Selected Sites Valuable for Studying New England Visual Culture

Destination Salem
Destination Salem is a complete access guide to visiting Salem. It includes recent local happenings as well as dates for upcoming city events. Destination Salem links to every attraction from the Peabody Essex Museum to the fascinating Salem Trolley tours. Exploring this web site will take you through a virtual tour through Salem's historic attractions and accommodations.

Salem in History

Northeast Massachusett's Digital Library:  a project to enhance access to an ever-growing digital collection of items, located in or items related to northeast Massachusetts. Digital image collections from a variety of local libraries and historical societies.

Information about the exhibition Words of Thunder: Abolitionists, Activists, Americans and upcoming colloaborations by the Museum of Afro-American History and the Boston Public Library. (Website is not very extensive)

The Old Sturbridge Village History Learning Laboratory is a comprehensive selection of resources about early New England Life. Includes a selection of artifacts from the collection, organized by use or material, transcriptions of primary documents including "The Boston Riot," Hampshire Gazette (28 October 28 1835). Research papers and background articles written by staff at Old Sturbridge Village, a Graphics Database: A significant collection of period graphics images and manuscripts that illuminate early American history and everyday life and curriculum plans.

Historic Salem Incorporated
Historic Salem Incorporated is designed for those interested in taking an in-depth look at Salem's historical sites. You can navigate through architectural links and get involved with current preservation issues. The Historic Salem Incorporated website contains their newsletter. Learn about the people, events and news that make Salem the landmark city of Massachusetts.

Salem Massachusetts Architecture
This is an excellent guide to Salem architecture of the colonial, New Republic, and antebellum eras. Visit this web site and browse through all of Salem's historic districts such as McIntire, Derby, Lafayette, and Washington Square. Visit each home or building and learn about its history.

Peabody Essex Museum
As one of the largest museums on the East Coast, the Peabody Essex Museum is home to a large collection of art and culture stemming from the early China trade and East India trading company, as well as art reflecting New England's culture.

North of Boston Convention and Visitor's Bureau
North of Boston Convention and Visitor's Bureau gives the visitor an in-depth look into the sites, sounds, and experiences of all four seasons on the North Shore. North of Boston's slogan is "There's a Story in Every Mile." This site may be useful to institute participants planning day trips. It provides useful information about historical homes and properties, world-renowned art colonies, music, theater and much more.

Essex Heritage Commission
This is an excellent, comprehensive guide to everything on the North Shore. It includes historic properties and museums, as well as beaches and accommodations. It has web links to all historic houses and museums in the region and provides driving directions to all. Highly recommended.

The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities
The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities is just the place you have been looking for if you love antiques, historic homes, and landscapes. SPNEA preserves and offers tours of over thirty historic properties all over New England. From house tours, programs, lectures and special events, to preservation and an archive of more than one million images, SPNEA has something to offer everyone who wants to discover New England's heritage.

The House of Seven Gables
The House of Seven Gables, also known as the Turner House, was built in 1668, and provided the setting for Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel of the same name. The House of Seven Gables, along with the Hawthorne Birthplace, which is also located on the property, constitutes its own national historic district on The National Register of Historic Places.

Danvers Historical Society
The Danvers Historical Society was formed in 1889 "to discover, collect, preserve and exhibit objects which illustrate local history, but particularly the history and development of the Town of Danvers." Historic properties owned and managed by the Society are Putnam House (1648), Page House (1754), and Glen Magna Farms (1812/1893). The Society's collection is housed at Tapley Memorial Hall and represents a large variety of cultural and decorative arts objects. In 1987 the Society became stewards of the Endicott Burying Ground.

Danvers Historical Preservation
Known as Salem Village in the 17th century, there are still over a dozen houses in Danvers dating from that era. Becoming independent from Salem in 1752, Danvers witnessed the development of various neighborhood villages, each having its era of prominence, and possessing a unique character. Through this website, the Danvers Historical Preservation Commission outlines the important colonial history of Salem Village from the 17th century up through the 19th century.

The Rebecca Nurse Homestead
The Rebecca Nurse Homestead website provides information about visiting this 17th century property associated with the Salem Village witchcraft trials of 1692 and the era of the American Revolution. The Homestead is owned and operated by the Danvers Alarm List Company, Inc., a non-profit, educational, 18th century reenactment group.

Beverly Historical Society and Museum
The Beverly Historical Society and Museum preserves and interprets Beverly's social, artistic and cultural history. It does this by maintaining historic properties and collecting, exhibiting, and conserving artifacts and archival materials associated with Beverly. The Beverly Historical Society makes available to researchers library collections, and initiates and works with special interest groups within the society in order to further specific collections, properties, and interests.

The Wenham Museum
The Wenham Museum features the circa 1690 Claflin-Richards House with three centuries of architecture, furnishings and artifacts, an extensive doll and toy collection, a model train room with six operating layouts of twelve trains in various gauges, a costume and textile gallery, a children's interactive Play and Learn Room and special changing exhibit galleries that bring history and culture to life. Accessible, interactive exhibits are designed to engage both adults and children, providing multi-generational education and entertainment.

Boston Athenaeum
The Boston Athenaeum, founded in 1807, is one of the oldest and most distinguished independent libraries in the United States. For nearly half a century the Athenaeum was the unchallenged center of intellectual life in Boston, and by 1851 had become one of the five largest libraries in the United States. Today its collections comprise over half a million volumes, with particular strengths in Boston history, New England state and local history, biography, English and American literature, and the fine and decorative arts.

New England Historic Genealogical Society
The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) is the oldest genealogical society in the country. If you have New England ancestors, or are interested in genealogical research of any kind, you will find that NEHGS is an important resource for helping you achieve your research goals. Explore our website and discover the many benefits available to you.

Massachusetts Historical Society
For more than two centuries the Massachusetts Historical Society has been collecting and preserving materials relating to the history of the Commonwealth and the nation. The holdings of the Massachusetts Historical Society encompass millions of rare and unique documents and artifacts vital to the study of the colonial period in New England.

Plimoth Plantation
Plimoth Plantation's website invites you to browse through "Living Breathing History" of colonial New England life. In addition, this website allows you to explore the plantation's historical background. It gives you links to important aspects such as "The English colonists," "Myth and reality," "The Wampanoag," and "Thanksgiving." This is a very informational site for 17th century history.

Plymouth Colony Archive Project
This site presents a collection of fully searchable texts, including: court records, colony laws, seventeenth century journals and memoirs, probate inventories, wills, town plans, maps, and fort plans; research and seminar analyses of numerous topics; biographical profiles of selected colonists; and architectural, archaeological and material culture studies. Among other works, published here for the first time are a Glossary and Notes on Plymouth Colony, Seventeenth Century Timber Framing, and Vernacular House Forms in Seventeenth Century Plymouth Colony: An Analysis of Evidence from the Plymouth Colony Room-by-Room Probate Inventories 1633-1685, by Patricia Scott Deetz and James Deetz. The site also presents studies focusing on broader regional and temporal scales, including Jim Deetz's analysis of changes over time in Anglo-American gravestone styles in New England, and discussion of the Parting Ways site and archaeological evidence found there of architectural forms and mortuary practices consistent with elements of African-American heritage. Excerpts from The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love & Death in Plymouth Colony, by Jim and Trish Deetz, provide analysis of the history and the myths created about the Plymouth colonists.

Mystic Seaport
Mystic Seaport's website provides a variety of educational information about their collections. It also helps plan a visit to the site (located on the Connecticut shore).

Old Sturbridge Village
Old Sturbridge Village's purpose is to provide modern Americans with a deepened understanding of their own times through a personal encounter with the New England past. The Village is a nonprofit educational institution. Its collections, exhibits, and programs present the story of everyday life in a small New England town during the years 1790 to 1840. Although the most of the collections are later, the library has many useful sources for colonial history and material culture.

Old Burial Hill, Marblehead
Old Burial Hill is one of the most picturesque graveyards in New England. It affords a view of Old Marblehead, the harbor, and the sea. Established in 1638 at the site of Marblehead's first meetinghouse, it's the burial site of an estimated 600 Revolutionary soldiers, although only a few of those graves are marked. The graveyard has many well-preserved headstones, some dating back to the seventeenth century. Their carvings exemplify artistic and religious expression of the Puritan period, and their epitaphs reflect the times of these settlers, sea captains, fishermen, wives and children. This web site provides a virtual tour of the site, or allows access to specific gravestones.

Grave Matter
Grave Matter is a collection of photographs and historical information on colonial cemeteries and gravestones of New England in southern Maine, southern New Hampshire and northeast Massachusetts. Within these pages are doctors, merchants, Revolutionary Patriots and Loyalists, British soldiers, judges, lawyers, sea captains, pirates and privateers, governors, slaves, military officers and veterans, Civil War generals, clergy, and in most cases all that is left is their headstone and the impression they made on history during their time.

Boston University's Library
Boston University allows students, faculty, staff, as well as outside guests, to use their Virtual Catalog to simultaneously search the catalogs of the libraries in the Boston Library Consortium, view combined search results from these catalogs, and place requests for books. Visitors may use library materials in the library.

Boston Public Library
Established in 1848, the Boston Public Library was the first publicly supported municipal library in America, the first public library to lend a book, the first to have a branch library and the first to have a children's room. Today, the Boston Public Library boasts 27 neighborhood branches, free Internet access, two unique restaurants, an award-winning website and an online store featuring reproductions of the Boston Public Library's priceless photographs and artwork.

Harvard University's Library
Consult "Conducting Research" on this site to find subject guides and links to other valuable information for doing library research. This web site is an online gateway to the extraordinary library resources of Harvard University and serves as an important research. The site also provides practical information on each of the more than 90 libraries that form the Harvard system. From here link to the Houghton Library, Harvard's Rare Book Library, which allows guest researchers without Harvard affiliation.

American Antiquarian Society
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) is an independent research library founded in 1814 in Worcester, Massachusetts. The library's collections document the life of America's people from the colonial era through the Civil War and Reconstruction. It is one of the country's best collections of books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, broadsides, manuscripts, music, graphic arts, and local histories. The on-line catalogue of all publications and engraving in North America before 1820 is one of the essential research tools of the field.

Worcester Art Museum
This is an overall guide to the museum, but the section on Early American Painting is especially strong. The Worcester Art Museum has one of the strongest collections of American colonial painting in the United States. Many of the images can be found on this site, along with extensive bibliographies and summaries of scholarship. This is a model site, highly recommended.

Salem Maritime
Salem Maritime, was the first National Historic Site in the National Park System, was established to preserve and interpret the maritime history of New England and the United States. The Site consists of about nine acres of land and twelve historic structures along the waterfront in Salem, Massachusetts, as well as a Visitor Center in downtown Salem. The Site documents the development of the Atlantic triangular trade during the colonial period, the role of privateering during the Revolutionary War, and the international maritime trade, especially with the Far East, which established American economic independence after the Revolution. The Site is also the focal point of the Essex National Heritage Area, designated in 1996, which links thousands of historic places in Essex County around three primary historic themes: colonial settlement, maritime trade, and early industrialization in the textile and shoe industries.

Note: These web reviews are based on how each site describes itself, along with our viewing of them.