Scouting Smithsonian – World’s largest museum complex

We recently returned from Washington DC and The Smithsonian Institute, our seventh museum for the upcoming season.

Director David Langer and Executive Producer Robert Lang visited several of the 19 museums and took some great photos of the intriguing galleries and objects.

“It was wonderful to be in a city that inspires so much visual attention in our culture,” said David Langer. ”The capital of the United States is so regularly portrayed in movies and television that I feel I know it.”

Photo: American Flags on display around The Mall in Washington, DC.

Being in The Mall, that grand piece of landscape architecture with the Capital Building on one end and the Lincoln Memorial on the other, was breathtaking. The grand monuments and museums that ring the National Mall were kept in human scale by the joggers and Frisbee players on the grass. The ever-present stars and strips are a constant reminder to foreign visitors that you are in a special place, called America.

Photo: People enjoying the fountain with the Lincoln Memorial in the background.

The National Museum of American History was unlike any of the other museums that I’ve visited around the world. Although the building is large, it is proportioned to a very human scale inside. It is constantly jammed with visitors gazing at artifacts of contemporary American life. Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz always draw a crowd. Meanwhile, the Price of Freedom is a fairly new exhibit that houses material from the Revolutionary War to Iraq. This will be the launching point for two of our stories: one about Cher Ami, a heroic homing pigeon who saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers in WW I and another about a Civil War surgical kit that was the precursor for modern day military field medicine.

Photo: Cher Ami, the heroic pigeon.

Another stunning area was the presentation of the fabled Star Spangled Banner flag. We know it iconically as a song sung at baseball games, but its origination comes from a massive flag kept behind glass under low light conditions to protect the faded colours. This was the inspiration for 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet, Francis Scott Key, to pen the words that became the United States National Anthem. The patriotic nature of the flag and its exhibit is felt in the hushed tones and dim light. No pictures are allowed here, but this will be the focus for another of our stories

Photo: Star Spangled Banner at the Smithsonian, courtesy of Smithsonian.com

Finally, we moved on to the collection of Harley-Davidson bikes and learned how these bikes have become another iconic piece of American culture.

There are some notable motorcycles here, including the former Guatemalan president Jorge Ubico’s rare 1942 Model 74.

Photo: Archival picture of the 1913 5-horsepower (hp) Harley-Davidson model, which is currently in storage at the museum.

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