. >> lisa kathleen graddy, thank you very much. >> thank you. >>> there's a new website for american history tv where you can find our schedules and preview our upcoming programs. watch featured video from our regular weekly series as well as access the history tweets. history in the news and social media from facebook, twitter and four square. follow it all weekend, every weekend on c-span 3 and online. >>> all day today, american history tv is featuring america's first ladies. who do you think was our most influential first lady? vote and join the conversation with us on facebook at facebook.com/c-span. >>> this is american history tv on c-span 3 and we are marking this weekend on presidents' day, looking at the nation's first ladies. up next, lady bird johnson takes us back to 1968 and shows us the white house she knew. >> a rather small room, it will be a little crowded. move up this way. >> many years ago when i was the wife of a brand new texas congressman i snapped photos outside the iron gates. i never imagined one day i would live on the other side of that fence. i had the d

. >>> lisa kathleen graddy is the curator for the women's political history museum at the smithsonian. when you put together the latest exhibit, how did you decide how the gowns would be placed and what it would say about the history and role of these first ladies? >> we picked a series of gowns, partly based on what we thought was pretty and what hadn't been out in the -- sometimes it's nice to be curator, because you can just choose things. we wanted an array of color, different styles and not logical. we wanted to maximize the space and really maximize the look of each style and color of each dress against each other, to make a more pleasing picture. and i think that putting things that are far apart in time next to each other, as opposed to a slow progression, you really see the amazing difference between, say, lucy hayes, the dress with the bustle and really tight shoulders. you're not going to raise your arm above your waist. an amazing difference that these were chronological, so far apart you wouldn't be able to see them. >> we tried to put things out that haven't been up in a

. >> lisa kathleen graddy is the curator for women's political history here at the smithsonian. tell us where we're at in american history museum. >> you're in the first lady's exhibit. welcome to the newest version of the exhibit, by my count, the ninth version of the first lady's exhibit since it began in 1913. so we're almost 100 years old and the longest lived exhibit at the smithsonian institution. >> and this iteration just opened up. so tell us the concept behind it. >> we tried few new thing. the challenge the first ladies collection and exhibit is always to balance. to balance the great interest in the dresses and the china with other kinds of stories about the first ladies, and we're always trying to find a way, i hate to say marry, they love to talk about marrying the presidency in the first ladies' exhibit, but to marry the two things so you get a fuller picture of the first ladies but really get a picture of what you want to see when you come here which are the beautiful dresses and the fine china. we tried a different arrangement in here which is the color scheme.