Visitors have to go through security before entering the Toronto Police Museum on the ground floor of the force’s headquarters on College Street. The dimly-lit museum is a series of three exhibition galleries connected by snaking slopes. Admission is free. The first gallery exhibits police uniform, badges, and standard issue Read more
Just down the street from the Royal Ontario Museum and the Gardiner Museum, the Bata Shoe Museum is one of of the few free museums on Sundays in Toronto. Its story is basically the history of shoes and how different periods of western history show through European fashion. The exhibitions Read more
It’s a quirky Dallas museum with three focal points: Jewish history, the Holocaust and biblical arts. Anyone with a firm grasp of Christian history should have an easy time following along. There are plenty of ancient oil lamps, ancient maps and ancient ceramics. The giant 10-meter mural of the resurrection Read more
The telephone was conceived and invented in this house in Brantford, Ontario. Alexander Graham Bell lived here with his parents after they moved over from Edinburgh. Bell had a handwritten note detailing where he was during each stage of development to allay any future concerns about where the telephone was Read more
The largest maritime museum on the Great Lakes isn’t the museum in Toledo, it’s in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Valley Camp is a 550-foot long Great Lakes freighter. Although modern ships of the Great Lakes are twice as long, this was one of the largest of its time when it Read more
The River of History Museum in the Michigan side of Sault Ste. Marie is a history museum on the St. Mary’s River. It shows how Natives lived before European arrival and their interactions with Europeans in the centuries that followed. Its interpretation of the violent history between the US and Read more
This small city in Ontario has a surprisingly large three-story museum. There’s an exhibition on the contributions people in the region have made to war efforts, but I didn’t get to see it because it was being rearranged. Upstairs on the second floor, there’s a gallery on the history of Read more
Located right across the street from the Kingston Penitentiary, Correctional Service Canada’s museum is housed inside Cedarwood, the former house of the prison warden. Entry is free. The lower level has exhibits on early forms of punishment, basically torture, for prisoners until 1969. Water boarding, locking inside a coffin, and Read more
Sharing the grounds with the Kingston General Hospital, the Museum of Health Care has the same long history as the 1830s hospital. It is the largest hospital between Toronto and Ottawa and only hospital in Canada to still be in its original building. The museum building used to be dormitories Read more
The Acadian Museum in Moncton is run by the University of Moncton. It has to be visited with forts Beauséjour and Lawrence to understand the context of the conflict between Acadian, the French, the British, and indigenous Mi’kmaq people in the mid-18th century. The experience is largely dependent on reading Read more