Take a Ride Through the History of America’s Freedom Train with Google
Image: US National Archives/Flickr

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Take a Ride Through the History of America’s Freedom Train with Google

[virtual choo-chooing in the distance]

In anticipation of some vigorous national kowtowing, barbecuing, and boozing in the name of America the Beautiful, Google and the US National Archives put up a virtual exhibit documenting the journey of the nation's Freedom Train.

Just in case you're not familiar with historical miscellanea, the Freedom Train was mobile tour of some of America's most important documents: the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Truman Doctrine, and the Bill of Rights. The train took 18 months to stop through 330 cities in the 48 states, from September 1947 to December 1949. There were two Freedom Trains, the second existing from 1975-6 in time for the US Bicentennial, but the virtual exhibit is on the original.

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The Train was particularly great as a vehicle for the government's stance against segregation: two cities, Memphis, Tennessee and Birmingham, Alabama, (the latter of which would be a major epicenter for the civil rights movement) were skipped for keeping white and black people in separate train cars.

The National Archives said the documents were viewed by some 3.5 million Americans while they were chugging across the country with a squadron of some 27 Marines guarding it. The intent was to "sell the idea of America" to American citizens, as if living and taking in the postwar economic afterglow weren't enough.

The Archives published the exhibit through Google's Cultural Institute, which allows for anyone with a Google account to put up virtual exhibits that feature everything from art galleries to world wonders in a filmstrip format. Museums have been made some of their offerings available online, but the Cultural Institute at least gives them a mobile-friendly platform that looks the same across devices—there's no messing with Flash player or unintuitive gallery formats that some museums without dedicated web teams may fall behind on.

Screengrab: Google Cultural Institute on mobile

But what's groundbreaking about the Cultural Institute is that users can populate galleries of their own—it combats the systemic trend of museums becoming state-sanctioned projections of power and gives an open platform where exhibitions that don't follow dominant narratives and interests can just as easily populate the same space as exhibits that do.

So feel free to jump through whichever galleries you want, nationalistic or not. Google's made it fair game.