Abby Epplett, Historian

In August 2025, I traveled to the Windsor area of Connecticut and spent three days visiting museums, stopping at historic sites, and walking in parks. On the second day of my adventure, I went to the Vintage Radio and Communications Museum of Connecticut  (VRCMC). Across all of intense museum visitation, this museum exceeded expectation more than any other. In a year that included trips to famous stops Philadelphia, Washington DC, Old Sturbridge Village, and Plimoth Patuxet, along with dozens of other venues, this was the most unique, whimsical, and satisfying stop.

Ambiguity has been widely discussed when exploring the Grey Havens through an academic lens . The name itself feels ambiguous, its color halfway between the symbolic white of goodness and black of evil appearing throughout the text. The White Towers or Emyn Beriad feel less ambiguous with their location closer to the Shire and their defining color. During the Fourth Age, Hobbits restored and repopulated the Undertowers in Westmarch even as Elves gradually abandoned the Grey Havens to migrate across the water.

On the same day I visited the Connecticut Trolley Museum and East Windsor Historical Society , I walked through Northwest Park run by the town of Windsor, CT. This 473-acre park includes a tobacco museum, a nature center, a heritage breed animal barn, public art, and twelve miles of walking trails.

Back in November, I watched and reviewed the documentary The American Revolution , which debuted on PBS and was produced by Florentine Films co-founded by Ken Burns . Having watched many of Burns’ documentaries and made short films of my own, I decided my next long video commitment was the 4 hour and 56 minute course Ken Burns Teaches Documentary Filmmaking on MasterClass . I have seen over a third of the MasterClass catalog so far, but I leave written reviews for those with a distinctly historical theme, including Doris Kearns Goodwin Teaches U.S. Presidential History and Leadership , Tracing Your Roots through Food with Michael W. Twitty , and Black History, Black Freedom, & Black Love . Like the other MasterClasses, this course was of high quality and gave advice offered nowhere else. Throughout the course, Burns walked the viewer through the steps of creating a documentary: finding and telling a story, sourcing archival materials, writing a script, using cinematic tech...

During my first day of my adventure in the Windsor, CT area, I stopped by East Windsor Historical Society to look at their collection of buildings and related outdoor artifacts. This venue was not far away from the Connecticut Trolley Museum , which I had visited in the morning, and was a great companion visit. While the society was not open during my visit, it was easy to park and look at the well-preserved space, also known as Museums on the Green. (Falmouth Historical Society on Cape Cod, which I visited back in August 2024 , similarly calls its venue Museum on the Green.)

While talking with his friends at the Green Dragon , Sam mentioned his cousin Halfast Gamgee had seen a giant tree walking through the North Moors of the Northfarthing while serving his master, Mr. Boffin, who was out hunting. This brief aside, and the exchange that followed, gives the reader an enormous amount of information about hunting practices, social hierarchy, and folk belief in the Shire, which I will unpack in this essay.

In mid-August 2025, I took a three-day trip to the Windsor, CT area to explore many museums and parks. My first stop on the trip with the Connecticut Trolley Museum (CTM) in East Windsor. The owner of the museum, the Connecticut Electric Railway Association, Inc., was founded in 1940, making it the oldest trolley preservation organization in the country. While checking off a bucket list item, I saw trolleys and fire trucks, took a ride on a restored trolley, and visited the unique gift shop.

I recently read the eBook Witch Hunt: A Traveler’s Guide to the Power and Persecution of the Witch written by Kristen J. Sollée and published in 2020 by Red Wheel / Weiser . The book was based on Sollée’s road trip to places of importance in witchcraft history with each chapter covering a different location with Europe or the USA. Sollée seamlessly blends her lived experience with detailed research, creating a narrative of magical realism, historic documentation, and modern interpretation, from scholarly books to tourist traps. Besides exploring places less familiar to the average reader, Sollée includes references to literature turned pop culture like Shakespeare’s Macbeth and well-known artworks like Michelangelo’s David and The Fall and Expulsion from Garden of Eden in the Sistine Chapel. The balance of novelty and familiarity kept me engaged through the 2.5 hour reading time. Another talent exhibit by Sollée is her ability to explain new vocabulary. From the “Introductio...

On the same day I took the lighthouse cruise around Cape Ann , I walked around Gloucester to see public art and learn the history of the maritime town. Along the way, I found carillon bells, a historic boat, beached buoys, and a silly sign.

Today, I am using my creative liberties to share a scene not appearing in the book that establishes the musical motif representing Frodo and Sam together. In my introduction to this theme, I combine the sound of the serinette with the whistling loved by hobbits along with exploring one interpretation of their relationship: that of a master and his disciple or acolyte.