Rare Objects Become "Unbound" at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum
NOTE : This exhibition ended in November 2012. Visitors to Salem, Massachusetts may go there lured by a curiosity to know more about the 1692 Witchcraft Trials but chances are good they leave with the knowledge that there is so much more to Salem than the tragic story of mass hysteria and people wrongly accused during a time when superstition and fear ruled the day. For example, they may leave knowing that Salem is home to the Peabody Essex Museum (or the PEM as it's more locally known) whose origins date to the 1799 founding of the East India Marine Society by a group of Salem-based captains and supercargoes (officers on merchant ships in charge of the commercial concerns of the voyage) making it the oldest continuously operating museum in the United States. Home to one of the major collections of Asian art in the United States, the PEM's holdings total about 1.3 million pieces including paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, textiles, architecture and decorat...