Movies: The Smithsonian Network

We go behind the scenes and into the minds of artists as they capture, commemorate, and, at times, condemn our presidents....

Herman Melville's epic ocean adventure "Moby Dick" is an American masterpiece. But was this stirring tale of violence and revenge simply an allegory, or were there real giants of the deep deliberately attacking whaling ships? With the help of centuri...

In 1960, a lone assassin planned a deadly attempt on the life of President-Elect John F Kennedy. With a Buick packed with dynamite, nothing was going to stop Kennedy's Suicide Bomber....

A documentary which follows two lion brothers as they become rulers of a pride in Botswana after a battle for dominance....

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In the far reaches of the North, wolf and bear come head to head. Winter has been long. The melting ice reveal scattered carcasses in the Swamp: a feast worth fighting for. The bears must fatten up before Winter comes again, the wolves must strengthe...

Even 2,000 years after his death, General Hannibal's battle strategies are still studied today. But of all his military feats, perhaps his greatest was leading his massive Carthaginian army of men and three-dozen elephants across the Alps and into th...

In Austria, he was known as an art collector and idealist. In Mexico, he was a colonialist aggressor responsible for thousands of deaths. And in France, he lost an empire. But who was the real Archduke Maximilian? Join us as we examine the brief and ...

Documentary which follows crocodile expert Brad Bestelink on a quest to dive with crocodiles without a cage or any other protection....

The drama documentary tells the real life story of Samurai woman Takeko Nakano who in 1868 fights for her clans' independence in a final battle that marks the end of the Samurai era....

In China's Valley of the Kings, there stands a tall, carved stone. It honors the resting place of a woman named Wu Zetian, who rose from concubine to become China's only female emperor. For more than a millennia, history claimed she killed her own ch...

Before he wrote the book that revolutionized the way people understood evolution, a young Charles Darwin found himself, by chance, on a strange sea voyage. This is the story of the HMS Beagle, which traveled from Great Britain to survey South America...

Ascension Island, a remote Mid-Atlantic outpost famous for its big game fishing, is under siege. Tiger sharks, hammerheads, even great whites, lured here every year by the bountiful reefs, are displaying aggressive behavior, culminating in the island...

Spend three years in China's remote and inhospitable Tibetan Plateau, home to nearly all the world's snow leopards....

Enter the harsh and unforgiving Kalahari and follow a lion pride attempt to save their threatened bloodline....

20 years after the TV Mini-Series "Tales of the Serengeti", our crew reunites to truly explore the Serengeti, with no fiction. We almost didn't survive it....

It lasted only one day on a small piece of land, but the impact the Battle of Waterloo had on history is massive and far-reaching. This is the definitive account of the fight that ended Napoleon's rule as emperor and altered the destinies of France, ...

Roughly 20 miles off the coast of west Africa, sits a volcanic relic now completely blanketed in equatorial rainforest: the island of Bioko. It's home to some very rare species, including the drill -- one of the most endangered primates in the world....

This is the story of a cheetah born into the Linyanti cheetah coalition. He is the runt of the litter and will have to fight hard for every scrap of food and attention to survive....

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 UK, but reigns supreme in Korea's mountains....