2018-10-27 14:26
Browsing through the vast collections of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) last week, I came across a haunting image of the Corwin or “Witch House” in Salem. It… Read More
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Architecture, history and culture from a Salem, Massachusetts based academic and perspective
2018-10-24 18:27
Every year about this time, there is a “it could only happen in Salem” story in the news: this year’s version reports a recent incident of assault and battery by … Read More
2018-10-22 11:29
I haven’t been posting on Salem very much: my blog is going to lose its name! Long-time readers will know that I always hide or leave during October as I do not care for Haunted Happen… Read More
2018-10-19 17:49
Driving home to Massachusetts from the Hudson River Valley last weekend, I actually drove west, as my brother told me there was a village across the river which I might enjoy: Athe… Read More
2018-10-16 13:14
This past weekend I toured six “country seats” built by various members of the venerable and prominent Livingston family of the Hudson River Valley in the later eighteenth and ni… Read More
2018-10-11 13:23
Disclosure of shameless showcasing of husband’s work! On a beautiful Indian Summer day, with the sun streaming in through the large windows throughout, I toured the form… Read More
2018-10-09 16:08
I am encountering so many references to quinces in my early modern recipe books and regimens: to eat, to preserve, in tarts and jellies and marmalade, of course. These English peop… Read More
2018-10-07 14:12
I’m working on three projects during my sabbatical this semester, but the one that has (re-)captured my attention, and to which I have devoted the most time so far, is an old study of… Read More
2018-10-03 15:14
I was pleased that a proposal to situate a commercial carnival for the city-wide celebration of Halloween on Salem Common was abandoned by our Mayor a few weeks ago, but many people in Salem… Read More
2018-10-01 12:18
We were in Saratoga Springs for a big family wedding this past weekend, one of four (or did I hear six?) that the city absorbed effortlessly: by all appearances Saratoga has its tourism game… Read More
2018-09-27 21:11
I like to run through Salem’s larger cemeteries because I’m not the best runner so I really don’t want a (live) audience. Last weekend I did something to my back, so instea… Read More
2018-09-25 14:42
About forty minutes inland from Salem to the northwest are the towns of Andover and North Andover, both early settlements and bustling towns today. Due to the anniversary of the last executi… Read More
2018-09-22 12:28
I always think about the Salem Witch Trials in September, as the cumulative hysteria of 1692 was coming to a close with the execution of the last eight victims on September 22. Every year at… Read More
2018-09-20 01:32
I teach what is commonly known as the “Scientific Revolution” in several of my courses, and I always endeavor to expose my students to the broad range of the “new science&r&hell…Read More
2018-09-16 15:53
I had high hopes for this particular September, one of the very few Septembers that I didn’t have to go back to school as a student or teacher in my entire life as I am on sabbatical… Read More
2018-09-12 08:45
Back to the seventeenth century, where I am working my way through a series of instructional books produced to meet the apparent and universal demand for better health, more wealth, and an e… Read More
2018-09-09 21:39
Increasing concern that the City might locate a commercial carnival on Salem Common during Haunted Happenings has brought me out of my seventeenth-century reverie: the present interrupts the… Read More
2018-09-05 15:51
I’m diving deep into early modern recipes this month, and as the term recipe was not reserved for the culinary realm during this time that means instructions for all sorts of… Read More
2018-09-02 18:31
Fair warning: this blog is going into a very random phase, even more random than usual. Normally around this time of year I would have some sort of Labor Day or “Back to School&rd&hell…Read More
2018-08-29 13:35
Things become crystal clear when you find yourself in a parallel universe and are able to discern what your universe lacks. Almost exactly a year ago, the Peabody Essex Museum notified… Read More
2018-08-25 12:36
I’m using the expression “turnkey” in typical contrary fashion here: it’s a real estate term which generally means a house that requires no repairs or refurbishment… Read More
2018-08-22 11:18
Portsmouth always struck me as a Georgian town, even from a young age, when I first developed an appreciation for historic houses at Strawbery Banke and first spotted what is still one of my… Read More
2018-08-19 13:48
We have had the longest stretch of horrible humid weather in my memory: it’s been hot too, but it’s the humidity that gets you, of course. The only place I’ve really b… Read More
2018-08-13 17:53
Salem is such a foodie/libations town now; I’m surprised there is so little culinary history served up. With countless restaurants, several bakeries and food shops, one brewery and ano… Read More
2018-08-10 11:33
August is high season for antique shows and auctions in New England: generally featuring Americana items with global goods mixed in, as our Yankee forebears, particularly those who dwelled i… Read More
2018-08-07 14:43
It’s August, so we’re coming up on the day a year ago when the Peabody Essex Museum quite suddenly closed the doors of its temporary Phillips Library facility in Peabody and issu… Read More
2018-08-03 01:15
Last weekend we were up in New Hampshire again as I continued my search for the perfect white antique 3-bedroom (maybe four, no more!) summer house. I was pretty fixated on Tamworth last sum… Read More
2018-07-31 02:03
I was in several New Hampshire towns in the Monadnock region over the past weekend, and in each and every one of them there was a centrally-located History Center or Historical Society, open… Read More
2018-07-28 15:32
Nestled between busy Boston, Quincy, and Route 128, the town of Milton, Massachusetts still wears signs of its pastoral past. It’s an original streetcar suburb, but the Blue Hills drew… Read More
2018-07-25 11:48
At a symposium on Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables last week, members of Salem State’s English Department offered really interesting insights into the text, its th… Read More
2018-07-22 20:38
In support of the summer-long celebration of the 350th anniversary of the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion in Salem, better known as the House of the Seven Gables, Salem State has offered up a Hawth… Read More
2018-07-18 16:09
Despite the fact that I am a middle-aged woman rather than an adolescent boy, I was absolutely determined to see the reproduction Viking ship Draken Harald Hårfagre as it sai… Read More
2018-07-13 10:37
It’s high summer and high time for some baseball: of the ephemeral kind. The Library of Congress’s major summer exhibition, Baseball Americana, presents all sorts of compell… Read More
2018-07-10 16:43
On a very humid Friday I spent a precious hour in the most beautiful house in America: the Gardner-Pingree House, built here in Salem in 1804 and widely acknowledged to be Samuel McIntire&rs&hell…Read More
2018-07-07 02:19
I grew up a few towns over from the famous “Wedding Cake House” in Kennebunk, Maine, more formerly known as the George W. Bourne house, and so it’s always been a part of my… Read More
2018-07-04 20:17
In recent years, Salem has put on an amazing fireworks display for the Fourth, before that it was BIG blazing bonfires, and before that it was LONG orations–sometime competing&nbs&hell…Read More
2018-07-02 20:18
Every single year I think about Nathaniel Hawthorne in the first week of July, as his birthday was on July 4, but this particular summer he—or his inspiration–is everywhere in Sa… Read More
2018-06-28 12:23
The century-old Classical Revival mansion in nearby Swampscott which served as the “Summer White House” for Calvin and Mrs. Coolidge in 1925 is not long for this world, as just l… Read More
2018-06-25 22:51
A while ago I scored the first volume of a classic text of early American gardens, Gardens of Colony and State, compiled and edited for the Garden Club of America by Alice G.B. Loc… Read More
2018-06-21 11:24
I believe that I am running out of architectural styles manifest in Salem: I’ve featured First Period houses several times, also Georgians, it’s always about Federals in this cit… Read More
2018-06-18 14:39
I’m in a bit of a funk about our city right now, but still mid-June is glorious nearly everywhere in New England, and Salem is no exception: it’s time to celebrate the roses, and… Read More
2018-06-12 21:14
My title does not refer to the made-up medieval era but rather to the first decades of the twentieth century–when civic pageants reigned on both sides of the Atlantic! Datewise, we&rsq&hell…Read More
2018-06-10 15:55
Most of the students in my summer Research & Writing Seminar are pursuing local history topics related to the Revolutionary War and just after: conscription, taxation, the disruption to… Read More
2018-06-07 13:28
Salem has been a tourist city for a very long time, and that identity has inspired the production of countless souvenirs made from every material imaginable: ceramic, metal, cloth, wood, pla… Read More
2018-06-04 01:32
The Salem Arts Festival was this weekend in Salem: its tenth anniversary. Last year plastic-bag jellyfish were suspended above Derby Square and Front Street; this year it was all about … Read More
2018-05-30 13:52
This past weekend I spent an hour or so browsing (digitally) through Eugène Grasset’s La plante et ses applications ornementales (1896) and then stepped outside to see that… Read More
2018-05-27 02:40
One of the most impressive historical remembrance projects of recent years is the Scottish Soldiers Project initiated by the University of Durham’s Department of Archaeology after huma… Read More
2018-05-23 15:55
This summer I’m teaching our department’s capstone course, a seminar in research and writing for which students write long papers on topics of their choosing, sourced by primary… Read More
2018-05-20 14:39
I woke up happy but exhausted this morning, having completed a marathon May week of graduate festivities: three dinners, our department retreat, and two commencement ceremonies (graduate and… Read More
2018-05-15 10:46
This is graduation week, when we celebrate achievement and completion with pieces of paper, as we have for hundreds of years. No one wants a digital diploma! Even that avatar of online… Read More
2018-05-12 16:22
Spring has finally arrived in Massachusetts, transforming gardens, grass, and trees in the space of a week. Woodland plants are my favorite ephemeral heralds, so yesterday I drove to the New… Read More
2018-05-09 12:20
I promise: this is the last Phillips Library post for quite some time. It’s been six months since the Peabody Essex Museum admitted, under duress and only because they needed appr… Read More
2018-05-07 11:08
The Grand Army of the Republic, the powerful veterans organization of Union veterans of the Civil War, was officially disbanded in 1956, following the death of the last Union soldier, Albert… Read More
2018-05-03 16:35
Lately I’ve been thinking about a Salem native, descended from the city’s most-monied maritime family, the Derbys, but still devoted to public service, very well-known in his day… Read More
2018-04-29 01:15
The Peabody Essex Museum has made an additional concession in the mitigation dialogue following their admission to the relocation of Salem’s historical archives to a “Collection… Read More
2018-04-25 11:33
The official response to the Peabody Essex Museum’s reluctant admission to the removal of Salem’s historical archives to a storage facility in Rowley was the formation of a &ldqu&hell…Read More
2018-04-21 18:37
I have a lovely little portfolio in my possession—which long lay undetected and -appreciated underneath a tall stack of much bigger books–discovered joyfully just the other day:… Read More
2018-04-19 11:04
Just off Salem Common was a rather nondescript house, long consigned to institutional use, which was rescued by a couple who transformed it into what can only be described as a show house, w… Read More
2018-04-15 18:46
Ever since that fateful night in early December 2017 when a representative of the Peabody Essex Museum disclosed that the vast majority of the collections in its Phillips Library, the major… Read More
2018-04-11 11:44
So many materials, locked away in the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, undigitized, unheralded, unshared, undervalued and underutilized. Perhaps the digitized catalog will bring… Read More
2018-04-08 13:58
When the American Revolution began to escalate in the late spring of 1775, people wanted to see images of its leaders: Englishmen and -women in particular, were eager to see the “rebel… Read More
2018-04-04 12:08
Exactly one hundred years ago in Salem, people were flocking to the Essex Institute to see a piece of Salem history that had recently been returned to their fair city: a Georgian fire-fighti… Read More
2018-04-02 11:35
We were a small party for Easter this year so we went to the St. Botolph Club in Boston for a buffet of oysters, salmon, eggs benedict, coq au vin, and lamb (no ham). This is the artsy old B… Read More
2018-03-28 12:39
Lately I’ve become a bit fixated on Simon Bradstreet, the last governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, primarily because of the spectacular Salem house in which he lived—and di… Read More
2018-03-26 11:09
This weekend, I gave a talk on Salem author Mary Harrod Northend, the Martha Stewart of her day (1904-26), at the House of the Seven Gables and my favorite part (not sure about my audience&r&hell…Read More
2018-03-22 18:13
It is that time of year again: time for the annual Salem Film Fest, now in its eleventh year and very firmly established on the cultural calendar. Over the years, it has been very inspiring… Read More
2018-03-20 12:52
The opposition to the Peabody Essex Museum’s removal of Salem’s historical archives to an industrial park in Rowley incorporates a range of perspectives: some people have never b… Read More
2018-03-18 13:09
I’ve been obsessed with the Downing-Bradstreet house (which once occupied the site of another current obsession, the Phillips Library) for quite some time: consequently I took advantag… Read More
2018-03-15 14:01
So I can show you the beautiful day after our third big snowstorm of March, and also anticipate St. Patrick’s Day coming up this weekend, I am showcasing a portfolio of some of Salem&r&hell…Read More
2018-03-12 13:55
Our recent nor’easter uncovered a skeletal shipwreck on Short Sands Beach in my hometown of York, Maine, and I dispatched my parents to take pictures almost as soon as the skies cleari… Read More
2018-03-07 17:09
As they are now, Salem women were really, really busy in the near and more-distant past, and the records in the Phillips Library are a testament to both the range and intensity of their acti… Read More
2018-03-05 13:04
I’ve been thinking about commemoration—past, present, and future–a lot lately, yet another consequence of the constant interplay between what I do and where I live. I&rsquo&hell…Read More
2018-03-01 19:14
The first of March: a notable historical day from my own geographical perspective, as it marks the anniversaries of both the incorporation of the first English “city” in North Am… Read More
2018-02-25 14:56
So this is where we are with the Phillips Library relocation, for lack of a better term: the Peabody Essex Museum, having made the reluctant admission that the collections will not be return… Read More
2018-02-23 12:13
Read this paragraph: ___________ is changing rapidly. Some of the changes have been good: the burgeoning art scene, the museum-building boom, the explosion in restaurants and the w… Read More
2018-02-21 12:34
My self-education in historical architectural photography is now quite stalled in the realm of the photogravure, and I just can’t see enough tonal prints of old buildings, preferably b… Read More
2018-02-19 13:02
I always commemorate Presidents Day by remembering all (or many) of our presidents rather than just Washington and Lincoln: different themes each year have yielded interesting perspectives o… Read More
2018-02-16 20:40
I find myself these days full of feelings of dissent and resistance but looking for more whimsical ways to express the same, as you can’t be strident all the time. It’s boring, a… Read More
2018-02-14 13:27
I have always focused on hearts for St. Valentine’s Day and this year will be no exception: even in the midst of my Phillips frenzy. Actually, I could showcase some Phillips materials… Read More
2018-02-12 01:20
I’m really looking forward to an upcoming exhibition at the Concord Museum: Fresh Goods: Shopping for Goods in a New England Town, 1750-1900, offered as part of a state-wide MASS… Read More
2018-02-08 17:20
If you haven’t noticed, I’ve become a bit obsessed with the prospect of an exiled and extracted Phillips Library; even though I’m living through it, it… Read More
2018-02-06 13:38
As if it is not enough to bury the archives of a historical seaport in an inland warehouse 45 minutes away, rumor has it that one of the prominent symbols of Salem’s maritime heritage… Read More
2018-02-04 14:37
Two notable architectural photographers of the twentieth century turned their lenses on Salem again and again: Frank Cousins (1851-1925) and Samuel Chamberlain (1895-1975). These men represe… Read More
2018-01-31 18:50
The 1920s was a decade of intensive commemoration in Massachusetts, in recognition of the 300th anniversaries of the landing at Plymouth in 1620 and the arrival of John Winthrop here in Sale… Read More
2018-01-28 17:56
It was Burns Night at Hamilton Hall last night, and my husband and I were charged with giving the Toast to the Lassies and Reply. After a week steeped in the Ploughman Poet, both of us were… Read More
2018-01-25 14:04
From my perspective, there are two digitization dilemmas inherent in the Peabody Essex Museum’s plan to relocate the Phillips Library outside of Salem, where it was created over a peri… Read More
2018-01-21 21:13
Six weeks into the struggle to convince the leadership of the Peabody Essex Museum to return its Phillips Library to Salem, I find myself with lost faith and many learned lessons. The p… Read More
2018-01-18 13:01
Considerations of both donor intent and the importance of place were brushed off pretty quickly by the leadership of the Peabody Essex Museum during the Q&A part of the public forum… Read More
2018-01-15 11:45
On the occasion of the Martin Luther King holiday here in Salem and across the country, I thought I would highlight some sources for African-American history in the major repository for loca… Read More
2018-01-12 14:43
Last night’s public forum in the atrium of the Peabody Essex Museum, in which the museum leadership presented their arguments for why the Phillips Library collections “must&rdquo&hell…Read More
2018-01-10 15:14
I have to admit that, having written this blog for seven years (unbelievable–seems like a month!), an enterprise I undertook because I wanted to indulge my own curiosity but also learn… Read More
2018-01-08 02:30
I have been treating the digital remnants of the first and apparently-last PEM exhibition focused on the holdings of the Phillips Library as a requiem; when I first saw Unbound: Tr… Read More
2018-01-05 14:38
A brief intermission from #saveSalemshistory for some snow pictures, because it was a pretty big storm, or “bomb cyclone”! Back to the Phillips in a few days: remember the big PE… Read More
2018-01-02 16:35
As frustrating as this past month has been with the prospect of Salem’s history being extracted by the relocation of the Phillips Library it has also been interesting, as I d… Read More
2017-12-28 18:33
Over the last three weeks, as I have listened to the public discourse surrounding the Peabody Essex Museum’s reluctant announcement that it was planning to house the Salem-dominant col… Read More
2017-12-26 18:24
A brief Christmas break and then it’s right back to Save-the-Phillips-Library-for-Salem business! But I had a very visual Christmas so I wanted to post some pictures. We were a party o… Read More
2017-12-18 11:38
Regarding the recent admission that the Museum plans to consign nearly all of the collections of the Phillips Library, including manuscript and printed materials central and unique to the hi… Read More
2017-12-14 01:56
Reading through the Phillips Library catalog is an activity that is simultaneously enticing and frustrating: one can glean the scope of the collections but not access them, provenances are p… Read More
2017-12-11 13:07
Dear readers: I had a lovely plan for the blog this December, including light, frothy and festive posts about fairies, puddings, and GIN. But then the Peabody Essex Museum was forced to admi… Read More
2017-12-08 13:01
On Wednesday night the Peabody Essex Museum finally came before the Salem Historic Commission and admitted that the “bulk” of collections in their Phillips Library, consisting of… Read More
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