Travels Into Our Past: America's Living History Museums & Historical Sites

Carla Anderson, Wayne P. Anderson

Description

ANOTHER VENTURE BOUND BOOK!

Whether you are seeking a new travel adventure, enjoy immersing yourself in history with a light touch, or are just looking for a good tale, the Andersons' first volume of Travels Into Our Past: America's Living History Museums & Historical Sites will be a satisfying reading experience.

When you delve into the pages of this book, you'll find yourself on an investigation of your ancestors' legacy on the different farms at Old World Wisconsin, each originally settled by a Norwegian, Dane, German, Pole, Finn, and a rich Yankee. Discover the Arabia Steamboat Museum near Kansas City and learn the unusual story of the ship which sank in the Missouri River in 1856.

Because of one of the many course changes of the "Big Muddy," the Arabia was later found buried deep in a farmer's field and was excavated with its cargo, a virtual "floating Wal-Mart." In Fort Smith, Arkansas, you'll read of a fire that became known as "the night of the lingerie parade."

Living history museums are an engaging and interactive way to learn about various facets of our vast country's relatively short history through demonstrations, preserved structures and re-enacted events. The Andersons share over fifty of their memorable experiences at these story-telling historical sites.

Sujets

• Points of Interest
• Museums
• Travel
• Tours

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 10 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781942168379
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 22 Mo

Extrait

Here’s a look at what people are saying about
Travels Into Our Past:
America’s Living History Museums & Historical Sites
 
“Planning an excursion to historical sites across the country, or simply dreaming about such an adventure? In either case, Wayne and Carla Anderson must be your trusted and informed guides. They can take you to an Arizona’s Cowboy Town USA, a late 19th century coal mine, the Smoky Mountains, a famous brig called Alcatraz, the Rosa Parks Library, or to a wide variety of other awe-inspiring locales.
You may get a rush when you ride the zip-line at Mill Creek Discovery Park in Michigan or flinch when you hear the Civil War cannons and muskets. You may fall silent when you visit the statue of the Little Rock Nine on the lawn of the Arkansas capitol, moved to tears reliving the heartbreaking events of the civil rights movement.
For memorable travels, filled with unexpected, delightful and often emotional experiences, explore with Wayne and Carla.”
 
~Dorothy J. Watson
Professor Emeritus
University of Missouri-Columbia
Watson Literacy Center
~~~
 
“Whether your travel interests lead you back to America’s pre-Colonial times or find you eager to explore the Civil Rights era of the Twentieth Century, Wayne and Carla Anderson’s illuminating guide to America’s living history museums is the book you’ll want to pack along for the ride as you set out in your car or favorite armchair to experience the past first hand.”
 
~Cathy Salter, author of
Notes From Breakfast Creek: A Look at the World,
and columnist for the Columbia Daily Tribune
and the Boone County Journal
 
“I have enjoyed reading Wayne’s columns for years now, and not only have I enjoyed them, but I have learned so much! Thank you for educating me about so much I have missed of American history.
You make me want to travel to all these places. Your writing is vivid and specific — the kind of writing I have tried to teach my students for 33 years at the Missouri School of Journalism.”
 
~Don Ranly, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus
Missouri School of Journalism
~~~
 
“Wayne and Carla Anderson are serial travelers. Travels Into Our Past: America’s Living History Museums & Historical Sites is their second effort, joining the 2011 collection Offbeat Travel: Exploring the unexpected and mysterious .
The new anthology offers a diverse and lively selection of stories that highlight public historical attractions from coast to coast.
The Andersons obviously enjoy their treks. ... they note in their columns their personal reactions to and interest in each historic venue. At a Yorktown, Va., restaurant with a Revolutionary War menu, for instance, ‘the carrot cake was especially good,’ they report.
The strength of Travels Into Our Past lies in its intermingling of wellknown sites such as Colonial Williamsburg, Va., Mark Twain’s Hannibal and Alcatraz in California with an abundance of lesser-known and sometimes quirky venues like Cowboy Town USA in Wickenburg, Ariz., and the replica Santa Maria in Columbus, Ohio.
The book is organized into nine sections that reflect themes represented by the various museums and attractions, starting with pre-Colonial America and ending with the Civil Rights era. Several columns populate each section.
... Travels Into Our Past is an easy, enjoyable read and a useful reference guide when you have a travel bug with a historical bent. ...Don’t be surprised if there are more down the road.”
Jim Robertson
Editor, the Columbia Daily Tribune

 
 
 
TRAVELS INTO OUR PAST:
AMERICA’S LIVING HISTORY MUSEUMS
& HISTORICAL SITES
 

WAYNE P. and CARLA LEE ANDERSON

 
 
 
© 2013 Wayne P. and Carla Lee Anderson
 
www.venturebound.net
www.authorsden.com/waynepanderson
www.PsyTrauma.com
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical or by any information or storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author.
 
Material previously published in the Columbia Daily Tribune used with permission.
 
Photos by Wayne and Carla Anderson Other photos used with permission.
 
Published by AKA-Publishing Columbia, Missouri.
 
Published in eBook format by AKA-Publishing
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN: 978-1-942168-37-9 eBook
ISBN: 978-1-942168-07-2 Trade Paperback
 
 
AKA-Publishing.com
 
 


 
 
 
Dedication
 
This book is dedicated to those who love to travel and enjoy learning new information about our fascinating country through the vast resources created by our Living History Museums and other Historical Sites.
It is also dedicated to the many unselfish volunteers and thoughtful employees of these national treasures.

 
 
 
Other Books by Wayne P. Anderson
 
 
Offbeat Travel: Exploring the Unexpected and Mysterious
AKA-Publishing
 
Christina’s Saga: From Norway to Dakota Territory
AKA-Publishing
 
The Changing Face of Sex
AKA-Publishing
 
Stress Management for Law Enforcement Officers
Prentice-Hall
Introduction
Recreating America’s past
 
For the past 60 years as we have traveled around the U.S., we have been impressed with the time, energy and expertise that has been spent preserving our country’s past in living history museums and historical sites. In recent years we have been amazed by the sheer number of these attractions that have been added and improved with buildings, artifacts and re-enactors brought together to give visitors a meaningful slice of history.
The Step into History website on the Internet lists over 550 places in the U. S. where you can see and experience life as it was in some era of the past. The historic periods covered by these museums range from the earliest settlements such as St. Augustine in Florida to the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that tells the story of the ongoing research on sources of energy.
Most living history museums are outdoors with authentic buildings and structures from the past. The original living history museums such as Williamsburg in Virginia and Old Salem in North Carolina are on the original historic sites with the original buildings. The newer living history museums, on the other hand, have been constructed with buildings that have been rescued from destruction around the countryside and moved to the museum area, recreating as nearly as possible the original setting.
Some of living history museum sites cover a large area of land such as Old World Wisconsin at 876 acres and Williamsburg in Virginia at 301 acres. Sometimes a whole area of a community has been reconstructed or has been saved such as the squares and buildings in Savannah in Georgia or the houses in the two-block area around Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois. In other cases much energy has gone into renovating old buildings and getting them on the National Register of Historic Places. Sometimes these homes such as at Macon in Georgia have been preserved and renovated at great expense to the owners.
The buildings in many of the more recent living history museums come from small towns and farms. For example, in our state of Missouri, in St. Louis and Kansas City urban renewal destroyed many historical places, but in smaller towns such as St. Charles, Lexington, Hermann and St. Joseph, the land on which old buildings sat had little commercial value, so they were left undisturbed.
When the appreciation of the past came to the foreground, they were there to be renovated. It seems that practically every state had one-room schoolhouses, small churches, vacant post offices, and old railroad stations standing empty. Others had lumber mills, grain-grinding mills, and sometimes waterwheels driven by small waterfalls. These added to the charm and historical significance of their living museums’ re-creation of history.
 
Why visit living history museums and historical sites?
 
Visiting these museums can help you build your own memories of what life was like in critical periods of U.S. history or experience your own past, such as Wayne did when we visited Pioneer Village in Jamestown, North Dakota. The visitor can come away from a visit to Michigan’s Wellington Farm USA: The Great Depression, with a better understanding of what the depression was like, or from Old World Wisconsin: The Immigrant Experience with a better idea of what the struggle on new land was like for new immigrants from Norway and other northern European countries.
Even spending time in a hard-time environment can be enjoyable if you can step out of it and back to the luxury that is the modern U.S., which for most of us will give us a renewed vision of how pleasant our present age is. On a visit to Williamsburg you can enjoy the grandeur of the early days, and in Old Salem see how a different ethnic group tackled the task of taming the country.
And perhaps even more important is the educational benefits for children. We have personally seen how much our children and grandchildren benefited from experiencing history first-hand on our travels. We have also watched as bus loads of schoolchildren toured the sites. They often seemed to be experiencing history in an even more intense way than the adults.
At Old World Wisconsin: the Immigrant Experience the children were excited to have a hands-on experience of collecting eggs in a chicken coop and watching cows being milked. Some schools regularly take their students on tours of these sites as a way of teaching them history.
In addition millions of people are now interested in genealogy; they want to know who their ancestors were, what they did and how they lived. You can now get a better idea of your ancestors’ lifestyle by going to living history museums where you can see how they ate, dressed, worked and entertained themselves. You can pick your time of history and somewhere in the U.S. find a historical site that welcomes you