This website from the National Portrait Gallery presents "America's most profound national experience" through the Smithsonian Institute's extensive portrait collections. Readers who have a Flash plug-in will likely enjoy the opening movie, which features a jaunty civil war era tune played on penny whistle and snare, along with a series of telling portraits from the era. From the homepage, readers may then explore a helpful timeline, as well as galleries organized around people and places. For instance, selecting The Castle navigates readers to photographs and drawings of the red sandstone building that was the Smithsonian Institute at the beginning of the Civil War, with the unfinished capitol building in the distance.