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 in the US and beyond. Explore ideas, programs, and exhibitions that inform and inspire. We the Muse...
Jan 26, 2023•3 min•Season 2Ep. 27
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 Gunter, Kate Lister, Emma Rees, Fern Riddell, and more! Search for "The Vagina Museum" wherever you get...
Mar 11, 2020•3 min•Season 1Ep. 27
[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 beauty in London’s “layers of puked-up history.” Sacha also knows some great queer history stories about ...
Nov 13, 2019•30 min•Season 1Ep. 27
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 Coast. Together, we unpack the Trump-branded duffel bags he uses to store his collection of Trump casino-...
Sep 23, 2019•25 min•Season 2Ep. 12
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. The Beatles/Poe mashup song is " The Poe-tles (Beatles/Edgar Allan Poe Mashup) " by Emuvies and can ...
Jul 23, 2019•39 min•Season 2Ep. 11
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 committed to sharing the site’s whole history and healing the legacy of trauma left by the violence of ...
Jul 01, 2019•44 min•Season 2Ep. 10
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 exhibit materials are just the catalyst for a much bigger experience, an experience that leaves these t...
Jun 18, 2019•40 min•Season 2Ep. 9
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 Jewish market on Baltimore’s East Lombard Street, and a celebration of the life of Harry Houdini, the s...
Apr 24, 2019•43 min•Season 2Ep. 8
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 staffers Beth Maloney and Auni Gelles about how an experimental interactive and a new job description are...
Feb 28, 2019•31 min•Season 2Ep. 7
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 are trying to serve a community of incredible diversity. This episode is sponsored by The Lyndhurst...
Jan 30, 2019•29 min•Season 2Ep. 6
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 Hesperus , from their album An Early American Quilt , released on the Maggie’s Music Label. Find more in...
Jan 29, 2019•5 min•Season 2Ep. 26
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 enslavers who ran them, and how they can shed light on the codification of slavery in Maryland and America. M...
Jan 28, 2019•6 min•Season 2Ep. 25
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 hidden under farm fields and forests until archeological efforts led to the formation of Historic St. M...
Jan 14, 2019•59 min•Season 2Ep. 5
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 enjoy Museums in Strange Places , please help me keep it going by leaving a review on iTunes or sharing thi...
Dec 31, 2018•8 min•Season 2Ep. 24
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 sitting vacant. But history isn’t repeating itself here. Executive Director Nancy Proctor wants it t...
Nov 27, 2018•32 min•Season 2Ep. 4
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-reaching youth programs, and his vision for a museum that’s truly community-led, inclusive, and relevant...
Nov 14, 2018•37 min•Season 2Ep. 3
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 Greenbelt Museum, housed in one of the original 1937 low-income row homes. This episode is sponsored by Th...
Nov 14, 2018•47 min•Season 2Ep. 2
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 by The Lyndhurst Group . The featured songs in this episode are by The Preschoolers . Find more info...
Nov 14, 2018•53 min•Season 2Ep. 1
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 utopia, the house where Edgar Allan Poe published his first poem, one of the earliest nursing schools in ...
Nov 06, 2018•4 min•Season 2Ep. 23
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 look at how one family continues this traditional method of de-toxifying shark meat while sharing the...
Aug 21, 2018•29 min•Season 1Ep. 22
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 Iceland—about how an Icelandic eruption may have started the French Revolution and how the museum came to ...
Aug 07, 2018•25 min•Season 1Ep. 21
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 Locatify . Locatify is an Icelandic software company specializing in mobile apps that use location techno...
Jul 25, 2018•27 min•Season 1Ep. 20
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 in mobile apps that use location technologies for Immersive audio guides, treasure hunt games, Augme...
Jul 11, 2018•8 min•Season 1Ep. 20
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 Eldfell volcano and visit Eldheimar , a state-of-the-art museum of remembrance built 40 years after the ...
Jul 03, 2018•30 min•Season 1Ep. 19
No matter what happens on the Westman Islands off Iceland's south coast–invading pirates, mass Mormon exoduses, months-long volcanic eruptions, mysterious diseases, perilous fishing waters–the island people, Eyjamenn, always come back to rebuild and repopulate. That's what makes their home island, Heimaey, so unique. In this episode, I visit the local history museum, Sagnheimar , to hear the stories that define them. Music in this episode is by Sume . This episode is sponsored by Locatify . Loca...
Jun 19, 2018•33 min•Season 1Ep. 18
After visiting the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Episode 16 , I still didn't get what all the hype was about. So, I sat down with anthropology professor (and fellow Fulbright grantee) John Bodinger de Uriarte to talk about how the museum plays with our ideas of authority and reality, why gift shops in Reykjavík are "museums of imagined Icelandicness," and more. The song in this episode is Þjráhyggja by JóiPé x Króli. _______ Museums in Strange Places is a podcast for people who love museums,...
Jun 05, 2018•23 min•Season 1Ep. 17
I didn't really want to visit the Icelandic Phallological Museum, so to make it more fun, I invited along my Icelandic museum friend, Sig. Join us as we marvel at massive whale phalluses, question the motivation of human donors to the museum, and try to figure out why everyone loves this weird little museum in Reykjavík so much. (This episode contains many PG-rated mentions of penises, but only alludes to sexual acts.) Songs in this episode are B.O.B.A. and Þjráhyggja by JóiPé x Króli. _______ M...
May 29, 2018•28 min•Season 1Ep. 16
For this episode, I'm back in Akureyri to visit The Industry Museum , a small museum formed from the enormous personal collection of one couple, who wanted to document the history of the many successful industries based in the "Capital of North Iceland" in the mid-20th Century. Deputy Director Jóna and I talk about nostalgia and relevance, and she shows me some of her favorite exhibits, including the intact workbench of the local coffin-maker. Music in this episode is by the KK Band . _______ Mu...
Apr 10, 2018•23 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Tucked away in a narrow valley just below the town of Akureyri in North Iceland, Sverrir Hermansson's Museum of Sundry Objects is one eccentric man's spectacular collection of ordinary things. In this episode, I visit this beautiful little museum, get to know Sverrir, and have an experience that changes the way I think about museums. Music in this episode is by the Bagdad Brothers . _______ Museums in Strange Places is a podcast for people who love museums, stories, culture, and exploring the wo...
Mar 27, 2018•28 min•Season 1Ep. 14
In this special episode about women's history in Iceland, I visit the Women's History Archive at the National and University Library of Iceland to speak to Rakel Adolphsdóttir about collecting women's history in Iceland and hunting for the women hidden in Iceland's archival collection. I also chat with the researchers behind the Hinsegin Huldkonur project who are trying to uncover the queer women in Icelandic sources and create a database of queer women's history. Music in this episode is by Bry...
Mar 14, 2018•44 min•Season 1Ep. 13
