Every first and third Monday at three in the afternoon, the Salem Historical Society opens the doors of its museum at 310 Main Street and lets whoever wanders in sit down in the air conditioning for a movie. No tickets, no reservations, no membership card required. The Flashback Film Fest is a collaboration between the Historical Society and Salem Community Television, and its screenings lean on historical footage with a local accent — past programs have covered Salem in the Revolutionary War, the history of Canobie Lake Park, and New England's extreme weather. On October 5, 2026, the subject is a beverage.
Specifically, it is Moxie, the caramel-colored, gentian-root-bittered soda that New Englanders have either loved or recoiled from for well over a century. The program promises to show how Moxie carved out a small but memorable place on the World War II home front, when spirited advertising and patriotic promotions tied the brand to the war effort and turned an everyday product into a small piece of American culture.
That a soft drink would bother with wartime patriotism is less odd than it sounds. Moxie had been selling itself as something more than refreshment almost from the beginning. It was created around 1876 by Augustin Thompson as a patent medicine called "Moxie Nerve Food," and it was produced in Lowell, Massachusetts. The name came to mean nerve itself — the word "moxie" entered American slang as a term for energy, pep, and the courage to face difficulty, a linguistic afterlife that outlasted the medicine-show origins. The drink is flavored with gentian root extract, an extremely bitter substance long used in herbal medicine, which is the reason first-timers tend to make a face and longtime devotees tend to shrug at them.
Moxie is among the first mass-produced soft drinks in the United States. Its regional grip is strong enough that Maine designated it the official state soft drink on May 10, 2005. It is now owned by the Coca-Cola Company.
When the war came, Moxie did what a lot of American brands did: it wrapped itself in the flag. Wartime advertising across the country was saturated with calls to buy war bonds, conserve resources, and support the troops, and Moxie joined in with promotions aimed at the home front. The details of exactly which campaigns the Salem program will highlight are not spelled out in the event listing, which is a contributed community post on Patch and appears to be the only public notice of the screening. The Historical Society's own channels did not independently confirm the October date at the time of writing, and no admission price is stated. The town's news page describing the film series, however, is explicit that these screenings are free and open — "no sign-ups, no cost, just walk in and enjoy" — and that they run on the first and third Monday of the month at 3 p.m. at the museum.
The Salem Historical Society itself is a small volunteer operation with an outsized mandate. It is a nonprofit governed by a board elected by its roughly eighty members, with about a dozen active volunteers, and it serves as custodian of four historic buildings, a burying ground, and a garden in town. Its museum on Main Street is the kind of place where local history gets kept alive less by grandeur than by persistence — by people who show up on a Monday afternoon to watch a film about a soda.
That is roughly the appeal. Moxie is a genuinely strange artifact: a patent medicine that became a soft drink, a bitter drink that became a byword for grit, a regional product that a global conglomerate keeps making anyway. Its wartime chapter is a reminder that the home front was not only victory gardens and ration books but also the ordinary commerce of everyday life, with brands jostling to be the ones that stood with the country. For an hour on an October afternoon in Salem, that history gets an air-conditioned room and an audience.
Anyone interested can simply walk into 310 Main Street at 3 p.m. on October 5. Given the series' format, expect archival footage and a local lens rather than a lecture. Given the subject, expect at least one person in the room to have strong opinions about the taste.