Field Trip: LOL

  No, I don't have a case of the giggles... the last time we made the trip to Illinois the kids dubbed it "L.O.L." for its nickname the Land of Lincoln.  Ha ha :)
  This trip to the Land of Lincoln included a visit to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum.  We had some sweet friends act as our guides and introduce us to this cool site.  I had heard that they had pulled out all the stops for this particular museum and that can usually mean one of two things: excellent museum or just wildly overdone. 
  The first stop was where it all began, Abe Lincoln's boyhood cabin.  The big kids were drawn in to hear the stories and see the lifesize figures depicting Abe's early history.  I caught a quick glance, but mostly I stayed outside of the cabin with Shorty.  He had caught sight of two fake cardinals in the trees and with the bird sounds playing there HAD to be more birds out there! 

looking for the birds

  After the cabin you walked right into the middle of a slave auction (the red lit area in the photo).  This display smacked you right in the face with the evils of the practice.  A woman being torn one way by her new owner while her husband was being led another by his and the crying child being held  by the auctioneer to be sold off himself.  Mookie said it was one of those things that made you want to cry.  The scene was so powerful that Shorty kept migrating back to the scene.  While he couldn't grasp what was going on there, we talked about what feelings were being shown and who was making people sad. 

Shorty and the slave auction (right) and Lincoln-Douglass debate (left)

  Interspersed with the striking scenes with life-sized figures there were notable artifacts, some of which were from the Lincoln Home we'd visited a couple weeks before. There were also sound and temperature effects (heat radiating from a wood stove, etc...) like we'd found when we visited the Flint Hills Discovery Center.  It's one of those things that I don't necessarily need as a museum attendee, but is really quite fun :)
  The museum did a really good job of evoking the feelings of the viewer.  The hallway with the Lincoln newspaper political cartoons was garish in an Alice in Wonderland type of style - off set frames, elongated and crooked doorways, nearly made me sick walking through the thing.

Bubby in the political cartoon hallway

Pardon my funky photo, but they don't allow flash photography in the displays and it was reeking havoc on my photos!  The hallway leading into the Emancipation Proclamation was equally as suffocating, with holographs yelling at you from either side - what poor Mr. Lincoln must have felt like.  The dizzying effect was reminiscent of the riots hallway at Brown vs. Board of Education in Topeka. 
  Mookie's favorite part was the map that showed the Civil War in 4 minutes.  That's 1 week/second.  The battles would explode upon the big screen.  She was so enthralled that she went back twice!  That is the best part of the museum for me.  It didn't have tons of actual artifacts but it made history come alive!  It made you feel with your senses and your heart all aspects of what was going on!

Civil War in 4 minutes

  They had some really awesome shows too which took you on a short tour of Lincoln and then of the importance of historical documents and artifacts (my favorite one!).   Like main character stated in one of the shows "Our experience becomes your experience, our courage becomes your courage, and the best parts of our lives on in you".  This is why history is SO important!

Shorty and his buddy