Lyle Kendrick, Outside of Class Assignment, Newseum

The Newseum is a special place and I think that's because it captures a quote that is featured in the building: Journalism is the first rough draft of history. While the museum is impressive because of how it captures the evolution of journalism, it is equally impressive in how it captures the evolution of the United States. 

Journalistic works as evidence of history is a different avenue from the traditional museums because the intention of journalists is to tell something as it is rather than historians who tell something as it was. The history in a museum like the Newseum is active and fluid which makes every artifact that m

This picture of the ARPANET, one of the precursors to the modern Internet, gave me a much better sense of how the Internet wasn't a thing invented but evolved. I'm reading "Guns, Germs, and Steel" right now and one of the arguments Jared Diamond makes is that there has never been any inventor in the world who made something out of thin air. All of the great, world changing inventions came as a part of a whole process and this image captures that. 

Nothing screams bastion of American legislative power quite like a row of red and white flags with that Maple leaf wedged in the middle.  

In the John F. Kennedy exhibit, there is a section for museum visitors to write where they were when JFK was shot.  It's fascinating what an event can mean to a nation across the age spectrum. In one corner, you have a teacher being told the president is dead and in the other corner you have a child who has only a vague idea who Kennedy was.

Sometimes an old newspaper can tell a tale larger than itself. Die Burger was once pretty much a mouthpiece of the Nationalist Party that drove the engines of apartheid. The picture also features Thabo Mbeki, who would later be the president of South Africa and worsen the AIDS crisis by denying the link between HIV and AIDS. What a newspaper can tell evolves just as history and nations do. 

The picture of the sticky notes detailing where museum visitors were when Kennedy died made me immediately think of 9/11. Unless an indisputable Roswell, New Mexico, or a World War III breaks out soon, I expect the images of 9/11 to be the most historically significant for a long time to come. Seeing all of the newspapers hung side by side in the museum is a powerful reminder of how important newspapers are. 

I love the quote "Journalism is the first rough draft of history" being behind the MLK Jr. cell door.  

If I could go back in a time machine and experience Walter Cronkite news live, I would gladly do it. It's a huge testament to his professionalism that the slightest inflection of emotion goes down as a memorable display of feeling. The museum is a history of journalism and Cronkite is certainly one of the titans of the industry's history.

You're a good man, Chuck.

This was one of the hardest moments in the museum: not touching.  

Tricky Dicky's  crookedness is such a blemish on American history but at the same time,  between Watergate coverage and the Frost/Nixon tapes that followed, he gave journalists so much to work with. If characters help create a compelling story, then Richard Nixon is a damn-near Dickensian creation of the universe.  

"ATTACK ON AMERICA" by The Charlotte Observer will forever be a part of my visual memory. The design of a paper, the images, the font will always be engrained in my mind. Journalists subtly led the country through helping Americans make sense of the carnage. That's one of the most noble roles journalists can play. 

The famous documents section was excellent. Military leaders and politicians couldn't have been as effective without the written word.