My sermon begins at 35:00.
 Our recent excursion to Boston, Massachusetts, was winding down. Some of our people were leaving, and very few were spending one more night before catching flights the next day. It's hard to know exactly what to do, so I suggested that we go to the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. Four of us caught a ride-share, but it took a while to get across the city. I've been through a handful of presidential library museums - Abraham Lincoln, Harry S Truman, Jimmy Carter - and I had high expectations for this one, which features artifacts from one of our nation's favorite presidents. I couldn't have predicted my disappointment. While there were a few great artifacts - JFK's dog tag, a certain coconut, the Bible on which the man laid his hand to take the oath of the presidency, and more. The disappointment came with the room that hosted space travel. Kennedy was so connected with the quest for the moon, that I expected a large exhibit, perhaps a simulation film with three-dimensional effects and surround sound. Alas, the room was small with nothing substantial.
You can spot some other items in these pictures, but not much. In fact, there was barely anything about the Cuban Missile Crisis and hardly anything about the assassination in Dallas. I learned a few things, but I didn't come out of this facility feeling very satisfied that I had connected with JFK. They missed far too many opportunities. Originally posted June 2020 History is not there for you to like or dislike... It is there for you to learn from. Lt. Colonel Allen West's recent response when being interviewed on the television news may be one that is quoted for many years. It goes along with my constant mantra that history is ugly, but it also explains the reason we study the ugliness. It may be too cliché to repeat that history repeats itself. If we don't want that ugliness from the past repeating itself in the present age, we must learn from the mistakes in history. That said, it's also well-known that history is the first core subject that teachers drop in elementary school with the excuse that they don't have time for it and that they are mandated to focus on "more important" subjects like Reading and Math.
 Students Explore Primary Sources and Material Culture
Please do not allow your students the luxury of sleeping through your history lessons. I know much of the problem here is systemic in that the subject has been put in the dusty corner in favor of "more important" subjects like reading and math, and I realize many, many educators are unfamiliar with their own standards and information (Translation: colleges have focused more on processes and have turned teachers into the profession without the knowledge they need to be experts.). We'll have to address some of these excuses and reasons in later posts. Please check back here in for more History Mythbusting to come.
Here is a concise explanation of the battle at Concord, Massachusetts:
Ralph Waldo Emerson probably wrote the Concord Hymn from his memories while sitting around the house that's in view of the bridge. According to the famous poem, when the farmers fired their weapons (whether first, or in reaction to gunplay from the Regulars), everything changed. How could these country folks ever expect to hold off the world's best army?
There is an original document that plays into the story of some important people here. There is also a display of a pair of breeches that were worn in the battle on that day. I had the time to take a blurry picture of a door that still displays the hole from a musket ball in the same skirmish. Just walking through the Buckman Tavern was a privilege. Even the squeaky floors I walked on were the original wooden floors from 1709.
Here is the 250th anniversary reenactment of the battle on the Lexington Green from earlier this year.
There are some very interesting monuments scattered about to mark various features of the area. One identifies original meeting houses and preachers, emphasizing again the connection between religious history and early American history. Another is a mass grave of individuals killed in the battle. A statue on a minute man prominently and alertly stands watch for the oncoming enemy. Buildings and houses on the perimeter come into play, as well: the headquarters of the minute men and the location of Samuel Adams and John Hancock when Paul Revere rode into town on his Midnight Ride, and others. Near the visitors' center is Buckman Tavern, which I'll write about soon, is also here.
Local residents told our small group to take a right when getting off of the ferry. It was clearly off the beaten path - a nature trail through grass and low trees. We skirted the water and shortly found what they told us about: this was the location of Naval Air Station Squantum in Quincy, Massachusetts. The timeline for the air station and airport is confusing. It begins in 1910. Amelia Earhart was one of the directors of the airport when it was known as Dennison. At some point, when the Navy took over the operation, this became a flight training facility. Now it is simply a wetland preserve. We walked the trail, following it as it looped around to a parking lot that connected to where we entered. Large hotels were prominent in the area. We then located Marina Bay, a semi-touristy area with restaurants and bars. I admired the boats docked in the area, and we walked around the military memorial. We found a restaurant next to the water and asked to be seated. We shared a meal, conversation, and lots of laughs as we got to know each other. After sunset, we called a ride share and returned to our dorm home at Boston University.
I'm thinking of a way to use these pictures in a pedagogy lesson about Lewis and Clark in December. I think that William Clark would be especially appreciative of such a display. Part of the charge that President Jefferson placed on Meriwether Lewis and his partner was to record all of the wildlife along their trail.
Some of that money is on display. One wall shows coinage and paper money produced during the every presidency. A mathematical piece of art made by money origami sits under glass. I picked up the solid block of gold - 27 pounds valued between 400,000 and 800,000 dollars. I, of course, was attracted to the authentic colonial currency. At the back is a window to the operations of the Federal Reserve. No photos are allowed. Here, in a small room, people transfer large bundles of cash in a complicated and intricate banking system. In a larger window is a warehouse where robot vehicles move bins full of bills down hallways from and to rows of industrial shelving.
On the way out of the Money Museum, we picked up small plastic bags of shredded bills (originally worth $85) as a souvenir of our visit. If you're ever in Kansas City, Missouri, and you have a half-hour to kill, trek over to this strong facility. It provides a different kind of education - historical and economical. I used to come home from school to watch reruns of Bewitched in the afternoon, but I wasn't thinking about that when I came to Salem, Massachusetts. Our tour was supposed to be focused on ghosts and history. One of the first stops was as this central intersection where a statue for Bewitched sat. I remembered the episodes of the show that were shot here. In those, Samantha (the domesticated witch main character played by Elizabeth Montgomery) traveled back to the 1600s and was put on trial. Nearby is the "Witch House", built around 1675. This is the only building still standing that has anything to do with the infamous witch trials. By the time we arrived in Salem after our daytime programming, the museum was closed, so unfortunately, we could not visit. Thankfully, our guide included much of the history surrounding the fears of witchcraft. I wanted to come here because the original girls who accused people of witchcraft are thought to possible have had what is now called Functional Neurological Disorder, which is the affliction that attacked my daughter in 2020 (before COVID). We fittingly ended our tour at the witchcraft trials memorial. There are benches protruding from the wall - one for each of the victims of the witch accusations and executions. When America finally enters World War I, things begin to change for the Allies. Kansas City's National World War I Museum does a decent job of depicting U.S. involvement, but the small, brief collection in the area risks depicting our nation as wrapping up the war in a nice little package. It really was a patriotic time in our nation. While citizens of the United States were separated from the war by the luxury of an oceans, now they were involved. War is ugly. Instead of an ocean, today, we are separated by time.
One of the areas of our ghost and history tour in Salem, Massachusetts, was a garden behind an old church building. There were some ghost stories told, but the flowers were blooming at this golden hour of the evening stole the show.
The filth is realistic, and even if the soldiers don't, the scenes can be pretty graphic - especially in the death trench, where a sign warns that some may be bothered by the images, not only by the life-sized trench, but on the monitor that scrolls images of the actual dead. One short video there shows two soldiers walking a road littered with the dead. They check for life in the fallen, but no one would expect to find any. That area of the museum reveals the reality of "boots on the ground", and the solution seems non-existent and impossible.
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