A Capitol Fourth
While the government-sponsored events for the 4th of July took place Tuesday night, a bunch of the interns and I spent the day readying for that celebration by visiting the National Archives in the afternoon. Why the National Archives? That's where the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights are housed. What better way to celebrate America's "birthday" than seeing some of the original founding documents?
On Saturday my friend offered to get me into The Phillips Collection for free since he's a member of the museum. Never one to pass up free opportunities, I said yes.
The Phillips Collection is an art museum founded in 1921 by Duncan Phillips and his wife, Marjorie Acker Phillips, in the Phillips' 1897 home on Dupont Circle. The permanent collection features nearly 3,000 works by American and European impressionist and modern artists, which are rotated regularly to present a new exhibit each time someone visits.
When I visited on Saturday, the original Phillips house was closed for a thermal upgrade project, but the Goh Annex and Sant Building galleries were open.
On Sunday, I finally made my visit to the National Air and Space Museum. I knew this was one museum I needed to visit since otherwise all my physics professors would give me hell when I return to Iowa in August if I didn't go.
I admit, the museum was definitely cool, but it just didn't capture my imagination the way the African American and American Indian museums did. At those museums I saw a history coming to life that I never learned about in high school textbooks since they represent a part of our history that America regularly tries to cover up and ignore. The Air and Space museum, however, reiterates for me pieces of history I've had repeatedly drilled into my brain through numerous history and science classes from kindergarten through college, a history that touts America's successes over the rest of the world's. I do greatly appreciate the scientific achievements the museum houses, and did learn some new things about various people and machines I didn't know before, but my passion just does not lie here like a lot of the other physics interns I'm rooming with this summer. Such a "bad" physics major I am.
Following the visit to the Air and Space museum, the other intern I went with really wanted to get some ice cream. I told him we weren't going out of our way to find it, and less than a minute later a Häagen-Dazs cart rolled by with free goodies. When you want ice cream bad enough, the universe finds a way to deliver. |