In Seneca Falls, New York you can visit the Women’s Rights National Historical Park. We have all been schooled in the civil rights movement and women’s suffrage was lightly touched on in school. Who among us has not been taught that all men are created equal? Are you actually aware though that as late as the 1970s women were still discriminated against in education? The top schools in the country such as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton did not allow women in their student ranks. Women were serving in the military to defend their country but could not attend the best schools with men. Until 1995, women wanting military careers could not enroll in the Citadel. Going back further, the Women’s Rights Museum showcases how women were denied property rights and in fact treated as property by the law. It discusses an interesting important conference on slavery where women attended with their husbands as representatives but were quickly told to shut up and sit down by the men in charge. Tour this museum at your own risk. I am still MAD!
In Cooperstown, New York the Baseball Hall of Fame draws millions of visitors every year. It is a place to feel closer to the Great Bambino, Lou Gehrig, Hank Aaron, Yogi Berra, and all the other greats of the American game. It is also a place to learn about the “other” baseball greats who are never mentioned, the women of baseball. It isn’t just that there were women’s professional baseball teams once upon a time that we were never taught about until the movie, ‘A League Of Their Own”, came out but also that women have been involved in baseball since its inception in America and have also been denied from it. One year we could play, then we couldn’t. Another year we could play again until a little girl showed too much talent and then females were banned again. It took a court case in 1973 to get women back into baseball for good though women currently are not represented in our all male professional teams.
In Fayetteville, North Carolina is the 82nd Airborne Museum. There you will learn about the real reason we invaded Grenada but for some reason were never told by American media even though it is a perfectly good reason. You will also learn about the operation in Panama and a prisoner we freed and almost killed while doing it but again media did not bother to tell us.
Andersonville, Georgia is the home of one of the most notorious Civil War prisons. When war was declared, neither side had made any preparations to take and house prisoners. Andersonville was erected as quickly as possible and filled with far more prisoners than it was built to handle before it was even completed thus making conditions deplorable. Inside the walls, they created a buffer zone between the yard and the walls which was defined by “the deadline”. Any prisoner that crossed that line was shot immediately! Disease killed far more soldiers than the guards did though thanks to lack of space and proper housing, poor medical care if any, bad food, and water from a stream that ran through the prison which was contaminated from the guard camp bathrooms up stream.
The United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. will certainly make you mad when you see a gas chamber and a room full of shoes taken from holocaust victims. The displays are haunting and not easily forgotten once seen. How could any people be so incredibly cruel?
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The Believe It Or Not Museum in Newport, Oregon and the Hill Aerospace Museum in Salt Lake City, UT are for the most part quite interesting but there’s an exhibit at both about Japanese balloons which were released into the air during World War II to carry bombs on the ocean air currents and hopefully drop them somewhere in the U.S. with no regard to any particular target or civilians. One that landed was found by a couple and their children on a picnic. The mother and children died when it exploded.
Have you visited a museum that made you mad?
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