The New York State Museum, New York State Archives, and the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, in collaboration with the Hudson River Valley Institute at Marist College and the Cooperstown Graduate Program at SUNY Oneonta, have announced a New York State History Conference for June 2024.
It will be five years since a general conference on New York State history has taken place.
According to organizers, the goal of the conference is “to provide an inclusive and engaging forum in which historians, educators, museum professionals, archivists, and librarians can share research and resources on the practice, research, preservation, and teaching of New York State history.”
An annual Conference on New York State History was a long-standing and popular forum for those interested in history in the state. It struggled after being all but abandoned by the State Museum and left to the now defunct New York State Historical Association. The last stand alone Conference on New York State History was held in 2015.
Some participants and organizers moved their conference participation to Researching New York the following year, an annual conference hosted by the State University at Albany’s History Department graduate students. That conference hasn’t occurred since 2019.
The latest effort is scheduled for June 20-21, 2024 at the Cultural Education Center, 222 Madison Avenue, in Albany (the building which houses the State Museum, Archives, and Library). Organizers are referring to the conference as “the first annual” apparently anticipating re-instituting the conference tradition.
A Call for Proposals is expected to be announced this summer and will be posted on the New York Almanack.
Map of New York State with counties as of 1788 provided.
This is an encouraging development, John. Thank you for the heads up.
Thank you for making this happen!
Yay! I hope this happens. I look forward to the call for papers and potential theme for 2024.
The Conference on New York State History has a history of its own. People began meeting informally in the 1890s and the New York State Historical Association was an outgrowth of the Conference of 1899 at Lake George. For many years the annual Conference and the annual meeting of NYSHA coincided, but by the 1950s the annual meeting of NYSHA no longer contained much historical content and the “College Conference” first met as an independent group in Cooperstown in 1957. The College Conference met annually, with the Office of State History (defunct in 1977) as lead sponsor. The last College Conference was held at Syracuse University in 1978.
The Conference began a new series in April of 1980 at SUNY Binghamton. Stefan Bielinski of the NYS Museum coordinated the Conference through 2002, when the Conference continued with Field Horne coordinating. Mr. Horne secured partnerships with the former NYSHA, The Archives Partnership Trust, and Humanities New York (was New York Humanities Council), with NYSHA taking the lead in 2012. After the 2012 Conference at Niagara University, NYSHA attempted to coordinate the Conference but this failed by 2016, when a joint Researching New York – Conference on NYS History meeting was held at the University at Albany (SUNY Albany).