Over the Labor Day weekend, my wife and I went into Washington, D.C. twice. Free parking at the Metro station, $2 rides anywhere, and free museums—you can have a day out, come home and make a quick dinner, and spend almost nothing. As a kid I always loved D.C., but commuting there for a couple of years dampened that enthusiasm. Now I look forward to these daytrips again.

We spent the first day at the National Museum of Natural History, maybe the most iconic of the Smithsonian museums. You can spend hours there, and once you forget most of it, you could go back and do it again. I went there as a kid, then with my wife, and one day we’ll go with our kids. There are all kinds of people at these museums: locals, tourists, older couples, young couples, families with young children, groups of field-tripping elementary school students. Just being in the middle of it all is invigorating and comforting. This is a setting where “Your tax dollars at work” doesn’t read as sarcastic at all. It reminds me a bit of why I love the Post Office.

We saw some very neat stuff too. Like this giant luminescent clam inside a small coral and aquarium display:

This very long-legged shrimp:

And a butterfly and moth incubation case, where this stunning pair of large moths had just emerged:

Oh, and this very retro bench! This belongs in an American consumer products or design museum:

This bit made me think about faith, science, and secularism:

I guess I retain enough of my Christian homeschooled upbringing that something about this makes me uneasy. In fact, I’ve always gotten an uneasy feeling in natural history museums: all the death, the interesting but seemingly pointless forms of life, the idea that we’re an accident, and that living, reproducing, and dying is the only real architecture to reality. It can feel like it’s subtly impugning your beliefs, if those are not your beliefs.

I think a lot of people think it is attacking them, and feel that science is motivated by secular ideology, or something like that. I don’t think that. I don’t not believe what the museum tells me; I have no trouble thinking God created evolution, as it were. Why not? Still, it makes me…uneasy.

I also thought this was interesting. Look at the line on the top right:

I can see one of the sorts of people I argue with about urbanism, reading this and saying, “So they think city people are more highly evolved?” It’s kind of funny, but the idea that urbanization is a final stage of human development is probably questionable. I guess I can sort of understand where heartland/rural/“Middle American” resentment comes from; I’ve heard enough of that language and worldview over the years that I can see how you could turn a couple of museum placards in D.C. into an elite war on real America. Much as I find that silly, I’m sensitive to it, and I definitely notice how a lot of people—some Twitter urbanists, for example—trigger and play into those resentments, sometimes by accident and sometimes, seemingly, on purpose.

The second day’s museum, the National Museum of American History, was probably more fun. Certainly, some of the material is sobering, and calls us to be better. But nothing is “anti-American”; it’s a celebration, if sometimes a complicated one, of all the different strands that come together to make this country what it is. On a holiday weekend, it was even more fitting. It inspired the same good civic pride as Election Day. That’s a feeling I remember from earlier years, that I feel less and less. It’s very nice to feel it again.

Here’s Julia Child’s kitchen, which I vaguely remember seeing there many years ago:

The other highlight was an exhibit themed around a centuries-old house in Massachusetts, disassembled in the 1960s and partially rebuilt, towering over the exhibit hall. It focused on all the different people who lived in it over the years, and how the evolution of the house and its inhabitants told the story of immigration, industrialization, and the postwar era. Interesting stuff. This is the sort of thing I write about all the time:

Some of this exhibit also talked about World War II and domestic life, as did the larger food exhibit that surrounds the Julia Child kitchen. The impact of the war on American life was truly radical—shortages, rationing, all that—although after a decade of the Depression, maybe people were used to it. When I read about this stuff, I’m supremely grateful that I’ve never had to live through that kind of trial. I also think about how those generations were probably tougher and more resilient, but at the cost of undergoing so much trauma and suffering. You can’t reverse engineer the Greatest Generation, and you also can’t make it again. It is what it is.

But I won’t leave you with that; I’ll leave you with this neat display card that ties the craft beer revolution not just to changing tastes and small-business entrepreneurship, but to a loosened regulatory environment:

That’s really interesting. Truth be told, a museum like this just scratches the surface of so many different topics and angles. You can just look at all the stuff, which is fine enough. But if you’re curious and read closely, there’s no end to what you can learn.

Related Reading:

What’s a City To You?

SUVs and Malt Beverages

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