We’re setting off for Iceland in a few weeks to join Viking for one of their Welcome Back cruises. So we have been poking around the company’s website.
One impressive resource there for the general public is Viking.TV. It was created in response to the pandemic and this channel is chock full of videos about art, culture, history, food, music, architecture, and destinations around the world.
Our favorite feature is Museum Monday. Stop in and you’ll see that there are now more than 60 videos about museums and collections. including some wonderful behind the scene tours.
You’ll find your own favorites, but here are a few of the videos that captured our attention and our imagination this week. We started with a visit to the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway, home to Thor Heyerdahl’s original Kon-Tiki raft and the papyrus boat Ra II.
We also went down a rabbit hole at London’s British Museum learning about how prepared the museum for lockdown and toured the collection of the Alaskan objects at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, England.
Statues are toppling and being taken down around the country because the historical figures they portray had a role in the oppression of others.
Included in this movement is the removal of the iconic Texas Ranger statue from the main lobby at Dallas Love Field Airport.
The 12-foot-tall bronze statue has been on display at the airport on and off since 1963 but was taken down in early June.
City officials decided to remove the statue. Their decision was prompted by published excerpts from a new book documenting the history of the Texas Rangers law enforcement agency and its connections to brutality and racism, the Dallas News reported.
But, Swanson says, some Texas Rangers were also responsible for “terrifying atrocities, including massacres on the Texas-Mexico border.”
The Texas Ranger statue that was at Dallas Love Field turned out to be especially problematic.
Sgt. E.J. âJayâ Banks, the Texas Ranger who served as the model for the statue at Dallas Love Field, was the commanding Ranger on the scene in 1956 when attempts were made to integrate the high school in Mansfield, near Dallas.
“But unlike state police in other Southern racial hotspots, the Rangers in Mansfield did not escort black students past howling mobs of white supremacists. They had been sent instead to keep the black children out of a white school,” Swanson writes, “A wire service photo showed [Banks] casually leaning against a tree outside Mansfield High. To his left, above the schoolâs entrance, was a dummy in blackface, hanging from a noose.”
What will happen to the statue – the spot it once filled at Dallas Love Field Airport?
According to an airport spokesman, “It has been placed into storage and the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture will lead the conversations and decisions as to what will happen to it next. There is no plan at this time to place anything else in that space.”
Miami International Airport is celebrating it 90th birthday.
To honor the 90th anniversary of Miami International, the airport opened an art exhibit titled MIA: A Hub for History, featuring airport memorabilia from the last nine decades.
Developed in partnership with the History Miami Museum and the Wolfson Archives, the exhibit features vintage photographs, posters, uniforms and videos of celebrity MIA arrivals from the airportâs first flight on 15 September 1928 up to the present.
Here are some tweets from the day.
See it now @iflymia : "MIA: A Hub For History," an exhibition celebrating 90 years aloft at Miami's airport. It's on view in the Hall of Aviation mezzanine, 4th Level, Concourse J. @WolfsonArchives & @HistoryMiami contributed to the exhibition. Photos courtesy @iflymia . pic.twitter.com/qP0hOXH8gw
OurCountyâs airport turns 90! History buffs, residents and visitors will enjoy seeing @IflyMIAâs birthday celebration complete with cake, former flight attendants, and a new vintage art exhibit in Concourse J created in partnership with @HistoryMiami. #MIAMemoriespic.twitter.com/TWt0XNEiOc