Museum sights in USA
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Southern Food & Beverage Museum
Sitting as it does in the commercial crassness of Riverwalk Mall, the Southern Food & Beverage Museum isn’t immediately appealing – from the outside it looks more like a gift shop than anything else. Don’t judge this book by that cover. There’s actually a pretty fascinating, well-executed exhibit behind the fronting shop that includes more information than you’ll probably ever need on the food staples and dishes of the South, and New Orleans and Louisiana in particular. The attached Museum of the American Cocktail isn’t much more than a small gallery hall, but admission is free with the food museum and, hey, how often do you get to see 19th-century ads for Sazer…
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Art Institute of Chicago
The second-largest art museum in the country, the Art Institute of Chicago has the kind of celebrity-heavy collection that routinely draws gasps from patrons. Grant Wood’s stern American Gothic ? Check. Edward Hopper’s lonely Nighthawks ? Yep. Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on La Grand Jatte ? Here. The museum’s collection of impressionist and postimpressionist paintings is second only to those in France, and the number of surrealist works – especially boxes by Joseph Cornell – is tremendous.
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Alcatraz
Alcatraz: for almost 150 years, the name has given the innocent chills and the guilty cold sweats. Over the years it’s been the nation’s first military prison, a forbidding maximum-security penitentiary and disputed territory between Native American activists and the FBI. No wonder that first step you take off the ferry and onto ‘the Rock’ seems to cue ominous music: dunh-dunh-dunnnnh! It all started innocently enough back in 1775, when Spanish lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala sailed the San Carlos past the 12-acre island he called Isla de Alcatraces (Isle of the Pelicans). In 1859 a new post on Alcatraz became the first US West Coast fort, and soon proved handy as…
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Lower East Side Tenement Museum
This museum puts the neighborhood’s heartbreaking but inspiring heritage on full display in three recreations of turn-of-the-20th-century tenements, including the late-19th-century home and garment shop of the Levine family from Poland, and two immigrant dwellings from the Great Depressions of 1873 and 1929. The visitor center shows a video detailing the difficult life endured by the people who once lived in the surrounding buildings, which more often than not had no running water or electricity. Museum visits are available only as part of scheduled tours (the price of which is included in the admission), which typically operate daily. But call ahead or check the website …
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Ellis Island
An icon of mythical proportions for the descendents of those who passed through here, this island and its hulking building served as New York’s main immigration station from 1892 until 1954, processing the amazing number of 12,000 individuals daily, from countries including Ireland, England, Germany and Austria. The process involved getting the once-over by doctors, being assigned new names if their own were too difficult to spell or pronounce, and basically getting the green light to start their new, hopeful and often frighteningly difficult lives here in the teeming city of New York. In its later years, after WWI and during the paranoia of the ‘Red Scare’ in this countr…
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Fort Abercrombie State Historical Park
This military fort and its pair of 8in guns were built by the US Army during WWII for a Japanese invasion that never came. In the end, Kodiak's lousy weather, not the army's superior firepower, kept the Japanese bombers away from the island. The fort is now a 186-acre state historical park, sitting majestically on the cliffs above scenic Monashka Bay. Between the guns is Ready Ammunition Bunker, which stored 400 rounds of ammunition during the war. Today it contains the small Kodiak Military History Museum.
Just as interesting as the gun emplacements are the tidal pools found along the park's rocky shorelines, where an afternoon of searching for sea creatures can be spent…
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Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens
There’s dazzling art inside this handsome museum, includes newly-acquired Norman Rockwells and George PA Healy’s famous portrait of the city’s namesake close to death. Also look for antiquities and a really fun interactive kids’ exhibit. Draped with wisteria and shaded by a massive, mossy oak so large it needs supports for its limbs, the garden is a grand place to unwind after absorbing all the beauty inside. Both the museum and gardens are impressively accessible, including a number of braille and audio guides.
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Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
The state's best introduction to the wonder of the desert is here, at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. A cross between a zoo and an interpretive park, Tucson's must-see attraction deserves a full day of exploration and has a nice café. Javelinas (wild boars), coyotes, bobcats, snakes and just about every other local desert animal are displayed in a natural-looking outdoor setting. During summer there's a Saturday-night program where you can see the creepy crawlies who live on the night shift.
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Brooklyn Museum of Art
Though it’s the country’s biggest art museum after the Met, with 1.5 million pieces and the largest Egyptian collection in the Americas, it sees far fewer visitors. The five-floor Beaux Arts building – built by McKim, Mead and White to be the world’s biggest museum in 1897 – is big, yet only a fifth of its originally planned size. Highlights are many. For much of the year, visitors linger by the museum’s glass esplanade entry to watch the fountains. Inside, the African Arts display (near the ground-floor cafe) offers several short video loops about fascinating traditional masks and costumes; the huge Egyptian collection on the 2nd floor features 13th-century mummy boards.…
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American Museum of Natural History
Founded in 1869, this classic museum for kids of all ages contains halls of fascinating wonderlands holding more than 30 million artifacts; its interactive exhibits, both in the original museum and its newest section, the Rose Center for Earth & Space, are also out of this world. The most famous attractions are its three large dinosaur halls, with various skeletons for ogling, and the enormous (fake) blue whale that hangs from the ceiling of the Hall of Ocean Life. Kids of all ages will find something to be intrigued by, whether it’s the stuffed Alaskan brown bear, the Star of India sapphire in the Hall of Minerals & Gems, the IMAX film on jungle life, or the skullcap of …
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Shelburne Museum
On a 45-acre estate, 7 miles south of Burlington in Shelburne, the Shelburne Museum boasts a stellar collection of American folk art, New England architecture and, well, just about everything. The wildly eclectic collection ranges from an early American sawmill to the Lake Champlain side-wheeler steamship Ticonderoga. How's that for lawn decor?
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Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum
Wander along the hoof-marked ground of a cattle drive, look through a rough-hewn slave cabin or duck into a 1930s-era movie. High-tech interactive exhibits and fun theatrics characterize the superb (and superbly humongous) Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. While you're downtown, you should wander by Austin's own piece of living history:
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Oregon Museum of Science & Industry
The Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, which offers hands-on science exhibits for the whole age range. There's also an Omnimax theater, planetarium shows and a submarine tour (all separate charge).
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Natural History Museum
The Natural History Museum, with dinosaur skeletons, an impressive rattlesnake collection, an earthquake exhibit and nature-themed movies in a giant-screen cinema.
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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) was destined from the start in 1935 to be an eclectic, unconventional museum. But when it moved into architect Mario Botta’s light-filled brick box in 1995, it became clear just how far this museum was prepared to push the art world. The new museum showed its backside to New York and leaned full-tilt towards the western horizon, taking risks on then-unknowns like Matthew Barney and his poetic videos involving industrial quantities of Vaseline, and Olafur Eliasson’s outer-space installations that distort all sense of reality. Finally SFMOMA had room to launch international traveling shows by squeegee-wielding German painter Gerha…
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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Both grim summation of human nature and fierce confirmation of basic goodness, the Holocaust Museum is unlike any other museum in Washington, DC. In remembering the millions murdered by the Nazis, it is brutal, direct and impassioned. Visitors are given the identity card of a single Holocaust victim, narrowing the scope of suffering to the individual level while paying thorough, overarching tribute to its powerful subject. Many visitors leave in tears, and few are unmoved. James Ingo Freed designed the extraordinary building in 1993 and its stark facade and steel-and-glass interior echo the death camps themselves.
Apart from the permanent exhibits, the candlelit Hall of R…
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South Street Seaport Museum
Opened in 1967, this museum offers a glimpse of the seaport’s history and a survey of the world’s great ocean liners, with permanent exhibits and various other sites dotted around the 11-block area. Included in the museum are three galleries, an antique printing shop, a children’s center, a maritime crafts center and historic ships: just south of Pier 17 stands a group of tall-masted sailing ships – the Peking, Wavertree, Pioneer, Ambrose and HelenMcAllister, among others – and the admission price to the museum includes access to their windswept decks and intimate interiors. For a really special treat, join a sailing tour aboard the gorgeous, iron-hulled Pioneer…
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University of Texas Museums & Galleries
The University of Texas, if not quite in the Ivy League, is a rich and prestigious school boasting several impressive museums and galleries. The Lyndon Baines Johnson, Archer Huntington and Texas Memorial museums are particularly worthwhile.
The LBJ Library, named for the 36th President, is a highlight of any visit to Austin. It much propaganda, but also offers a candid look at the social and political climate of the 1960s.
Also on campus, the Texas Memorial Museum packs a huge art deco building with displays of Texas' natural and social history. Exhibits focus on geology, paleontology, anthropology and natural history. Don't miss the impressive pterodactyl skeleton.
The …
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California Academy of Sciences
Finally the California Academy of Sciences has a museum suited to its fascinating collection of 38,000 natural wonders and the occasional freak of nature. Under the wildflower-covered ‘living roof’ of Renzo Piano’s LEED-certified green building, butterflies flutter through a four-storey glass rainforest dome, a rare white alligator stalks a swamp, and Pierre the Penguin paddles his massive new tank in the African Hall. In the basement aquarium, kids duck inside a glass bubble to enter an eel forest, find Nemos in the tropical-fish tanks and squeal to pet starfish in an aquatic petting zoo. The views here are sublime: you can glimpse into infinity in the Planetarium or rid…
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Sixth Floor Museum
President John F Kennedy’s downtown assassination sent the city reeling in November 1963. The shooting was followed by a chaotic manhunt and gunman Lee Harvey Oswald’s eventual assassination. The fascinating and highly audiovisual Sixth Floor Museum narrates in excruciating, minute-by-minute detail what happened and where. Eyewitness photos, video and audio clips add a vivid depth to the experience. Even the myriad twisted assassin conspiracy theories are succinctly summarized. From Dealey Plaza, walk along Elm St beside the infamous grassy knoll, and look for the white ‘X’ in the road that marks the exact spot where the president was shot. Turn around and look up at …
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National Building Museum
Devoted to the architectural arts, this museum is appropriately housed in an architectural jewel: the 1887 Old Pension Building. Four stories of ornamented balconies flank the dramatic 316ft-wide atrium, and the Corinthian columns are among the largest in the world, rising 75ft high. An inventive system of windows and archways keeps the so-called Great Hall constantly glimmering in natural light, and this space has hosted 17 inaugural balls – from Grover Cleveland’s in 1885 to Barack Obama’s in 2009. The showy space easily overshadows the exhibits, but they’re worthwhile nonetheless – ‘Washington: City and Symbol’ examines the deeper symbolism of DC architecture; and ‘Too…
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Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology
The centerpiece of the Peabody is the impressive Hall of the North American Indian, which traces how native peoples responded to the arrival of Europeans from the 15th to the 18th centuries. As such, it addresses how these cultures have adapted to European influences and how they have maintained their own traditions and customs. Other exhibits examine indigenous cultures throughout the Americas, including a fantastic comparison of cave paintings and murals of the Awatovi (New Mexico), the Maya (Guatemala) and the Moche (Peru). Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum is one of the world’s oldest museums devoted to anthropology. The price of admission includes entry to the Harv…
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National Civil Rights Museum
Housed in the Lorraine Motel, where the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr was fatally shot on April 4, 1968, is the gut-wrenching National Civil Rights Museum. Five blocks south of Beale St, this museum's extensive exhibits, detailed timeline and accompanying audio-guide chronicle the ongoing struggles for African American freedom and equality in the US. Both Dr King's cultural contribution and his assassination serve as prisms for looking at the Civil Rights movement, its precursors and its indelible and continuing impact on American life. The turquoise exterior of the 1950s motel and two preserved interior rooms remain much as they were at the time of King's death, and …
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Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum
The free Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum is an embarrassment of riches for history nerds, science geeks and music lovers. Filled with historical written artifacts from the private collection of David Karpeles, a Santa Barbara real-estate investor, it's a true SoCal treasure.
One of just eight Karpeles manuscript museums in the country, this branch houses the original proposed draft of the Bill of Rights, an Emancipation Proclamation Amendment signed by Abraham Lincoln, and Einstein's description of the theory of relativity. A recent special exhibit highlighting historic women contained writings from Lucretia Borgia, Catherine the Great and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lots o…
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Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)
Consider it the Art Institute’s brash, rebellious sibling, with especially strong minimalist and surrealist collections and permanent works by Franz Kline, René Magritte, Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol. Covering art from 1945 forward, the MCA’s collection spans the gamut, from Jenny Holzer’s LED Truisms to Joseph Beuys’ austere Felt Suit, with displays arranged to blur the boundaries between painting, photography, sculpture, video and other media. The museum also regularly hosts dance, film and speaking events from an international array of contemporary artists, and the traveling exhibits it pulls in are A-list. The museum’s shop wins big points for its jewelry pi…
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