Smithsonian stories through the side entrance.
Sidedoor follows Lizzie Peabody through Smithsonian-linked stories where familiar symbols, hidden specimens, and overlooked lives become surprisingly dramatic. Episodes move from Betsy Ross and Uncle Sam to Vera Rubin, Alice the tapir, Katherine Wright, and Clifton Chenier with a brisk, conversational style.
PRESS PLAY
Sidedoor is a Smithsonian-backed narrative show for stories that feel familiar until someone opens the wrong drawer. Lizzie Peabody leads with scene and surprise, then lets researchers, writers, artists, and witnesses pull the thread. The subjects range widely. Episodes move from the American flag and Uncle Sam to tapir bones, factory labor, dark matter, Chinatown violence, early aviation, and zydeco. That range is the point. The show treats history as something stored in objects, images, songs, specimens, and family legends, then asks how those fragments became public memory. A Betsy Ross episode turns a classroom legend into a story about timing, grief after the Civil War, and the making of a national symbol. An Uncle Sam episode finds civic identity in cartoons, cereal boxes, stuffed dolls, and the durability of a top hat and goatee. The science episodes are equally story-driven. Vera Rubin's path to astronomy becomes a study of persistence, exclusion, and the difficulty of seeing what others are trained to miss. Alice the tapir begins as a mystery in deep storage and becomes a living record of animal research in Panama. Sidedoor also has a strong eye for overlooked support systems. Katherine Wright is framed not as a footnote to Wilbur and Orville, but as someone essential to the Wright family's public and private machinery. Clifton Chenier's story turns a late-night Carnegie Hall rescue and a Houston beer joint encounter into a larger portrait of zydeco's fight for recognition. The show can be playful. It is not weightless. Episodes make room for labor exploitation, war casualties, public violence, sexism in science, and the uneven rewards of American industry. Still, the editorial posture stays inviting, concrete, and clear. Sidedoor suits listeners who like museum-grade curiosity with narrative momentum, where the artifact is only the beginning and the real discovery is how much meaning people have packed around it.
Made for: For curious listeners who like history, science, culture, and biography told through vivid objects and surprising trails. It suits families and adults who enjoy smart storytelling without academic stiffness.
What sets it apart: Sidedoor has direct access to Smithsonian collections, researchers, and institutional memory, which gives its stories unusual range and authority. It pairs museum depth with scene-led audio storytelling that keeps even familiar American symbols feeling unsettled and alive.
More than 154 million treasures fill the Smithsonian’s vaults. But where the public’s view ends, Sidedoor begins. With the help of biologists, artists, historians, archaeologists, zookeepers and astrophysicists, host Lizzie Peabody sneaks listeners through the Smithsonian’s side door, telling stories that can’t be heard anywhere else. Check out si.edu/sidedoor and follow @SidedoorPod for more info.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Sidedoor turns overlooked people, material traces, and field discoveries into vivid histories of science, industry, culture, and conservation.
Sidedoor begins with a scene, a person, or a puzzling find, then lets Lizzie Peabody follow the evidence outward. A troubled Carnegie Hall concert leads into Clifton Chenier's career.
A box turtle finally appears, and you understand why nobody will tell you where it lives.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A flag legend becomes a lesson in how myths take hold.
The piece treats Betsy Ross as one part of a larger account of how a familiar schoolbook image hardens into national myth. It moves from the childhood version of the tale to the Civil War, when the flag came to stand as a sacred symbol and the Betsy Ross story reappeared in…
A battered box reveals a tapir named Alice and a tangled history of wildlife protection in Panama.
A Smithsonian warehouse internship turns into a compact natural-history mystery when Nina Harai opens a battered, watermarked box and finds a tapir skeleton.
A clothing shortage opens onto the machinery, infrastructure, and human cost of American industrial power.
A shortage of coats, hats, and fabric gives Sidedoor a clean way into the story of American industrialization. The episode traces how the Revolutionary colonies' dependence on British imports exposed a manufacturing weakness, then carries that thread through the rise of…
A White House photo makes Kate Wright the center of the Wright brothers story.
This episode places Kate Wright at the center of the story, using the lone woman in the 1909 White House photograph beside Orville as a sharp way to measure public memory against private effort.
Carnegie Hall shifts from bored seats to aisle dancing, then circles back to Clifton Chenier's Houston years.
Side Door shapes a sold-out 1979 Carnegie Hall blues tribute into a lively account of how Clifton Chenier could move a crowd from restlessness to dancing in the aisle.
Troy's Uncle Sam story turns a familiar icon into a local mystery with sharp visual history.
Side Door treats Troy, New York's claim to be the official home of Uncle Sam as a story about how a national symbol settles into everyday civic life.
A woods walk becomes a careful look at turtle trafficking and one vivid box turtle.
Side Door moves from a spring walk through a hidden stretch of woods into a close look at turtle poaching, fieldwork, and the strange intimacy of looking for an animal that people try to keep out of sight.
Curious facts, kid-sized and quiz-ready.
Engineer and TV host Emily Calandrelli describes her experience flying to space on Blue Origin's NS-28 mission.
Side Door hosts a mailbag episode where producer James Morrison draws listener questions from a bag, starting with a search for an actual mailbag at the Smithsonian.
This episode of Side Door shares a 20,000 Hertz podcast about how the Jeopardy theme song originated as a lullaby for Mervyn Griffin's son.
The Smithsonian's Jennifer Jones says the museum has the Star-Spangled Banner, but not an original 13-star circle flag, so the Betsy Ross question starts with uncertainty.
Smithsonian archaeology intern Nina Harai finds a tapir skull with shotgun-wound holes inside a decades-old storage box at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, dated only to September 1988.
Smithsonian's Side Door traces the history of American manufacturing, opening with Benjamin Franklin's 1776 mission to France, where author Rachel Slade says his deliberately homespun, beaver-fur outfit at the court of King Louis XVI was '100% marketing' meant to showcase American bootstrapping.
Side Door traces the life of astronomer Vera Rubin, from building a homemade cardboard telescope as an 11-year-old in 1930s Washington, D.C., to becoming the scientist whose research provided the strongest direct evidence for dark matter.
A journalist recounts the 1973 gangland execution of Chinatown gang leader Yip Yee Tak in San Francisco.
Side Door opens on a 1909 White House photograph where President William Howard Taft stands with Wilbur, Orville, and Catherine Wright, the only woman in the line.
At Carnegie Hall in 1979, Dickie Landry watched a sold-out blues tribute stall until Clifton Chenier, in a red suit and gold crown, woke up 3,000 people and sent them dancing in the aisles.
["Side Door opens in Troy, New York, where garbage trucks, bowling lanes, and the Hart-Klewitt Museum all point back to Uncle Sam.", "Kathy Sheehan says Troy is the official home of Uncle Sam because Samuel Wilson lived there, while Smithsonian curator Frank Blazich says the origin story is still disputed.", "The episode follows the War of 1812 meat contract, the E.A.U.S.
This episode explores the quirky personality of Alexander Fleming and how his unusual hobby of germ paintings led to the discovery of penicillin.
Smithsonian researchers search for turtles in a secret Virginia forest to discuss the illegal turtle trade, the most trafficked four-legged creatures in the world.