One of the most quietly powerful experiences in any American museum is the glass-floored walkway at the entrance to the National WWI Museum. Beneath the glass floor lies a field of 9,000 red poppies, each one representing 1,000 of the 9 million soldiers killed in the war. Walking across it forces a moment of reckoning with scale that no wall of statistics can achieve.
The museum continues downstairs with a chronological exhibition that covers the causes, conduct, and consequences of the First World War in careful, even-handed detail. The European focus is balanced by coverage of how the war transformed American society, politics, and foreign policy. The museum sits beneath the 217-foot Liberty Memorial, which can be climbed for panoramic views across Kansas City and into Kansas to the west.