Frazier Museum

As we drove to the Louisville Science Center, there were grumblings that we always went to the same place and there was never anything different except the traveling exhibit. When we discovered that the traveling exhibit was "Sesame Street explains the body" and the place was chock-a-block with little kids, the grumblers won the day and we walked a block to the Frazier History Museum.

It is mostly an arms history museum, but much of it is very well done. My eyes glazed over at the displays of paraphernalia of Kentucky Civil War officers (on both sides of the war). But the dioramas and reconstructions of famous battles and how weapons and tactics changed were quite interesting. The top floor is British history, the second American, and the first floor has some lecture areas and hands-on spaces. They provide a long list of interpretations--you'd have to come rather often to see them all. We saw Annie Oakley and a demonstration of sword fighting with blade and buckler. The latter was taken from an illustrated manual from the 1200's in which a monk is teaching a scholar (and on the last page an 8'th century female saint) how to fight. A buckler is a metal shield about the size of a dinner plate with a large boss in the middle. You have to be fast with it...