This week in North Philly Note, Donna Seger and Brad Austin, coeditors of Salem’s Centuries, write about the history of a city that should be known for much more than just witches. If one loo…

Provocative title, yes? It's not mine. A very different presentation for me today: a very short post, with no pictures and very little analysis on my part. Basically I just want to offer you a link, to the Minority Report of the two historians appointed to the City Seal Task Force, whose contributions to the Official Report were so butchered and detached from documentation that they felt compelled to compose their own report and submit it to the Salem City Council for its review and consideration of an alteration to Salem's official city seal since 1839.

Yesterday I received three copies of Salem's Centuries. New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City, and Tuesday is publication day, so I thought I'd provide an introductory post. The crucible of this book is definitely this blog, so I want to thank all of its followers, readers, and commenters: I truly am grateful for your support and inspiration!

I'm still working on the fall version of my 2025 reading list even as the year draws to a close. I certainly won't finish it by the end of the year, but I have a LONG break ahead of me as I have a sabbatical for the spring semester! Lots of great books coming out next year (including my own) so I better get going.

Everyone has their favorite Christmas movies, and most of mine are classics from the mid-twentieth century: there is the Barbara Stanwyck double feature of Christmas in Connecticut and Remember the Night followed by the Bing Crosby double feature of Holiday Inn and White Christmas and then I turn to Holiday Affair and The Bishop's Wife. Very close to Christmas, I put on variations of…

I was researching the enforcement of the famous (or infamous) 1659 Massachusetts statutory "ban" on Christmas in the records of the Essex County quarterly courts the other day and soon realized that no one got fined for "keeping Christmas" but rather for excessive "tippling" on Christmas. I think if you kept Christmas quietly at home you were fine, but if you or your guests became "distempered with drink" you were not.

Christmas in Salem, a holiday house tour held hosted every year by Historic Salem, Inc. as its largest fundraiser, has always been one of my favorite events. It represents every thing I love about Salem: architecture, creativity, community, preservation, walkability, pride of place. It's the light at the end of the long dark Halloween tunnel. I never miss it, and this year I couldn't miss it, as our house was on the tour, so it came to me!

One of the chapters I wrote for the forthcoming (on January 6!) Salem's Centuries was on the Colonial Revival, and in it I  explored Salem's experience of that cultural movement as well as Salem's influence in that cultural movement. I am no art historian, so my purview is very broad, and more focused on popular distillations of "Salem style" than original creations. 

I really didn't want to publish any more about the Salem City Seal saga here, but the closing meeting of the Task Force which has recommended its replacement was concerning in so many ways that I simply had to write about it (it was keeping me up at night). For those that haven't followed this issue and are (really) interested, previous posts are…

I decided to celebrate the debut of Ken Burns' new series on the American Revolution by getting out two old books which I always enjoy browsing through, and which I now realize were quite foundational in how I look (and I do mean look) at American history in particular and history in general. The two books are The Pictorial History of the American Revolution…

I am very excited about The Testament of Ann Lee, the new film about the Shaker founder, because its sounds like quite the experience and I am descended from a Shaker family. I know that sounds like an odd thing to say, because one of the most conspicuous characteristics of the Shakers is their celibacy, but my great great great grandfather James Valentine Calver sold off all his possessions and left his (rather large, I've seen it) home in Diss, England and traveled to America with his wife Susan and nine children, Ellen, Maria, Henry, James Jr., Thomas, William, twins Mariah and Jane, and Amelia, to take up residence near the Shaker community in New Lebanon, New York (generally called Mount Lebanon) in 1849.

Salem is not particularly known for its folk art, I think. The standard for craftsmanship during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century was so high, and production so prolific, that the curatorial and collecting emphasis always seems to be on the best and the brightest of the decorative arts rather than the more idiosyncratic. But I'm always looking for interesting examples of folk art, and every once in a while I do a round-up of samplers, silhouettes and signs.

You hear my title phrase all the time in Salem now, with increasing frequency. It's a way to acknowledge the fact that residents of Salem have to (or want to): go to work, drive to their appointments, take their kids to school, walk along the sidewalk or sit on their front stoops in the prolonged Halloween season of September and October (and a bit of November, and.......) when a million people shuffle around our very small city taking pictures of each other.

I've engaged in lots of different history here: a lot of public, some world, American and European, but above all, local. I'm always looking for new ways to delve into and present local history. I follow the sources, I chase down new perspectives and approaches whenever I catch a trail, and because I'm operating in a digital world, I always look for striking visuals.

The Historic New England season is closing this Columbus/Indigenous People's Day weekend and as I am up in York Harbor, I went to visit one of HNE's oldest houses (both in terms of sheer vintage and time under its stewardship): the Jackson House in Portsmouth, built circa 1664. This is an extraordinary house: I'm sorry to be posting at this time when you won't be able to visit it until next June, because I'd really like to urge everyone reading to go.

This post is about the work of a venerable but new-to-me graphic designer, Seymour Chwast, but before I get to him I have to explain how I got to him. If you have been reading the blog over the past year or so, you might have perceived that I have become mildly obsessed with two images associated with Salem: the official Salem City Seal with its Sumatran trader, now likely on its way out after 180 years or so, and more recently a cartoon cat mascot chosen by the Mayor of Salem and the Salem 400+ Committee to represent our city's "unique identity" for our upcoming Quadricentennial.

I had some obligations here in Salem so could not leave the Witch City for the weekend, but I did spend yesterday driving around a little part of our county stopping in at open houses for the annual Essex Heritage Trails and Sails event series, which features an array of heritage, cultural and nature events over three weekends every September.

I had yet another "symbol trauma" (I have no other way to refer to it) on Friday when people starting sending me images of little anime cats with notes indicating that this was the new official mascot for Salem's 400th commemoration, Salem 400+. Was this a joke? Apparently not. Here's the press release text and the cat (in front of 1910 City Hall just to emphasize his/her official status).

I wrote the chapter on Salem's Colonial Revival movement in our forthcoming book Salem's Centuries, an effort that I think was pretty ballsy given that I am neither an American historican or an art/architectural historian. You can be sure that I had both types of experts read it before submission and it has been peer-reviewed several times before publication! I felt confident because I took a biographical and cultural history approach, utilizing the work and lives of Salem exemplars Frank Cousins, Mary Harrod Northend, George Francis Dow, and Caroline Emmerton.