Being a Tourist

Hello,

 

In DC we got in some new sites. Two of them are new monuments. Or at least new since we were last there. The first was the WWI monument. It was quite simple and tasteful with lists and lists of names of those who died. The second was the monument for Eisenhower. How is it decided what people will have a monument and who will not?

 

We also visited the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers museum. Because of the pandemic we needed an appointment and were the only people there with the guide. It was quite interesting. At the time of the Civil War in the USA no one notified families about the fate of their loved ones. It came to the attention of Clara Barton, spurring her into action. She formed an organization that tackled the job. They were able to track down the information for 22,000 Union soldiers (Or at least I think that was the number.). With the next war the government took on the role of letting families know when death or imprisonment occurred.

 

The second museum was the African-American Civil War museum. I had known that there were black soldiers in the civil war on the Union side, but not many of the details about how that came about or just what happened to them. As might be expected, much was required of them, but their compensation was quite a bit less than that of white soldiers. There was much information in the place and we could have stayed much longer, but it was more reading than any of us wanted to accomplish, or perhaps it is just more than we could take into our brains on one trip. Perhaps on another visit we could go back.

 

Paula