I would have thought Chicago or New York would be the place for this, but turns out the National Building Museum lives on one side of Judiciary Square in Washington, D.C. Buildings are everything; we live, work, and rest in them. They’re all around us. America used to be the Read more
The museum is expensive and small for Washington, D.C. standards, but time your visit correctly and you’ll be able to participate in simulations that gives you a broader perspective on law enforcement training. Its location under the D.C. courts and opposite a memorial etched with the names of law enforcement Read more
There are four originals of the 1297 Magna Carta, one of them is in Washington, D.C.‘s National Archives. Entry is free but photography is prohibited. The modest downstairs gallery tells the troubled national history of how slaves built the Capitol and the White House, broken promises, the long-time disenfranchisement of Read more
This is the most child-friendly museum of the Smithsonians in Washington, D.C. If you don’t like having your seat kicked by a toddler on the bus, screaming babies on airplanes, or parents bringing tweens into bars then you will not like this place. The Smithsonian is a revered institution, but Read more
Washington, D.C.’s main monoliths of power, culture, and history all lie in an inverse T-shaped park stretching two miles from end to end. From the Lincoln Memorial in the west to the Capitol in the east to the White House in the north, this half-kilometre wide grassy avenue was the Read more
The fish ladder at the dam in Grand Rapids lets fish lie trout and salmon move upstream and bypass the dam. There are additional fish ladders in upstream dams so fish can spawn as they did thousands of years ago. The fish ladder was designed to allow fish through while Read more
Grand Rapids was my bonus level in Michigan. I had only planned to visit Flint, Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Lansing on the trip, but efficiency won the day. Former president Gerald Ford was born and grew up in Grand Rapids, his presidential library and grave site has price space on Read more
The Lehigh Valley Heritage Center is the history museum and artifact archive of the coal mining, steel smelting, and war loving region in the Great Appalachian Valley. The coal was used to power ships, the steel used to build ships, and men sent to operate the ships. The ships were Read more
Human ingenuity led to the industrial revolution but it was powered by coal. Long hours and low pay, coal miners fed the machines in Detroit that built Ford Model T’s on a production line, the locomotives that shipped them all over the world, and cooked the food of the people Read more
Allentown in the Lehigh Valley was named after its founder William Allen. His son, James Allen, built Trout Hall that stands as the site of the county’s historical museum. Its baseball team is called the Iron Pigs, named after the city’s early steel industry that began in the 1850s, the Read more