Liberty Memorial Poppies, Kansas City, Missouri Photo Print

"Liberty Memorial Poppies, Kansas City, Missouri" by Catherine Sherman. "For the nine days leading up to the Armistice, the official WWI memorial of the United States was illuminated with a nearly 55 million pixel, 800,000 lumens display featuring more than 5,000 poppies each evening in a massive and moving light installation. Every 15 minutes, a special presentations of images, footage and details about World War I will appear. Peace and Remembrance marks the centennial of the Armistice of 1918 that brought an end to WWI, with each day of the installation leading up to the Armistice signifying one million of the total nine million combatant deaths of the conflict." The Liberty Memorial is part of the National World War I Museum and Memorial of the United States. Opened to the public as the Liberty Memorial museum in 1926, it was designated in 2004 by the United States Congress as America's official museum dedicated to World War I. In 2004, construction started on a new 80,000-square-foot (7,400 m2) expansion and the Edward Jones Research Centre underneath the original memorial. The year that this was completed, Liberty Memorial was designated a National Historic Landmark (September 20, 2006) Why Poppies? In the spring of 1915, shortly after losing a friend in Ypres, a Canadian doctor, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae was inspired by the sight of poppies growing in battle-scarred fields to write a now famous poem called 'In Flanders Fields'. After the First World War, the poppy was adopted as a symbol of Remembrance.