Let’s take a tour through some of America’s biggest and best museums
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with stories about current events and trending topics. This is the second week of summer, and this summer we’re talking about daily life and culture in the U.S.
Today, we’ll be taking a tour through some of the great big museums in the U.S. And on Thursday, we’ll look at some great small museums that you can visit too.
In the second half of today’s lesson, you’ll learn what it means to “make a difference.” This is lesson number 690, so that means JR has uploaded the full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/690. That full lesson, as always, includes the transcript, translations, quiz, exercises, and more. PlainEnglish.com/690.
The best big museums in America
Let’s start our American museum tour with three ambitious , wide-ranging art museums, one in each of the nation’s three biggest cities.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or The Met, as it’s known, in New York is the biggest museum in the United States, and one of the biggest in the world. It opened in 1872 and moved into its current building on Fifth Avenue in 1880. The permanent collection has seventeen separate departments , too many to list here. But it has impressive collections on Ancient Egypt, Renaissance art, all the European masters , Islamic art , antique weapons , musical instruments, costumes , furniture , and more.
Highlights include a marble column from ancient Greece, Van Gogh’s self-portrait , and “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” a painting that depicts a critical moment in America’s Revolutionary War.
Chicago’s Art Institute is almost as old as The Met: it opened in 1892 on South Michigan Avenue. It’s the second-largest museum in the U.S., behind only The Met. There, you can find one of the largest Impressionist collections outside Europe. The permanent collection exhibits art from over 5,000 years of human history .
You can see the famous Grant Wood portrait, “American Gothic” here: this is the painting with two farmers and a white farmhouse behind them. You’ll also find “Nighthawk,” the Edward Hopper painting of a single man at a diner late at night. One of my favorites is called “Paris Street; Rainy Day.”
On the opposite coast, in Los Angeles, visit the Getty Center, which is known for its paintings, drawings , and photographs. The Getty Center is the newest of the big art museums. It was founded only in the 1950s, by the wealthy oil industrialist J. Paul Getty. It started in his home, but later moved into its current building, which opened in 1997.
While the Met and the Art Institute are in stately , classic, conservative buildings , the Getty has a bold, modern design . It’s perched high above Los Angles, so it has stunning views from its landscaped gardens outside.
Two other great art museums to mention: the Museum of Modern Art in New York (that one has Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”) and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
But not all great museums are about art. In Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Institution’s Air & Space Museum traces the history of aviation and space travel . You can see Neil Armstrong’s space suit , a space capsule from the first space flight, and the Wright Brothers’ original airplane.
The Smithsonian also has great museums about American History, Natural History, and American Art. All of them are free.
The National 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City is an excellent museum, for a lot of reasons . It’s built right on—right in—the site of the September 11 attacks . The collection is very well-curated , with artifacts collected from the rescue effort . There are moving audio and video components, too. You can see news coverage from New York City that morning and hear the audio from the cockpit of an airplane that hit the towers. We did a whole episode on this museum. Listen to that one at PlainEnglish.com/398 .
Dearborn, Michigan, is a suburb of Detroit, the home of America’s auto industry . And The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation tells the story of innovation , with a focus on the automobile age . The museum includes the presidential limousine that John F. Kennedy was riding in when he was shot . You can see the “Quadricycle,” the first motor vehicle developed by Henry Ford in 1896. There are early versions of mail trucks , fire trucks , and buses.
Next door, you can find the outdoor part of the museum. The “Greenfield Village” is a re-creation of architecture from Henry Ford’s lifetime . Historic buildings were moved to the village to show what buildings were like, and what village life was like, in the early twentieth century.
That’s not all. Ford—the company—has an assembly plant in Dearborn. It’s open for tours, so you can walk around a catwalk high above the factory floor and watch Ford’s iconic F-150 pickup truck being assembled . If you do all three—the museum, the outdoor village, and the assembly plant tour—you have a great day.
If you have children—or if you’re just a kid at heart —you might want to visit the world’s largest children’s museum. It’s in Indianapolis, Indiana, a medium-sized city in the Midwest. At the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, kids can explore recreations of dinosaurs , steam locomotives , and spaceships . There’s also a section about how children have made a difference in history, highlighting the story of Anne Frank and others.
Jeff’s take
I have been to all of these except the Getty and the Indy Children’s Museum. I know Detroit isn’t on a lot of people’s itineraries , but if you’re into cars, automobiles, or the history of innovation, I do highly recommend the Henry Ford Museum and Ford assembly plant tour.
But if you’re into museums and can visit only one city, I say go to Washington, D.C. New York is a great museum city. But Washington has such a good variety, and the museums in D.C. are free. You could go to two a day for a week and still not see it all.
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