It takes a lot of time and effort to reconstruct an entire 18th century star fort more or less from scratch. It’s not something you see being done that often. Yet that’s just what happened with Fort Stanwix National Monument back in the 1970s.
The USS Constitution was once one of six wood-hulled, three-masted heavy frigates originally built for the US Navy. She’s the last one left.
One of my most vivid memories of the weird magnificence of the American landscape comes from the 1977 Steven Spielberg movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which features Devils Tower National Monument.
What do we mean by “public culture”? Most culture is public in some way, in that it involves a set of shared values and communicative symbols that most of us will recognize. But what does that mean? And how does it relate to the way we commemorate history in the United States?
Of the 15 presidential libraries run by the National Archives and Records Administration, this one is devoted to perhaps the most effective yet controversial president of the 20th century: Lyndon Johnson. If there’s one word that defines this museum, it’s “legacy.”
The trouble with the Smithsonian Institution is that it simply has way too much stuff to see. That’s not such a bad thing, though.
George Washington’s plantation home is still around, and it’s still presenting a somewhat airbrushed image of the man.
The National Park Service now cares for what was once America’s oldest and largest federal armory. If you want to see hundreds of firearms stacked up in intimidating rows, this is the place to be.
Dougie Does Monuments 