The Beginning

The museum began with a conversation between the historian Stephen Ambrose and Nick Mueller, and Ambrose raised $50,000 in start-up money from Peter Kalikow. Congress later added $4 million. The opening planned for 1994 slipped several times, and in 1998 the scope widened from the Normandy landings to all of D-Day, helped by the film Saving Private Ryan. It was dedicated on June 6, 2000, as the National D-Day Museum in the former Weckerling Brewery building. Congress designated it the national World War II museum in 2003, and the name changed in 2006.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.9 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 1.0 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 1.1 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 1.2 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.

More markers nearby

• Confederate Memorial Hall — steps away
• Margaret's Place and Walk / Lower Garden District — steps away
• Kossuth — 0.4 mi
• Lafayette Square — 0.4 mi