In your experience, which is the best history museum you’ve ever visited?
What I like is one that;
Covers a topic deeply.
That has good exhibits.
That is big enough that your not done in 10 minutes.
That could hold the interest of people even if they are not deeply interested in the topic.
I for one like the ones with interactive exhibits. Also ones with unique items and/or persons working there who themselves can give great insight. For example here in Kansas City there is a museum towards the Negro Baseball League which in itself isnt so great but used to have a 98 year old former Negro Leaguer one could see and ask questions to.
Granted I havent visited too many. The best I have seen:
The Smithsonian in Washington DC.
Andersonville Georgia and the museum for prisoners of war.
WW1 museum in Kansas City.
Strategic Air Command museum in Omaha Nebraska.
Also are most “living history” museums where people actually live out the life of the people in the time period.
Now I’ve heard some others arent so great. Ex. Most of the “Hall of Fame” places like the ones dedicated to baseball, football, and even Rock and Roll I hear are not that great.
The Admiral Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, TX is one of the best I’ve visited. The name makes it appear to be a monument to Nimitz, but it’s not that at all. It’s more of a museum about the Pacific during WWII. The level of exhibits is far above what you’d expect in a small town like this. They have entire aircraft set in full-sized dioramas, and even a submarine (w a cutaway view so you can see what it was like inside).
The Japanese Peace Garden which was donated by Japan is pretty amazing. The face that it’s still maintained daily after 70 years is kinda moving.
Hey, neighbor! (the OP). I agree the WWI museum in Kansas City is quite good – the trench mockup is memorable.
A friend from the East Coast who has moved baseball all his life actually thought the Negro Leagues museum was quite well done. It’s small, but you learn a lot of surprising things.
Answering the question…Washington DC’s Holocaust Museum is terrific and moving. It does a good job of walking you through the gradual buildup of Nazism and it’s consequences – you see it as a process, not a single event, which make you want to stay more alert for more or less analogous incipient situations today and in the future. And the selection of tangible objects is well considered (who can forget the eyeball models, created to help “professionals” distinguish people among racial types?).
Staying on the Kansas region theme, the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson is fantastic. It takes you through the US/USSR (and beyond) space race step by step, and puts it in its political context. The objects are amazing (including several priceless Russian ones), including a real Titan rocket, and are well displayed.
You mentioned how Halls of Fame can be disappointing. That’s true. The one thing I liked about Cleveland’s Rock’n’Roll HoF was the screening of a film (on continuous loop) about all the inductees. They spend about three minutes on the career of each group or performer, but it’s really well done – I even got veklempt a few times. Besides enjoying your favorite artists, you end up learning to appreciate a few you hadn’t given much thought to previously.
Yeah Hall of Fames. Like the NFL one where I guess if your just gagga over seeing a famous persons uniform or ring you will think plucking down $20 for a ticket is worth it but for others mostly its much of the same.
Now down in Norman Oklahoma there is a Cowboy Hall of Fame and museum of western heritage which is quite good.
If your ever driving on I-80 between Chicago and Des Monies, stop at the trucking museum. Its short but really good.
I’d like to again stress Andersonville Georgia. Its quite moving being at the site where 30,000 prisoners were held and most died. I swear you can literally feel the ghosts.
Ditto on the Imperial War Museum. The war rooms really give you a sense of time and place and Churchill’s museum is a fine example of using modern technology to keep people interested in history. Interactive display boards, videos of his speeches etc.
I like the National WW II museum in New Orleans. A relative late-comer to the museum scene, it is doing well. It has a large wing on the Pacific War but covers all theaters.
I don’t think anyone thought it would amount to much-it’s initial reason for existence was the fact that Stephen Ambrose, the history author, taught at UNO and the fact that the Higgins boat was designed and built in New Orleans. But once it started it really took off.
This is the one I came in to mention - it’s a lot more than planes and tanks! The vast collection of paraphernalia from various wars is amazing…You could easily spend 3 or 4 hours there.
The Henry Ford (consisting of the indoor Henry Ford Museum, and the outdoor Greenfield Village), in Dearborn, MI.
Some of the highlights include:
The chair Lincoln was shot in (Henry Ford Museum)
Six presidential limos, including Kennedy’s (HFM)
The Rosa Parks bus (HFM)
Henry Ford’s private train car (HFM)
George Washington’s camp bed (HFM)
Steam engines, historic farm equipment, an automobile exhibit going through the complete history of the car, etc (HFM)
1939 Douglas DC-3 airplane (HFM)
Rotating exhibits (currently Women of Rock, previous ones included the Titanic, James Bond) (HFM)
Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House
Colonial jewelry, clothing, furniture, tools, silver, etc. (HFM)
Buildings from Edison’s Menlo Park lab (GFV)
Historic steam trains that take you around the village (GFV)
Model T rides (GFV)
101-year-old carousel (GFV)
Henry Ford’s birth home (GFV)
The Wright Brothers’ cycle ship (GFV)
Edison’s original light bulb (GFV)
Noah Webster home, Robert Frost home (GFV)
Working farms run with 19th century technology (GFV)
Homes, farms, and a windmill from as far back as the 1600s (GFV)
Original one-room school house, slaves quarters (GFV)
Costumed re-enactors strolling around (GFV)
1867-rules Base Ball games every Sunday in the summer (GFV)
Civil War re-enactments (GFV)
Ragtime Street Fair (GFV)
19th-century Christmas events (GFV)
Classic car shows (GFV)
Seasonal, locally-produced 19th-century meals (GFV)
A truly spectacular hands-on living history museum. My family gets a membership every year, and we spend 1-3 days a week there most weeks. It never gets old.
The Shanghai Museum is not only good, the building is also shaped like an ancient bronze cooking vessel called a ding. Chiang Kai-shek’s two-story house in the French Quarter has been turned into a nice museum. And the Museum of Ancient Chinese Sex Culture is pretty interesting (google it if you dare!).
The Forbidden City in Beijing is one big museum.
Also interesting is the Museum of the Imperial Palace of the Manchu State in Changchun, the capital of China’s Jilin province, which borders North Korea. It’s housed in the former palace of Puyi of Last Emperor fame. It’s where he lived while he was the nominal head of Manchukuo, the puppet state of the Japanese Empire., from 1932-45.
In Singapore, we recently visited the Peranakan Museum, devoted to the history of the Pernakans in the city-state (Pernakans are descendants of Chinese immigrant laborers who married local Malays). And the Chinatown Heritage Center, also good.
If you’re driving on I-80 west of Omaha, look for the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument. It chronicles the westward expansion of the US, starting with pioneers in covered wagons and moving forward through time all the way to the arrival of the interstate highway system. Lots of dioramas and text, and they give you radio headsets that provide even more info. Deifinitely worth a visit.
Two come to mind:
The A-bomb museum in Hiroshima. Incredibly well done with great displays and artifacts. I am hard pressed to think of another single event of the past century that had such an impact and lasting affect on the world.
The Newseum in Washington DC. This museum is “the history of news”, but if you think about it, it is really kind of the “history of recorded events”, and therefore also covers all these historic events and how they were presented to the public.
The Mercer Museum, just outside of Philly was regarded by Henry Ford as the only museum in America worth visiting. It is a trip through the wonderful, deranged mind of a madman in the most fantastic way possible.
London’s Natural History Museum is probably my favorite, but I have an (almost unnatural) attachment to the Fleet Air Arm Museum since I grew up very close to it.
The Autrey in LA impressed the heck out of me. Native American art, old & new, fine art & popular art, etc. I remember great landscape paintings from the 19th century–and a 1950’s kid’s bedroom decorated with Hopalong Cassidy items.
Thirded. The Holocaust exhibit is very informative, and absolutely chilling.
The National Army Museum in Chelsea, London is pretty cool as well, especially the part where you walk through the history of the army chronologically.
The WWI museum in Kansas City is absolutely stellar though- you’ll have a hard time finding another museum to surpass it.