The National Historical Fire Foundation is better know as the Hall of Flame. The museum is dedicated to preserving firefighting equipment used in Arizona and around the world. The museum has five exhibit bays and the National Firefighting Hall of Heroes gallery. The equipment is grouped as: Hand & Horse Drawn (1725–1908); Motorized Apparatus (1897–1948); Motorized Apparatus (1918–1968); Motorized Apparatus (1919–1950) and Wildland Firefighting. It has also have a large collection of Fire Department arm patches.
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While many know the Harry Ransom Center as an internationally renowned humanities research center, it hosts many exhibits of interest to the general traveling public. The center, located at The University of Texas at Austin, is home to 100,000 works of art, 5 million photographs, more than 42 million manuscripts and nearly 1 million books. The collection’s highlights include one of only 20 complete copies of the Gutenberg Bible in the world.
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The story of Arizona would be far from complete without the Native American perspective. While it is at times a difficult story to tell and a difficult story to hear, the Heard Museum does a magnificent job brining the Native American Experience to life. Dwight B. and Maie Bartlett Heard founded the museum in 1929 to house their personal art collection. Today, the 130,000-square-foot museum features more than 40,000 items in its collection, including the Barry Goldwater collection of Hopi kachina dolls.
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Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, lived in a house at 907 Whitehead Street from 1931 to 1939. Asa Tift, a marine architect and salvage wrecker, built the house in a French Colonial estate style. Construction on the house started in 1848 and completed in 1851. When Pauline first saw the house in deep disrepair, she labeled it a “damned haunted house.” However, she convinced her wealthy uncle to buy it for $8,000 for her and her husband as a wedding present. Today, the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida, is equal parts shrine to Hemingway and a historic house. The house, a National Historic Landmark, showcases Hemingway’s possessions, including his writing desk, hunting trophies and books. It is also famous for its resident cats, many of which are descendants of Hemingway’s original pet cats and are said to have six toes.
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The High Museum of Art, the premier art museum in the South, is in the midst of a multi-year partnership with The Museum of Modern Art. Through 2013, the partnership will bring many international exhibitions to Atlanta and past exhibitions have included masterpieces by Claude Monet and Leonardo de Vinci.
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Built after World War II, the museum is dedicated to the atomic bombing of the city and to the war. Though the museum presents history from a Japanese perspective, it includes exhibits and information detailing Japanese aggression throughout Asia leading up to World War II. The museum also includes copies of letters the city’s mayors have written to leaders of various countries, opposing their successful tests of an atomic weapon. The mayors are advocates for an atomic bomb-free world.
The Historic Railpark and Train Museum is located in the historic former railroad Louisville and Nashville Railroad station in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 18, 1979.
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The Royal Navy light cruiser HMS Belfast was commissioned on Aug. 5, 1939, and built by Harland and Wolff shipyard in its namesake city of Belfast. This is the same company that built another famous ship, the Titanic. The Belfast saw action during some of the most pivotal battles of World War II, including the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.
No trip to Toronto is complete without a visit to the Hockey Hall of Fame. The museum — known as the Temple de la renommée du hockey in French — dates to 1943 and has been in its current location on Yonge Street in the heart of Toronto since 1993. There are roughly 400 people — including players, builders and referees — inducted into the Hall of Fame. The 60,000-square-foot museum is home to heaps of memorabilia, helping to tell the story of hockey from its earliest days to modern times.