RESOURCES


The New Bedford Whaling Museum of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society (founded 1903) houses a spectacular, world-class collection of paintings, drawings, prints, scrimshaw, decorative arts, ethnology, tools, whaling gear, ship models, books, manuscripts, documents, photographs, personal memorabilia, and other materials of international scope and profound significance, spanning the seven seas and all seven continents over a period of more than seven centuries, numbering ±175,000 objects. It is the flagship partner of the National Park Service in the newly-created New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park. The Kendall Institute was established in 2001 on the occasion of the Museum’s merger with the Kendall Whaling Museum (founded 1955 around a family collection established in 1899). The Institute is the research, library, archival, and publications division of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and also houses the Herman Melville Society archive. The Internship Program was founded at the Kendall Whaling Museum in 1982 and now continues on an expanded basis in New Bedford: it has a unusually distinguished record of training students and new professionals from around the world, many of whom now hold positions of responsibility in museums across America and abroad.

Principal collections include American paintings and drawings (18th-20th Centuries); Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings, prints, and decorative arts (16th-18th C.); British and Continental whaling art (17th-20th C.); New England regional decorative arts (18th-20th C.); Native American and Pacific Basin tribal art and ethnology (prehistory-20th C.); Japanese whaling art (18th-20th C.); and modern whaling (20th C.). It is by far the world’s largest and most international whaling museum and among the world’s greatest maritime museums; the collections of whaling paintings, prints, scrimshaw, manuscripts, and American, Dutch, British, and Japanese whaling pictures are the world’s largest and most comprehensive. Library, manuscript, and archival holdings are very extensive (±30,000 printed titles, ±3,000 manuscript volumes, ±200 feet of unbound manuscripts, ±50,000 historic photographs), forming the basis for advanced research in numerous disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, and the biological, environmental, and earth sciences.