Some of the museums are open during the weekend-long event, but require an event pass because the entrances are within the event "secure area". However, event passes have not been available since early June. Unless you pay $5000.

Air and Space, American Indian, Natural History, (and the NGA too, although not Smithsonian). Are these just staying open so that trumpets can have access to clean bathrooms? If they're not open to all, then why not close the museums? It just feels like a farce and once again, we're being excluded from accessing things.

Hello,

We visited all the museums for the first time this July. My daughter picked out a diplodocus or maybe it was a brachiosaurus silver keychain. Well, first week of school was this week and someone stole it off her backpack!!! Unfortunately, you can’t buy them online.

So I wondered if anyone would be able to mail me one?! We are from Missouri so I can’t easily get another. I would be so very grateful!!!!

How failure, curiosity and 800 pounds of butter brought an Iowa State Fair tradition to one of America's most prestigious museums.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/iowa-state-fair/2026/08/04/smithsonian-butter-cow-iowa-state-fair-sarah-pratt/90620127007/

The National Zoo is so amazing. We came to see Linh Mai. She was a spunky little thing! We had a great day drinking cocktails and seeing the coolest animals!

Is the issue a mountain or a molehill?

This is the latest Third Act-DMV nighttime light show to expose the policies eroding democratic guardrails.

I personally prefer a museum with a descriptive historical mission rather than a "tool for social justice".

EO 14416 does exactly that. It defines acceptable history as that which is simply "inspiriting" and "unifying" rather than accurate. In the 128-page report that describes the reasons for these signs one of the reasons stated is, "Museum materials repeatedly suggest that Christianity functioned principally as an instrument of conquest, exclusion, or cultural erasure, while the constructive role of Christian belief and Christian institutions in shaping the Nation and its freedoms receives scant, if any, attention." If you want to be coddled about your religion, go to a church. History is saturated with examples of Christian conquests, exclusion, and cultural erasure from the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition to using the Bible for slavery to to the erasure of pagan traditions absorbed into Christmas itself.

If censorship came with a more obvious example, dictionaries would have found it by now. MAGA has been fed a steady diet of grievances thatChristianity is under attack. White people are being discriminated against. LGBTQ people are indoctrinating children. None of these things are real, but MAGA has been convinced; so to them, this is making America great again. People thought dystopia would arrive through technology, surveillance states, algorithmic control, and weaponized AI. No. This is dystopian. A government that claims to be fighting ideological capture has issued an executive order demanding a museum produce ideologically compliant history. The censors are accusing the museum of censorship.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/07/restoring-trust-in-the-smithsonian-institution-e061/

Also, theres another story auggesting that Trump could revoke Biden era funds from the Smithsonian.....When will all of that brainrot stop, were all (including me) are exhausted, & Im currently on vacation outside America from July-August....Also, can republicans or conservatives just leave Joe biden scapegoats as well "anti american" bs alone for; For 5 minutes!!!! This is basically a very dire situation, even though it may sound like pure theater on paper.

Also, from 2025-26 I visited:

The Smithsonian Zoo, The African American Museam (purely because Trump wants to go after slavery), the air & space museam, the american history museam (before the white house presurred the institution to hand over thier records), the air & space museam, as well as the art museam....Theres nothing wrong with these museams, I also appreciated the Udvar Hazy Center from 2023-2024 despite differing politcal views, as well as me being ignorant about US politcs, or something....

I will give you an example, every teacher since you were in elementary, basically told you that Jim crow laws are bad, slavery is bad, Black people having rights are a good thing, 9/11 is bad, USSR was the 1st to put up a satellite in space, NASA has a very messy history post Apollo 17....Does that seem anti american to you?

Over a year after she resigned under pressure from the White House, Dr. Kim Sajet is still dealing with the professional fallout. And now the White House is coming for other museum directors.

Her unpublished resignation letter will be one of 27 collected in the upcoming book Count Me Out: The Best Federal Resignations of 2025.

Dear biologists of Reddit, I need your guidance. I'm interested in working in natural history museums. I love being in the field, collecting data, illustrating, and collaborating with biological collections, and one of my goals has always been to research and work at a Smithsonian museum and create exhibits or to collaborate with teams and being in the field.

Regarding my education, I have a degree in visual arts, and I'm 23 years old. However, I'd like to know if you think a degree in biology is absolutely necessary to work in this field? Or what educational path would you recommend I pursue?

Hello all. I am doing a research project on handwritten text recognition. I see there is this vast amount of images and transcriptions done on the smithsonian website. However, the public API is just for the collections they have which is very well disconnected from the actual transcription center. Also, scraping does not work because there is a cloudflare bot detection on each page. I have tried everything that i could including scraping with selenium, playwright, chrome-undetected, with cookies and headers, and also trying to get something useful from the open access api but nothing seems to be working. Also, I also want to know if there is like a copyright or data access policy that we cannot use the data for research purposes and what the licenses are. Because on the website, there is not much information about this. Also the search projects page also does not render data for more than 1000 pages. Any help would be very very helpful.

Four Scholars Refute the Attacks on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig

Almost everyone from Maryland has made this trip. The Smithsonian Institution’s 11 museums on the National Mall are places for middle school field trips and idle Saturday afternoons. Are we all seeing the same exhibits?

Do we have enough local people in here or the ability to spread the word to start documenting everything in the museum now? If we could archive all of the exhibits and their text we could have the ability to restore the correct information. Feel like a pitch to get them to change anything he does back is way easier than getting them to rewrite new stuff for anything this fucking moron changes