nolanews:
There are some cool things coming to the National World War II Museum.
Dignitaries and officials topped off the newest expansion with an evergreen tree at the highest point on the new building, the U.S. Freedom Pavilion.
The Pavilion, expected to open to the public this winter, will display the museum’s “macro” artifacts: airplanes, tanks, jeeps and a “simulated submarine ride in which 27 visitors at a time will feel the floor vibrate and the whoosh of a torpedo being fired.”
Also today, there was a ceremony to break ground for the _next_ expansion to the museum, called the Campaigns of Courage: European and Pacific Theaters.
The exhibits on display here will have an interactive narrative element that will guide visitors through the experiences of a particular service member:
“Each visitor will receive a bar-coded version of a GI’s dog tag bearing a service member’s name. Throughout the exhibit, updates will be available at kiosks.”
The updates will be supplied via information the museum collected through oral-history interviews with the actual service members.
You guys, this is going to be so cool. I cannot wait. Isn’t history the best?!
Mad Men season 5 finally began last night with an incredible two-hour premiere. I liked everything about the episode, especially that race and the Civil Rights Movement are becoming important issues. The show skipped just far enough ahead for Joan to have birthed her baby and for Don and Megan to be married. The time jump seemed appropriate to me (someone told me it may jump ahead six years and I panicked). Did you watch it? What did you think? Or, should I say, “Zou Bisou Bisou”?
I’m excited.
The cast and director aside, I really loved the novel and I can’t wait to see how Baz Luhrmann’s version translates to the screen. Plus, I’m obsessed with the 1920s.
But, really, who isn’t?
I read The Great Gatsby in high school and a lot of my peers had mixed feelings about it. Have you read it? What do you think?
Life recently published these photographs taken in New Orleans during Mardi Gras in 1938. Doesn’t look like much has changed (aside from the horse-drawn floats).
From the article:
Relatively early on in its remarkable, decades-long run as a weekly magazine, LIFE turned its eye toward always-enticing, ever-vivid New Orleans and that great city’s signature, defining event: Mardi Gras. In February, 1938, editors sent photographer William Vandivert (later a charter member of Magnum) to the Big Easy to chronicle the carnival — and to show LIFE’s readers how one American city, more Caribbean than Southern in so many ways, maintained a centuries-old tradition of refined debauchery and plain, unalloyed fun in the midst of the Great Depression.
The story that ran in the March 14, 1938, issue of LIFE, alongside some of Vandivert’s photographs, was interesting enough, in its own way. Titled “LIFE goes to America’s Most Famous Party,” the five-page feature focused almost exclusively on the aristocratic Comus Ball, and the pomp and ceremony that attends the crowning of the ball’s king and queen. In fact, in 1938, LIFE was invited to the Comus Ball “to photograph it,” the magazine gently boasted to its readers, “for the press for the first and only time in its 81 years.”
But Bill Vandivert was in New Orleans for more than a few days and nights in the late winter of 1938, and he made hundreds of photographs — far more interesting photographs, it turns out, than those that ran in the magazine — on the crowded, joyously chaotic streets and boulevards of that singular town. Here, in tribute to the spirit of the Crescent City, and to celebrate the ancient festival of carnival (from Latin, carne vale, or “farewell to meat”) that traditionally marks the beginning of the Christian observance of Lent, LIFE.com offers a gallery of those previously unpublished Vandivert photos: pictures of men, women and children happily caught up in the whirldwind of Mardi Gras, in a vanished New Orleans that feels at once ghostly and, somehow, intensely alive.
Damn right New Orleans is on the list.
weareconstance:
The Historic New Orleans Collection currently is showing The Eighteenth Star: Treasures from 200 Years of Louisiana Statehood. The show contains stories that have defined Louisiana since its entry into the Union on April 30, 1812, as the eighteenth state.
The show will stay up until January 29th.
above: Drinking water donated after Hurricane Katrina by Anheuser-Busch, Inc., 2005.
Why am I just hearing about this?
(via defendneworleans)
