Pygmy Madtom
The pygmy madtom is among the least frequently encountered North American fishes, documented from limited reaches of the Duck and Clinch river systems in Tennessee.
Places and wildlife — page 56
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Tennessee Coneflower
This purple coneflower evolved in the thin, hot soils of limestone cedar glades near Nashville and occurs naturally nowhere outside a small part of Middle Tennessee.
Ruth's Golden Aster
This endangered perennial grows in cracks and scoured rocky margins along short reaches of the Hiwassee and Ocoee rivers, nowhere else on Earth.
U.S. Space & Rocket Center
A Saturn V, Apollo hardware, spacecraft, engines, simulators, and outdoor rocket parks make Huntsville’s engineering history physically comprehensible.
Birmingham Museum of Art
Asian art, Wedgwood, European painting, African art, American work, and Alabama makers reward comparison across material and period rather than a greatest-hits lap.
Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum
More than a century of motorcycles, an exceptional Lotus collection, restoration work, and views onto an active circuit turn transportation history into a study of engineering choices.
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
Primary sources, recreated spaces, oral history, and the view toward Kelly Ingram Park and 16th Street Baptist Church connect organized resistance to the city that tried to suppress it.
The Legacy Museum
Immersive exhibits connect the domestic slave trade, racial terror, segregation, mass incarceration, and contemporary legal inequality in a former warehouse district shaped by enslaved commerce.
Rosa Parks Museum
A restored bus, courtroom and boycott evidence, oral histories, and the arrest site explain the Montgomery Bus Boycott as organized community work rather than one spontaneous refusal.
Museum of Alabama
Four major galleries move through land, Indigenous nations, state formation, war, industrialization, politics, civil rights, and everyday life inside the nation’s oldest state-funded independent archives agency.
History Museum of Mobile
Indigenous trade, French and Spanish rule, slavery, cotton, shipbuilding, Carnival, migration, and hurricanes unfold inside the former Southern Market and City Hall.
Mobile Carnival Museum
Robes, crowns, float models, photographs, invitations, costumes, and a rocking float expose the designed machinery behind Mobile’s long Carnival tradition.
Africatown Heritage House
Clotilda artifacts, descendant voices, West African contexts, documents, and environmental history tell how 110 captives survived the last known illegal slave voyage to the United States and founded Africatown.
Cook Museum of Natural Science
A cave, forest canopy, live animals, Tennessee River gallery, ocean tank, insects, and hands-on labs translate connected habitats into physical exploration.
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
American painting, prints, studio glass, Southern regional art, decorative arts, and an important Bill Traylor group share the museum with ArtWorks and a sculpture garden.
Alabama Music Hall of Fame
Costumes, instruments, recordings, contracts, vehicles, and biographies connect Alabama-born performers with songwriters, producers, session players, and the Muscle Shoals industry.
McWane Science Center
Alabama fossils, an aquarium, physical-science interactives, early-childhood play, live animals, demonstrations, and an IMAX Dome make this a layered family science center.
Anniston Museum of Natural History
Birds of the Americas, Alabama environments, fossils, minerals, live-animal programs, and global habitat displays share a campus with the Berman Museum and Longleaf Botanical Gardens.
National Maritime Museum of the Gulf
Ship handling, navigation, weather, offshore industry, ports, marine science, and naval history fill a purpose-built riverfront museum overlooking active Mobile traffic.
Negro Southern League Museum
Uniforms, photographs, contracts, equipment, scorebooks, and the career of Birmingham Black Barons players recover a league built under segregation.
W. C. Handy Birthplace, Museum & Library
Handy’s reconstructed birthplace, piano, manuscripts, instruments, photographs, and personal objects connect a Florence childhood to touring, arranging, publishing, and the national circulation of blues form.
National Memorial for Peace and Justice
More than 800 weathering-steel monuments represent U.S. counties where racial-terror lynchings were documented, surrounded by sculpture, text, and duplicate columns intended for local claim.
Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site
Hangars, aircraft, a control tower, film, photographs, oral histories, and training equipment preserve the field where Black military aviators and support crews challenged exclusion.
Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site
The Carver Museum, Booker T. Washington’s home, student-built architecture, laboratories, and active Tuskegee University campus connect education, self-determination, accommodation, protest, science, and institution building.
16th Street Baptist Church
The congregation’s sanctuary, Wales Window, memorial spaces, and history interpret its role in Birmingham organizing and the 1963 bombing that killed Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley.
Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church
The church where Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastor preserves its sanctuary, office, parsonage connections, and basement mural near the Alabama State Capitol.
Civil Rights Memorial Center
Maya Lin’s granite memorial and the adjacent center honor forty people killed during the modern civil-rights movement while connecting their stories to contemporary justice work.
Freedom Riders National Monument
Outdoor interpretation at the former Greyhound station and a second site west of Anniston mark where a Freedom Riders bus was attacked and then burned on Mother’s Day 1961.
Edmund Pettus Bridge
The Alabama River crossing marks where state troopers attacked voting-rights marchers on March 7, 1965, and where later Selma-to-Montgomery marches passed under federal protection.
Brown Chapel AME Church
Brown Chapel served as the starting point and organizing center for the 1965 voting-rights campaign and Selma-to-Montgomery marches, within the George Washington Carver Homes community.
Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark
Preserved furnaces, stoves, blowing engines, casting sheds, rail lines, and workers’ histories reveal how local ore, coal, and limestone built an industrial city.
USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park
USS Alabama, submarine USS Drum, aircraft, tanks, memorials, and interior compartments expose naval engineering and the labor of living inside war machines.
Fort Morgan State Historic Site
A masonry fort at Mobile Bay’s mouth layers the Battle of Mobile Bay, enslaved construction labor, harbor defense, changing artillery, and coastal ecology.
Fort Gaines
Ramparts, tunnels, cannons, bakery, blacksmith shop, and bay views make the fort’s relationship to Fort Morgan, naval channels, and Dauphin Island legible.
Horseshoe Bend National Military Park
A museum, overlook, battlefield road, river, and reconstructed barricade interpret the 1814 battle that devastated Red Stick Creek forces and accelerated U.S. seizure of Muscogee land.
Old Cahawba Archaeological Park
Ruins, cemeteries, mapped streets, archaeological remains, and river landscape preserve the state’s first capital and later Black community rather than a reconstructed town.
Ivy Green: Helen Keller Birthplace
Keller’s birthplace, cottage, household objects, gardens, and the pump associated with her language breakthrough interpret family life, Anne Sullivan’s teaching, and a globally influential writer and activist.
Frank Lloyd Wright Rosenbaum House
The 1939 house, 1948 addition, built-in furniture, brick, cypress, radiant floor, and long garden axis preserve one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s clearest Usonian experiments.
Muscle Shoals Sound Studio
The original 3614 Jackson Highway control room, instruments, isolation spaces, photographs, and session history explain how the Swampers built a recognizable yet flexible sound.
FAME Recording Studios
Studio A, control rooms, instruments, photographs, and continuing sessions connect Rick Hall’s production culture with soul, country, rock, and generations of musicians.
Moundville Archaeological Park
Twenty-nine platform mounds, a central plaza, museum, river setting, and archaeological evidence preserve one of the largest Mississippian political and ceremonial centers.
Russell Cave National Monument
A boardwalk reaches the enormous shelter where deep stratified deposits record repeated Indigenous occupation, changing tools, foodways, climate, and trade over millennia.
Little River Canyon National Preserve
Clifftop overlooks, waterfalls, sandstone canyon, forest, pools, and whitewater protect one of the Southeast’s most dramatic plateau-river landscapes.
Cheaha State Park
Bald Rock, Pulpit Rock, CCC stonework, mountain forest, lake, and connections to the Pinhoti Trail make the state high point more than a drive-up tower.
Gulf State Park
Nine ecosystems, the Hugh S. Branyon Backcountry Trail, Lake Shelby, dunes, beach, pier, nature center, and wildlife corridors reveal far more than a resort shoreline.
DeSoto State Park
Forest trails, the West Fork of Little River, boardwalks, small falls, CCC structures, and the separate DeSoto Falls area create a broad Lookout Mountain park.
Oak Mountain State Park
More than 11,000 acres hold hiking and mountain-bike trails, Double Oak Lake, Peavine Falls, wildlife rehabilitation, overlooks, beaches, and campgrounds near Birmingham.
Cathedral Caverns State Park
A 126-foot-wide entrance, the huge Goliath stalagmite, flowstone, columns, and a paved guided route make subterranean time unusually legible.