This issue's somber focus reminds us that we must learn from the events of our collective past and honor the memory of those brave men and women who sacrificed comfort and safety, and their own lives, to win a safer and better future for us.
The hosts below offer tours to most of the battle sites and monuments we feature in this issue. Many of the trips these companies offer can be found by using ...
Tour Host Review
Boy, talk about history overload! Midas Battlefield Tours offers nearly 50 separate tours ranging from the Punic Wars to nearly every European war over the past 2,000 years.
Trips based on their customers’ interests feature heavily in their choice of itineraries and the variety is far greater than the other companies I’ve reviewed. WWII trips include areas you rarely see with other co...
Host of the Month
When I was a college student a friend of mine put up posters around campus announcing an upcoming party at his house. He named the party “The Great Chockahoola Swamp Massacree,” clearly implying that his party would be one memorable, pull-out-the-stops blast.I reme...
Festival Pick
It’s shame that jitters about travel to Europe had to be the goad for renewed American interest in travel to Mexico. Like the girl next door, who turns out to have virtually everything a young man is looking for, Mexico has always been one of the great – but unsung – travel destinations.Though Mexico is only little more than a fifth the size of the U.S., it boasts almost as great...
World Heritage Site
On March 20, the second day of the war in Iraq, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum celebrated its long-awaited grand re-opening at its new venue on Civic Center Plaza. As hundreds of celebrants gathered in front of the city’s converted old main library, a beaux-arts gem built in 1917, hundreds of anti-war demonstrators sur...
Museum Pick
Before taking a vacation several years ago to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, my wife and I casually tacked Glacier National Park in Montana onto our itinerary. But later in the trip, after 10 days of travel to and through the first two parks, we were nearing satiation. We had seen and enjoyed such beautiful scenery and wildlife, as well as trying to le...
National Park Pick
Glacier National Park, Montana
Written By Patrick Totty Posted on Nature
Before taking a vacation several years ago to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, my wife and I casually tacked GlacierNational Park in Montana onto our itinerary. But later in the trip, after 10 days of travel to and through the first two parks, we were nearing satiation. We had seen and enjoyed such beautiful scenery and wildlife, as well as trying to learn the history of the area, that the 400-mile drive north to Glacier began to look onerous.
Robert Reynolds recalls the moment he realized, only minutes into a meeting with a group of Filipino movers and shakers, that his plea to dedicate Corregidor Island in Manila Bay as a WWII shrine was going absolutely nowhere.
The year was 1968 and Reynolds, a former Royal Air Force bomber pilot now living in the United States, was appealing to them to see the major...
The monument: An indoor shrine to the fallen topped by one of the largest statues on earth.
Why to go: The Nazis, with their audaciously stupid notions of racial superiority, never understood the Russians. It was a failure that cost them the war. By late 1941, after the Wehrmacht had demolished several Russian armies and had captured 3...
The monument: If the Vietnam Memorial artfully avoids editorial comment on the war it commemorates, the great monument at Thiepval, France, looks askance at what it marks. Its designer, British architect Sir Edwin Luytens, created a monument that generates unease, even repulsion. It is an ugly structure, dominating the hill like a grotesque red-and-white crab, its...
The monument: A semi-circle of six freestanding columns at the entrance to Mexico City’s verdant jewel, Chapultepec (Aztec for “grasshopper hill”) Park. The columns honor six teenage cadets who threw themselves to their deaths from the heights of Chapultepec Castle in 1847 rather than surrender to U.S. Marines who were about to take Mexico...
“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives. . . You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. There is no difference to us between the ‘Johnnies’ and the ‘Mehmets,’ where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. . . You, the mothers, who sent your sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears;...
The monument: The steel ribs that once formed the frame of the dome that capped the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall building in downtown Hiroshima, a city on the southwestern end of the main Japanese island of Honshu.
Why to go: The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima killed half as many people as the fire-bombing of Tokyo by...
In some ways this memorial is the most important 20th-century monument to U.S. soldiers. Although Vietnam was a heartbreaking struggle, in the end the fate of the United States did not rest on its outcome. At Normandy, though, the U.S. rolled the dice on June 6, 1944, and wagered that it could gain...
The monument: A 45-acre memorial to the Holocaust that includes museums, archives, monuments and exhibition spaces that commemorate the lost Jews of Europe.
Why to go: Judaism, except for a brief time in the first century A.D. when it made converts among the upper classes in Alexandria and Rome, has never been a missionary...
At the beginning of the 21st century it is obvious that war will be with our species for a while longer. America’s war on terrorism, Israel’s struggle for survival, the ongoing confrontation between India and Pakistan, China’s belligerence toward Taiwan and northern Sudan’s armed enslavement of the southern Sudanese, among others, all bespeak a world...
The monument: A simple V-shaped cleft in the Washington Mall whose stone walls bear the names of the 58,000 servicemen who died in the Vietnam War between 1961 and 1973.
Why to go: This monument is the stuff of legend. A 20-year-old Yale architecture student, fulfilling a class assignment and with no thought of entering the official competition, draws a simple...
The monument: The remains of the U.S.S. Arizona, a World War I-era battleship that was destroyed in a spectacular explosion during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, in 1941. To this day droplets of oil from the ship’s fuel bunkers continue to bubble up to the surface of Pearl Harbor’s placid waters.
"Standing along the Thames in the shadow of the Globe Theatre, the sights and sounds of Elizabethan England came alive around me." Such was the reaction of one visitor to a holiday based on the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In London, the centerpiece is the authentically reconstructed Globe Theatre, with a guided tour and a chance to see a production, complete with...
The monument: The remains of the U.S.S. Arizona, a World War I-era battleship that was destroyed in a spectacular explosion during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, in 1941. To this day droplets of oil from the ship’s fuel bunkers continue to bubble up to the surface of Pearl Harbor’s placid waters.Why to go: Before Sept. 11, 2001, the date that most lived “in infamy” in older Americans’ minds was December 7, 1941, the...
The monument: Located near Metéora, 100 miles northwest of Athens, this small monument is something a casual visitor might exhaust in only a few minutes. But for the more discerning visitor, it would be useful to linger here because it commemorates an event upon which the history of the whole world later hinged.Why to Go: In 480 B.C., a huge Persian army, advancing south towards Athens, encountered a band of Spartan soldiers – probably no more than 300 – at the pass of...
The monument: The steel ribs that once formed the frame of the dome that capped the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall building in downtown Hiroshima, a city on the southwestern end of the main Japanese island of Honshu. Why to go: The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima killed half as many people as the fire-bombing of Tokyo by conventional weapons only a few weeks...
On March 20, the second day of the war in Iraq, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum celebrated its long-awaited grand re-opening at its new venue on Civic Center Plaza. As hundreds of celebrants gathered in front of the city’s converted old main library, a beaux-arts gem built in 1917, hundreds of anti-war demonstrators surged nearby, seriously attempting to shut down business as...
When I was a college student a friend of mine put up posters around campus announcing an upcoming party at his house. He named the party “The Great Chockahoola Swamp Massacree,” clearly implying that his party would be one memorable, pull-out-the-stops blast.
I remember little from that night except that the party was aptly named. Years later, a lot of...
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Glacier National Park, Montana
Robert Reynolds recalls the moment he realized, only minutes into a meeting with a group of Filipino movers and shakers, that his plea to dedicate Corregidor Island in Manila Bay as a WWII shrine was going absolutely nowhere. 
The monument: An indoor shrine to the fallen topped by one of the largest statues on earth.
The monument: If the Vietnam Memorial artfully avoids editorial comment on the war it commemorates, the great monument at Thiepval, France, looks askance at what it marks. Its designer, British architect Sir Edwin Luytens, created a monument that generates unease, even repulsion. It is an ugly structure, dominating the hill like a grotesque red-and-white crab, its...
The monument: A semi-circle of six freestanding columns at the entrance to Mexico City’s verdant jewel, Chapultepec (Aztec for “grasshopper hill”) Park. The columns honor six teenage cadets who threw themselves to their deaths from the heights of Chapultepec Castle in 1847 rather than surrender to U.S. Marines who were about to take Mexico...
“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives. . . You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. There is no difference to us between the ‘Johnnies’ and the ‘Mehmets,’ where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. . . You, the mothers, who sent your sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears;...
The monument: The steel ribs that once formed the frame of the dome that capped the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall building in downtown Hiroshima, a city on the southwestern end of the main Japanese island of Honshu. 
In some ways this memorial is the most important 20th-century monument to U.S. soldiers. Although Vietnam was a heartbreaking struggle, in the end the fate of the United States did not rest on its outcome. At Normandy, though, the U.S. rolled the dice on June 6, 1944, and wagered that it could gain...
The monument: A 45-acre memorial to the Holocaust that includes museums, archives, monuments and exhibition spaces that commemorate the lost Jews of Europe. 
At the beginning of the 21st century it is obvious that war will be with our species for a while longer. America’s war on terrorism, Israel’s struggle for survival, the ongoing confrontation between India and Pakistan, China’s belligerence toward Taiwan and northern Sudan’s armed enslavement of the southern Sudanese, among others, all bespeak a world....jpg)
The monument: A simple V-shaped cleft in the Washington Mall whose stone walls bear the names of the 58,000 servicemen who died in the Vietnam War between 1961 and 1973.
The monument: The remains of the U.S.S. Arizona, a World War I-era battleship that was destroyed in a spectacular explosion during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, in 1941. To this day droplets of oil from the ship’s fuel bunkers continue to bubble up to the surface of Pearl Harbor’s placid waters.