Across America: 6 Museums That Celebrate Our Country

Get out and sample the best of the land of the free and home of the brave

Jeff Tomik,

AARP Experience Counts

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Published October 03, 2024

President Ronald Reagan was getting into this car when he was shot by John Hinckley on March 30, 1981. The car carried Reagan to the hospital. Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and George H.W. Bush also used this car.

KMSPhotography/The Henry Ford

Walk around the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and you can see the original Star-Spangled Banner at the National Museum of America History, the National Portrait Gallery’s collection of presidential portraits and Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit at the National Air and Space Museum.

Jumping from Smithsonian to Smithsonian can paint a comprehensive picture of this country’s complex 250-year history and it’s thoroughly recommended.

But you don’t have to go to the nation’s capital to see artifacts that represent America. Here are six museums beyond the capital that feature exhibits celebrating the land of the free and home of the brave.

The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan

The Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford.

Gary Malerba for The Henry Ford

More than 1.7 million people per year visit the four venues just outside Detroit: the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, Greenfield Village, Ford Rouge Factory Tour and Giant Screen Experience.

From being able to see the bus where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to catching a ride in a Model T, many of the major exhibits tell the story of American history through automobiles.

The presidential vehicles exhibit includes the horse-drawn carriage used by Theodore Roosevelt and the Lincoln limousine that John F. Kennedy was in when he was assassinated in 1963.

National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana

An exterior view of the National World War II museum in New Orleans.

Jeffery Johnston/Courtesy The National WWII Museum

Visit the military museum to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the World War II turning point when more than 150,000 troops from America, Canada and the United Kingdom stormed Normandy's beaches to liberate France from Nazi Germany’s control.

The museum tells the story of the war through more than 9,000 personal accounts and 250,000 artifacts. The six-acre campus features an extensive display of air, land and sea vehicles including a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber, Sherman Tank and Higgins boat.

The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The Benjamin Franklin statue inside the entryway at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

DWMoran Photo/Courtesy The Franklin Institute

In one of the most historic cities in the country, the tribute to Founding Father Benjamin Franklin is a science and technology educational hub that highlights America’s history of innovation.

Exhibits showcase Franklin’s discovery of electricity, the Wrights brothers taking flight and the extensive history of U.S. space exploration. While the iconic Giant Heart, a two-story walkthrough exhibit that was built in 1953, is currently closed, it will reopen in November with the Giant Heart as the centerpiece on a new exhibit on the human body.

National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee

A display at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images

Located at the former Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, this museum chronicles the movement to abolish segregation and fight racial injustice and discrimination.

The complex underwent a nearly $30 million renovation 10 years ago, adding more films, oral histories and interactive media to its collection. Among its exhibits includes a replica of a Greyhound bus used by Freedom Riders and an interactive exhibit that represents the Montgomery bus boycott, which began with Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat.

Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida

The Command/Service Module and capsule displayed here were built for a Skylab rescue mission and were once attached to the Saturn 1-B rocket.

PETE BARRETT / The Capsule

Did you know there’s a U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame? The tribute to the country’s top spacemen and spacewomen is housed in the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex’s Heroes & Legends building. The Mercury Seven were the inaugural class in 1990. Since then, Neil Armstrong (1993), Sally Ride (2003) and Guion Bluford (2010) have been among the more than 100 inductees.

On top of the hall of fame, the center features the Saturn V, a life-sized Mars rover replica and a rocket garden with spacecrafts from NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. If you plan on making a visit, you can also time it so you also see an actual rocket launch.

U.S.S. Midway Museum in San Diego, California

Family manning a radarscope in the Command Information Center at the USS Midway Museum.

Courtesy USS Midway Museum

OK, so this is also on the coast and might not quite fit the definition of heartland, but it’s not Washington D.C., New York City or Los Angeles. U.S.S. Midway, the county’s longest-serving aircraft carrier from 1945 to 1992, opened as a museum in 2004 and now hosts more than a million people every year.

The ship houses more than 30 restored aircraft and is a commemoration of military history as well as a demonstration of naval engineering. Visitors can try out flight simulators, lie in sleeping quarters and stroll the flight deck to better understand what the more than 200,000 sailors who served aboard the vessel experienced.

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Jeff Tomik graduated from James Madison University with a B.A. in journalism and worked for publications in the Washington, D.C., area from 2007, spending 11 years at The Washington Post, where he was a multiplatform editor. He is currently an assistant editor at PhillyVoice.

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