Stories from the Vaults

Roughly 50,000 items are annually donated to the Smithsonian's collection. See Roosevelt's hunting trophies, Steinbeck's sea urchins, Phyllis Diller's joke file, and other gifts from famous patrons.

Tom is on a mission: to discover what it means to be the best, the tiniest, the coldest and the most misunderstood.

Host Tom Cavanagh tries to unravel the idea of "Home Sweet Home." He visits the National Air and Space Museum's collection of space suits, learns about Native American tipis at the National Museum of the American Indian, and finds an astonishing array of life in a thimble of sand.

Beauty isn't just in the eye of the beholder. Three Smithsonian curators offer their surprising perspectives on the elusive meaning of true beauty as it applies to their work with advertising, orchids and ants.

Enter the vaults of the National Museum of American History and the National Air and Space Museum in search of earth-shattering firsts. From a new collection of vintage planes to the very first videogame (hint: it wasn't Pong).

The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of Natural History, and the National Postal Museum all hold clues to the afterlife. Deep inside their vaults, the evidence for life after death has never been more convincing.

Dive into the very heart of the world's largest museum complex amidst more than 136 million objects. With such an incredible variety of things to see, there's nothing haphazard about the systematic collections at the Smithsonian. Host Tom Cavanagh visits the National Zoo and the National Museum of American History, showing us that breadth certainly doesn't equal randomness.