Abby Epplett, Historian

While planning day trips to the Essex National Heritage Area, I stumbled upon The Beacons Are Lit: The Lighthouse Keepers of Bakers Island . I was intrigued by the bizarre juxtaposition of a late 18 th century lighthouse in Salem, MA and a line from Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King , so I had to further investigate this short online exhibit. The exhibit begins with a quick review on the history and importance of lighthouses with a special focus on the Pharos of Alexandria in Ancient Greece. Then the exhibit dives right into the importance of the lighthouse on Bakers Island. The current lighthouse is “Pa”, as it was the “husband” of “Ma”, a slightly older and shorter lighthouse next door that was torn down in 1926. Lighthouses have been on the island since 1798, and a keeper was needed to run them. This work was incredibly risky, as third keeper Nathaniel Ward and his assistant Marshall (with no clarity in the exhibit over whether this was a first name or last name...

While the physical exhibition currently touring the country through the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) will not reach the northeast until late 2025 and early 2026, the online equivalent of The Bias Inside Us can be viewed at any time from anywhere in the world. This succinct and informative conversation piece on understanding bias comes with an educators toolkit and links to research used when created the exhibit. The experience includes a brief introduction, a six-part online exhibition, and a thorough “About” section to learn highlighting the many contributing voices. Introduction A clever scrolling digital art piece at the start of the introduction gave the definition of bias as used in the exhibition along with the increasingly familiar quote, “We are all members of the same race… the human race.” Unfortunately, because I usually set my browser font size to “large” due to visual impairment, the bottom of each card in the section overv...

Last year during Day 2 of Smithsonian National Education Summit 2023 , I learned about Becoming US , a high school level educational resource for teaching about immigration and migration. Based on the website of the National Museum of American History (NMAH) , this resource includes classroom guides, a glossary, news articles, videos, and activities for students in 8 th through 11 th grade. Although I have not been in that demographic for over ten years, I enjoyed learning about these topics from multiple perspectives. About This section explained that the online project began in 2014 as part of a collection of in-person, print, and virtual productions. The exhibit Many Voices, One Nation and accompanying book Many Voices, One Nation: Material Culture Reflections on Race and Migration in the United States provided much of the material found in the lessons. Resources Preparing to Teach NMAH provides a forty-four page guide made in collaboration with Teachi...

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, hosts an interactive online exhibit called Closer to Johannes Vermeer , which has been on my digital bucket list for several months. The Dutch phone, internet, and cable provider KPN gave additional funding for the exhibit. The total completion time for me was about three hours.

“A History of Worcester in 10 Maps” was created in part of the Worcester Tercentennial, a celebration of the city’s 300 th anniversary . As noted in the Storymap , a popular interactive map viewer powered by ArcGIS , Worcester was founded in 1722 by English colonists and grew to become the second largest city in New England, after Boston. The visual history begins with an early woodcut map of New England from 1677, before the founding of the town, and ends with the current Geographic Information System (GIS) map created by the City of Worcester . Each segment contains a link back to the original source of the map. The sources are a fantastic collection of digital resources for Massachusetts artifacts and include: Massachusetts Historical Society Archives of the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts CURIOSity Digital Collections at the Harvard Library Digital Commonwealth ...