National Museum of American History, Part II

A continuation of yesterpost...

The American Enterprise exhibit showcases inventions and advertisements from the past 200+ years of American history (though not everything is from America!).

Ads outside the exhibit

Seatbelt-safety ads featuring talking crash test dummies won awards!

One display shows how American products are adapted for other cultures or by other cultures. McDonalds has franchises everywhere, including Japan.

Japanese McDs!

A Turkish food maker decided to take on Coca-Cola with their own cola that appealed to "positive nationalism." Turkey must have some better local beverage than soda, right?

Which would you drink?

Home computers became popular in the late 1970s when microprocessor became small enough and cheap enough to be affordable. The museum has an Altair 8800 and a TRS-80, along with a Superman comic touting the value of computers!

Early computers

I found another display of kitchen devices featuring a refrigerator.

Kitchen items

A tractor

Items on display go all the way back to Eli Whitney's cotton gin, an engine that enabled growers to get the seeds out of cotton easily, making the crop much more profitable.

Cotton gin

I took our youngest into the Wonderplace, an interactive exhibit aimed at preschoolers up to first graders. He enjoyed exploring and using his imagination.

Wonderplace

Switches and knobs

Building a treehouse

Treehouse with farm

Cooking in the play kitchen

Toy tractors in the kitchen

We walked through the On the Water exhibit and the America on the Move exhibit. The kids were getting hungry, so we didn't see too much. The exhibit focuses on vehicles used in the past 200 or so years.

A model ship

A full-size locomotive 

A stuck car

A fancier car

Boats from New York harbor

On our way to the basement cafeteria for lunch, we found a Lego Statue of Liberty! The replica is nine feet, five and a half inches tall. The actual statue is 151.1 feet tall. It was shipped to the United States in 350 pieces that were put together over seven months. The Lego statues has approximately 25,375 pieces and took 292 hours to construct.

Lego Liberty

After lunch, we went upstairs to see more items. I was surprise to see Felicia Day's costume from her web series The Guild. The show was a spoof of The Office with the co-workers being people who play an online clone of World of Warcraft. They are all members of a guild within the game but they meet each other in real life, causing comedic situations.

The Guild costume

An upstairs exhibit has a display of musical instruments. One side display shows various instruments used by jazz musicians. Another has a set of stringed instruments crafted by Stradivarius.

Jazz instruments

Stradivarious instruments

The big draw on the third floor is a pair of the ruby slippers from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. The display shows stills from the movie and how the museum has preserved the pair of slippers they have.

Scenes from the movie

Working on the shoes

This display

The filmmakers had several different pairs of slippers made and this particular pair is a mismatched set. The display challenges visitors to find difference between the two but the only difference I saw was the bows were a little different.

The museum has a lot of other exhibits. We only saw about half and may go back again someday.

National Museum of American History, Part I

The National Museum of American History (Smithsonian Institution) is located in the heart of Washington, D.C. We visited on Martin Luther King Jr. Day since street parking was free. The museum is free to get in  (as are all of the Smithsonian museums). We drove in early to find a spot which meant we had fifteen minutes to spend before we could enter the building.

Obligingly, the museum has an outdoor exhibit. Arches of Life is a wooden sculpture by Foon Sham, an American born in Macau, China, in 1953. He's a professor of art at the University of Maryland and has done other outdoor sculptures for the museum.

Arches of Life

Sheltering from the cold

More arches

Is this also art?

The garden area also has an imitation Victory Garden. During World War II, food shortages in England, America, and Germany inspired locals to plant gardens in their yards that grew fruits and vegetables. Such a gesture was a small contribution to the war effort. The museum's garden wasn't very impressive, probably because we visited in January.

Victory garden

A variety of plants 

Lettuce called "Red Deer Tongue"!

More vegetation waiting for spring to come

View to the EPA building

We walked around to the Mall side of the building to stand in the sunshine as we waited for the last five minutes to go by.

Washington Monument and museum sign

The edges of the building also have plants growing.

Ornamental Onion tree

Sneezeweed, so we were happy for January weather

Seriously, I didn't make up the name

We finally made it inside. The very first exhibit we saw was the Star Spangled Banner. This flag was the one flown over Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore in 1814. British ships shelled the fort all night. Francis Scott Key witnessed the bombardment and wrote the famous poem that became the United States national anthem.

Entrance to the Star Spangled Banner exhibit

Photography is not allowed in the exhibit since the flag is so old. It's in a case full of special gas under low lights to preserve it as long as possible. The flag is huge--thirty feet by thirty-four feet. Mary Pickersgill made it in her home and was paid over $400 for the project. Since it dates from 1814, it has fifteen stars and fifteen stripes for the fifteen states.

We walked around and discovered the Batmobile from the first Tim Burton film in 1989. The movie ushered in the modern era of superhero films with a more serious take on the character and more convincing visual effects.

Batmobile under the purple lights--Curse you, Joker!

The museum has lots of random historical items in displays throughout the building.

Etch-a-Sketch, Mickey Mouse ears, canned goods, etc.

Some of the exhibits are interactive and designed to draw children's attention. One creative place is the Spark!Lab.

Going to the Spark!Lab

Inside, visitors can try out various crafts, like designing makeup for performers or helmets for athletes.

It's good to practice on someone else, or something else in this case

Making a helmet so it's more protective

Right outside the Spark!Lab is Object Project, a less interactive but still interesting display of household items from American history. One interactive exhibit has visitors pick out clothes and see what they look like.

Zombieparent as a golf pro from the 1920s

A display showed various refrigerators and the sort of stuff we keep inside them.

Kitchen chills

Ice containers/trays

Another section of Object Project has a display on bicycles from a by-gone era.

Bike shop

Interacting with the exhibit

Another rider

Entertainment at home has been important ever since homes were invented. Some modern items on display are record players, phones, and computers.

Old-style CD player

Rotary phone

The original Macintosh computer

Another interactive display had us playing The Price is Right. My son was better at guessing the initial cost of one of the first instant cameras on the market.

Price is Right display

My bid was too low

One corner has a display on the Transcontinental Railroad, with a map on the floor showing the routes of the original tracks that crossed the North American continent.

Railroad info

Some historical items

The map

The meeting point

More from the museum in the next post!