Читать книгу Travels Into Our Past: America's Living History Museums & Historical Sites - Wayne P. Anderson - Страница 4

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 into the past to relive parts of your own genealogical past.

Personally we have probably enjoyed most the places where we could make contact with our own ancestors and see through our own eyes the labor, the tedium, the danger and the pleasures that they experienced in this new country.