Latest Air and space Podcast Episodes
The Woman in the Frame
Sidedoor - September 18, 2019 04:01 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsDid you know that Martha Washington was essential to America’s Revolutionary War effort? Or that Eleanor Roosevelt was the driving force behind the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights? According to journalist, writer, and commentator Cokie Roberts, many of America's Fi...
Field Trip!
Sidedoor - September 04, 2019 04:01 - 28 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsSidedoor hits the road, sneaking behind the scenes for the ultimate Smithsonian field trip we never took as kids. Lizzie and producer Justin O'Neill journey by bike, train, and even horse (okay, plastic horse) in a romp from museum to museum, encountering a hungry predator, a group of B...
Memory, Myth & Miniatures
Sidedoor - August 21, 2019 11:36 - 23 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsDavid Levinthal is a New York-based artist whose photography depicts “the America that never was but always will be.” He uses toys to recreate iconic moments in American history and pop culture, encouraging his audience to question America’s collective memory. Sidedoor visits Levinthal ...
The Wild Orchid Mystery
Sidedoor - August 07, 2019 04:01 - 22 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsYou probably know orchids as the big, colorful flowers found in grocery stores and given as housewarming gifts. But those tropical beauties represent only a fraction of the estimated 25,000 orchid species worldwide. While their showy relatives fly off the shelves, North America’s more u...
Things You'd Never Tell Your Parents
Sidedoor - July 24, 2019 04:01 - 20 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsRegie Cabico has been called the "Lady Gaga of Spoken Word poetry"—he's outspoken, provocative and iconoclastic. The son of Filipino immigrants living in rural Maryland, Regie says he’ll never be “entirely American or entirely Filipino,” and on stage he uses his poetry to explore identi...
Space Jocks & Moon Rocks
Sidedoor - July 10, 2019 04:02 - 26 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsWhen NASA’s Apollo 11 mission sent the first astronauts to the moon 50 years ago, there were many things we didn’t know. Like whether the moon’s surface would turn out to be a field of quicksand, if space germs would infect the astronauts, or what exactly the moon was made of. To commem...
The Dinosaur War
Sidedoor - June 12, 2019 04:00 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsBehind the fossilized teeth, bones, and claws displayed in the National Museum of Natural History’s new Fossil Hall is the story of two men and a nasty feud. During the paleontology boom of the late 1800s, scientists O.C. Marsh and Edward Cope went from good friends who named species af...
Update: Meet the New Voice of Season Four!
Sidedoor - June 05, 2019 04:01 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsWith our fourth season’s launch quickly approaching, take a moment to meet the new voice of Sidedoor! Season Four of the Smithsonian's Sidedoor podcast launches on June 12, 2019. Subscribe now!
Aloha, Y’all
Sidedoor - April 24, 2019 04:00 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsClose your eyes and think of Hawaii. That sound you undoubtedly hear? Well, that’s the ocean. But that other sound floating on the breeze—that’s the steel guitar, an indigenous Hawaiian invention that has influenced country, blues, and rock music since the turn of the 20th century. This...
Good as Gold
Sidedoor - April 10, 2019 04:00 - 21 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsGlittering treasures, gleaming coins, and eye-catching jewelry…gold can be all of these things, but in some parts of the world it's also an enduring link to the past. Gus Casely-Hayford, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, takes us on a journey through West Afr...
Abraham Lincoln: Prankster-in-Chief
Sidedoor - April 01, 2019 04:00 - 32 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsWe all know Abraham Lincoln, right? Well, we know one side of him—the grave-faced leader of a troubled country—but behind the face on the penny lies an unlikely jokester. This week, Sidedoor reveals the rascally side of our 16th president, and does it with a brand-new sound.
The Feather Detective
Sidedoor - March 27, 2019 04:00 - 27 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsIn 1960, investigators found dark bits of feather stuck inside a crashed airplane's engines. They needed someone to figure out what bird they belonged to—and how that bird took down a 110,000-pound plane. Enter Roxie Laybourne, a Smithsonian bird expert who not only answered that questi...
Singing the Gender-Bending Blues
Sidedoor - March 13, 2019 04:00 - 26 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsGladys Bentley loved women, wore men's clothing, and sang bawdy songs that would make sailors blush...and did it openly in the 1920s and 1930s. This was long before the gay rights or the civil rights movements, yet Bentley became a darling of the Harlem Renaissance alongside icons like ...
The Silence of the Frogs
Sidedoor - February 27, 2019 05:00 - 26 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsIn the mid-1990s, investigators identified a mysterious and seemingly unstoppable killer. Its name? Chytrid. Its prey? Frogs. Since then, the disease has ravaged frog populations worldwide, and despite decades of research there’s still no cure. So, like modern-day Noahs, a group of Smit...
Cheech Marin Gets Artsy
Sidedoor - February 13, 2019 05:00 - 26 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsIn the 1970s and ’80s, Cheech Marin was famous for being half of the stoner comedy duo "Cheech and Chong." Today, he’s a passionate advocate for Chicano art and is raising awareness around a uniquely Mexican American aesthetic: rasquachismo. In this episode of Sidedoor, Cheech Marin is ...
50 Shades of Gray Whales
Sidedoor - January 30, 2019 05:00 - 25 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsHappy New Year! We’re busy working on a new batch of Sidedoor episodes and while you wait, we wanted to re-share a story we like from the fall, just in case you missed it the first time around. From 6,000-year-old cave paintings to silver screen stars in movies like Free Willy, whales h...
Amelia Earhart's Revolutionary Flight Club
Sidedoor - December 26, 2018 05:00 - 26 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsYou know Amelia Earhart, but did you know she was just one of a daring group of women aviators who defied both expectations and gravity in the 1920s? They called themselves the Ninety-Nines, and they’re still flying today as an organization dedicated to the advancement of women pilots. ...
Inventor, Photographer...Murderer
Sidedoor - December 12, 2018 05:00 - 27 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsMeet Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneering and eccentric photographer from the 1800s whose work changed how people understood movement, and paved the way for the invention of motion pictures. But this inventor, artist, and showman also made a name for himself for something much less savory: ...
This Color Is Who I Am
Sidedoor - November 28, 2018 05:00 - 27 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsArtist Frank Holliday's social circle in the 1980s was a who's who of New York City cool: Andy Warhol, Cyndi Lauper, RuPaul, Keith Haring, and even Madonna. But Frank's odyssey through the art world also placed him at the center of an epidemic that would shake the entire country. In hon...
That Brunch in the Forest
Sidedoor - November 14, 2018 05:00 - 25 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsIn 1621, a group of Pilgrims and Native Americans came together for a meal that many Americans call "The First Thanksgiving." But get this—it wasn't the first, and the meal itself wasn't so special either. The event was actually all but forgotten for hundreds of years…until it was duste...
Seriously Seeking Sasquatch
Sidedoor - October 31, 2018 04:00 - 26 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsInside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural history is the skeleton of Grover Krantz—an accomplished anthropologist, tenured professor…and diehard Bigfoot believer? As the first serious scientist to study the legendary creature, Krantz risked his career and reputation on a subje...
Slavery, Freedom & Grandma’s House
Sidedoor - October 17, 2018 04:00 - 21 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsWhat if you found out that your grandmother’s house was going on display at a museum? The. Whole. House. That’s what happened to the Meggett sisters, who grew up visiting, eating, and playing at their grandma’s tiny cabin in South Carolina, unaware that it was originally built to house ...
50 Shades of Gray Whales
Sidedoor - October 03, 2018 04:00 - 24 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsFrom 6,000-year-old cave paintings to silver screen stars in movies like Free Willy, whales have long captured the human imagination. And it makes sense—they're among the largest and most intelligent creatures to ever live on our planet. This time on Sidedoor, we’ll explore our surprisi...
Update: Passing the Mic!
Sidedoor - October 01, 2018 04:00 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsOur dear host Tony Cohn is leaving *Sidedoor *to travel the world, so we want to take a minute to introduce you to the new voice of the show, Haleema Shah.
A Right to the City
Sidedoor - September 19, 2018 04:00 - 24 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsIn Washington, D.C., the neighborhood of Anacostia was once dismissed as the wrong side of the river. Now, it is turning into a housing hotspot as the city sees an influx of newer, wealthier residents. It’s called gentrification, and the process has become a flashpoint from Houston to H...
The World's Deadliest Animal
Sidedoor - September 05, 2018 04:00 - 25 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsThe world’s deadliest animal isn’t the tiger, the snake, or even the alligator—it’s the mosquito. These tiny insects spread diseases that kill over 700,000 people each year. But what can we do to stop them? In search of solutions, host Tony Cohn travels around Panama with some well-equi...
The Mystery Bones of Witch Hill
Sidedoor - August 22, 2018 04:00 - 22 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsIt begins a bit like a *Scooby Doo *episode: archaeologists digging at a place called “Witch Hill” discover mysterious human remains in an ancient trash heap. Who was this person? How’d they get there? Astonishingly, it would take 40 years to find out, and the story is way more surprisi...
The Curse of the Hope Diamond
Sidedoor - August 08, 2018 04:00 - 27 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsThe Hope Diamond is one of the most iconic items in the Smithsonian's collections, but this glittering gem is rumored to have a dark side. French monarchs, an heiress, and at least one unlucky postman have met misfortune after possessing it—though does that really constitute a curse? Th...
Season Three Update!
Sidedoor - August 02, 2018 17:34 - 1 minute ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsTony sneaks away from the mosquitoes and frogs of Panama to make a special announcement: Sidedoor season three launches on Wednesday, August 8! Get ready for even more amazing stories from every corner of the Smithsonian. Pro tip: subscribe today to receive new episodes before anyone ...
Red, White and Brew
Sidedoor - July 04, 2018 04:00 - 25 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsHow much do you know about the history of American home brewing? In this episode of Sidedoor you'll meet the Smithsonian's first brewing historian, Theresa McCulla, and learn about the role of women, enslaved people, and immigrants in the country's complex—and often surprising—relations...
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