A major expansion in Salem, Massachusetts. (Current and Coming).

The history of the venerable Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is as fascinating as the diverse and extraordinary collections housed within its many walls. However, its mergers with other institutions over the course of more than two hundred years have not been without consequences. Many objects among its holdings of more than two million works of art have never been exhibited due to a shortage of space, and there were entire categories of the collections that were not represented at all in the galleries allocated to the permanent collection. The recent opening of a 111,000square-foot wing ameliorates this problem.

The museum today represents an amalgamation of several organizations founded in this New England coastal town in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was a time when curiosities made in obscure and remote locations around the world were highly valued. Affluent Salem merchants and adventuresome ship's captains and their officers collected natural rarities and sophisticated works of art from ports of call in Asia, Africa, and the islands in the Pacific Ocean.

The origin of the museum was the East India Marine Society, which was founded in 1799 by shipmasters and supercargoes who had collectively amassed forty-three hundred objects made in China, Japan, India, Africa, and Oceania. In 1821 the Essex Historical Society was established in Salem, and in 1848 it merged with the Essex County Natural History Society, which had been founded twelve years earlier. The Essex institute, as the organization came to be known, had the first period rooms in the United States.

The Peabody Academy of Science succeeded the languishing East India Marine Society during economic hard times later in the nineteenth century, and took over the natural history collections of the Essex Institute. The academy was later ...