China, as we know it today, would not exist without the Han Dynasty. About two millenniums ago, its emperors ruled for over 400 years, and yet, few vi...

When Mount Vesuvius obliterated the city of Pompeii in 79 A.D., it preserved the bodies of about 2,000 victims, freezing them in their final moments....

The uncommon sight of polar bears wandering a colorful landscape during an iceless summer in Hudson Bay, Canada.

In November 19, 1946, a U.S. military transport plane goes out of control while flying over the Swiss Alps and crashes high in the mountains. Miraculo...

Peek at the first hours of three tiger cubs to their first swim at the National Zoo.