Museums in Strange Places

A new podcast from Hannah Hethmon, creator of We the Museum and Museums in Strange Places . Produced for the Federation of State Humanities Councils, Humanities = is a show about real individuals, organizations, and communities making a real difference through the humanities. This show is a production of the Federation of State Humanities Councils. The first three episodes are now available wherev...

I always meant to get back into doing Museum in Strange Places episodes, but producing professionally as Better Lemon Creative Audio and the pandemic got in the way. Now, I'm finally back with a brand new show for museum workers, WE THE MUSEUM. We the Museum is a podcast for museum workers who want to form a more perfect institution. Episodes will feature in-depth conversations with museum workers...

One of the many projects I've been working on through my new production company ( Better Lemon Creative Audio ) is a podcast for the Vagina Museum in London. I'm so passionate about the work this museum is doing, and I think you're going to LOVE this podcast. It's written and produced by me with research and narration by science communicator Alyssa Chafee. Guests include big names like Dr. Jen Gun...

[A pilot for a new show I developed about living in London. I'm really proud of how it turned out, but I just don't have the time to make more episodes, so it's going to live here on the Museum in Strange Places feed. I meet up with escape room creator, museum professional, and self-proclaimed mermaid hunter Sacha Coward , who takes me somewhere that will inspire me a bit and help me see the beaut...

Donald J. Trump has been active in business and media for fifty years, but his scandal-ridden presidency has overshadowed most of his history. Levi Fox's Pop-Up Atlantic City Trump Museum  is an attempt to remedy this oversight for one specific chapter of the Trump story: his four Atlantic City casinos and the impact their short tenures and bankruptcies had on the gambling capitol of the East Coas...

He’s the master of macabre, the man who created mystery fiction, the face on the socks and beer bottles of everyday Baltimoreans. He’s Edgar Allan Poe, and he belongs to Baltimore. Join me on a visit to the Poe House in Baltimore, the tiny house where his career began, to learn about Baltimore’s devotion to Poe, his tragic life, and the future of his legacy in the city where he died mysteriously....

So much of Maryland was built on the back of enslaved Africans, yet it’s easy to avoid confronting the history of slavery in Maryland’s former plantation country. Historic Sotterley is trying to change that. The plantation was built in 1703 by a man who made his money off the slave trade, and the site was witness to 165 continuous years of slavery. Today, staff and descendants at Sotterley are com...

About half of all museums in the US are in small towns in rural America. Each of these museums holds stories and objects that are worth preserving and sharing, but they don’t always have the funding and infrastructure they need to operate and innovate. That’s where Museum on Main Street comes in. This Smithsonian program brings traveling exhibits to small towns for six weeks at a time. But the exh...

What do Baltimore, Russian Jews, the third oldest synagogue in America, Eastern European Catholics, seances, and Harry Houdini have in common? You’ll find out in this episode, a visit to the Jewish Museum of Maryland, an institution that prioritizes storytelling (and is pretty good at it). Join me for a tour of the historic Lloyd Street Synagogue, a journey back in history to the heyday of the Jew...

S02/E07: Located in a waterfront 1860s oyster cannery in the Baltimore Harbor, The Baltimore Museum of Industry is trying to inspire and engage their visitors around the concept of work by telling the stories of historical workers. But in order to better fulfill this mission, the museum has to be constantly re-evaluating themselves and their assumptions about work. In this episode, I talk to staff...

The Sandy Spring Museum describes itself as “community-activated.” They want to be a secular gathering places, where people of different backgrounds can come together and build a sense of place and belonging. I visit the museum to speak with Executive Director Allison Weiss about the museum’s radically community-driven programming, the Quaker principles built into the museum’s design, and how they...

BONUS content from Episode 5, "The Lost City: Historic St. Mary’s City, Maryland."  Dr. Regina Faden and I head down to Historic St. Mary's City's Waterfront exhibit, where we board the Maryland Dove, a replica 17th century sailing ship. The ship's Boatswain, Jeremy, talks to us about what it's like working on a historic ship and why old boats are like classic cars.   Music in this episode is by ...

BONUS content from Episode 5, "The Lost City: Historic St. Mary’s City, Maryland."  A brief stop at the active dig site of Historic St. Mary's City's Archeology Field School, where Dr. Travis Parno is guiding students from St. Mary's College in a dig to investigate the site of Maryland's first State House. Dr. Parno also tells me about his ongoing research into early taverns, the powerful enslaver...

In the early 17th century, 300 English settlers traveled to the new colony of Maryland in search of new opportunities and a place where they could practice their Catholic faith in peace. They built Maryland’s first capital, St. Mary’s City, and their city thrived...until its founders fell from power in England. Soon, St. Mary’s City was abandoned and it’s wooden structures rotted. The city lay hid...

BONUS CONTENT from Episode 4, “Museum Time Machine: The Peale Center.” The Peale Center’s Nancy Proctor shows me the museum’s Ring of Fire, explains the phenomenon of skeuomorphism, and tells me why gas lighting was such a game-changing technology in Baltimore.   All the music in this episode is by Outcalls . Find more information on the museum and photos on my website,  hhethmon.com . If you enjo...

There’s a time machine in downtown Baltimore on Holliday Street. A time machine that will take you back to the origin of public collections of art, history, and science...and then zip you through the present and into the future of museums. The Peale Center , the oldest purpose-built museum space in the US, is starting its third century as a building and its third life as a museum after decades of...

Prince George’s County, Maryland is one of the wealthiest African American communities in the US, a suburban enclave of Black excellence just outside Washington, D.C. But it wasn’t always that way. At the small (but mighty) Prince George’s African American Museum and Cultural Center, the passionate young Executive Director, Maleke Glee, tells me about the history of the area, the museum’s far-reac...

Tucked among other Maryland suburbs outside Washington, D.C., the cute little town of Greenbelt has a surprisingly radical history. It was one of three “green towns” built under the New Deal Era Resettlement Administration, and it was supposed to be a new way of living, a utopia. Was it really a utopia? And how did the model hold up over time? I discover this and more during my visit to the Greenb...

The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is monument to outsider art, the creative spirit, and the search for truth. Step inside this glittering temple to intuition and inspiration to experience the museum’s marvelous “shows,” each of which comes from the singular mind of the museum’s founder and envisioner, Rebecca Alban Hoffberger. Download Transcript . This episode is sponsored...

In each season of this podcast, I explore a different country, state, or region through its museums. In Season 1, I traveled around Iceland. For season two, I decided to explore my native state of Maryland. I visited 22 of Maryland’s most interesting and unique museums, including America’s first purpose built museum, a historic synagogue, a black history wax museum, a New Deal public housing utopi...

Iceland has a lot of weird traditional foods, but nothing compares to fermented shark meat. The family at Bjarnarhöfn has been hunting and fermenting shark meat for nearly 400 years, although today they only process bycatch Greenland sharks. Many years ago, the family opened a Shark Museum at the farm to share their traditions and introduce the world to “hákarl”. In this episode, I get an inside l...

What would it look like if Indiana Jones was into volcanoes and created a museum in a small Icelandic village? The Volcano Museum in Stykkishólmur displays the art and geological specimens collected by volcanologist Haralður Sigurðsson from around the world during his many decades of exploration and research. I speak to museum manager, Filip Polách—a Czech photographer who fell in love with Icelan...

Walk into the War and Peace Museum , a small building sitting on a fjord north of Reykjavík, Iceland, and you're instantly transported into another era. Covering every wall are carefully arranged artifacts, photographs, and documents from the WWII years in Iceland. This is Guðjón Sigmundsson's personal collection, and it's full of surprises and uncovered secrets. This episode is sponsored by Locat...

Bonus! I go behind-the-scenes with Locatify 's Steinunn Anna Gunnlaugsdóttir to talk about the making of Eldheimar's location-aware audio guide app (E19: Memorial to an Eruption). We chat about how Locatify joined the Eldheimar project, the beacon technology used in Eldheimar, and their new hyper-precise ultra-wideband system for museum apps. Locatify is an Icelandic software company specializing ...

On January 23, 1973, residents of the island town Vestmannaeyjar in Iceland were woken from sleep by the sounds of a huge fissure ripping open the earth. The Eldfell volcanic eruption that followed forced everyone to evacuate the island for six months. By the time the eruption stopped, 400 homes were covered by lava and the rest of the island was covered in ash. In this episode, I hike up the Eldf...