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Editorial Staff

Amazon’s 10 Best Selling New York History Books

August 27, 2008 by Editorial Staff 2 Comments

Stealing an idea from the Civil War blog TOCWOC, I thought I’d periodically post the ten best-selling books about New York history from Amazon. I took the liberty to separate the wheat from the chaff.

1. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York

2. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York

3. Tom Buk-Swienty, The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America

4. Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in 18th Century Manhattan

5. Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

6. John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century

7. Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

8. David McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

9. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865

10. Thurston Moore and Byron Coley, No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980

Filed Under: Books

Call For Papers: When The French Were Here

August 26, 2008 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

As part of the quadricentennial of Samuel de Champlain’s exploration of Lake Champlain, Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont is hosting an international academic symposium on July 2-5, 2009. Scholars from the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences are invited to participate.

The theme, “When the French Were Here,” invites the broadest possible consideration of Samuel de Champlain’s achievements, his life, and of his world as a cultural, social and ideological context. [Read more…] about Call For Papers: When The French Were Here

Filed Under: History Tagged With: 400th, Calls for Papers, Champlain College, French And Indian War, Lake Champlain, Samuel de Champlain, Vermont

This Week’s Top New York History News

August 22, 2008 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

  • » Locked Albany HS Room’s Treasures Revealed
  • » Time Running Short For 400-Yr Party
  • » A Call to Preserve Admirals Row
  • » Lawyer Plans Attack on Gender Studies
  • » Debate Over The Future of The Erie Canal
  • » In Some Districts, 100 Percent Pass Regents
  • » Historic Sagamore to Be Sold

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: nyhistorywire

Tammis Groft and Museum and History Advocacy

August 22, 2008 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

One of New York’s museum leading lights, Tammis Groft, was recently mentioned over at Suzanne Fischer’s Public Historian blog in a post calling for more blogging about museum and history advocacy:

Among AAM’s projects is museum advocacy on a national level. Recently, they sent Tammis K. Groft, deputy director of collections and exhibits at the Albany Institute of History and Art [above], to Washington as a “citizen-lobbyist” to speak to a committee about the importance of NEH Preservation and Access Grants. She wrote a few blog posts on the subject on the AAM’s advocacy blog. PAG grants are a major way museums of all sizes fund collections stewardship projects, and the funding for the program is slated to be cut by 50% next year. Contact your elected officials to advocate for NEH conservation programs!

The Humanities Advocacy Network is also a great resource for humanities advocacy, including preservation and history programs. You can sign up to get action alerts and email your representatives from the page.

I’d love to see more blogging from AAM or other organizations on museum and history advocacy issues. The wrangling over appropriations can be very opaque, and a human voice really helps to clarify issues and make advocacy work seem much more possible for small museum professionals and those without much lobbying practice. (My occasional posts about Minnesota cultural legislation don’t cut it.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Albany Institute For History and Art, Museums-Archives-Historic Sites

Edgar Allan Poe in New York City

August 21, 2008 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The blog Ephemeral New York is taking note of the Edgar Allan Poe house museum in The Bronx, which is closing in the spring for year long renovations:

“In 1846, Edgar Allan Poe, his wife (and cousin) Virginia, and his mother-in-law moved from Manhattan to a little wooden house built in 1812 in The Bronx’s rural Fordham neighborhood. The isolated, modest home, which rented for just $100 a year, must have suited Poe well; he wrote “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells” there.

But his time in the house would be short. Virginia succumbed to tuberculosis in 1847. Poe died in 1849 in Baltimore.”

According to the blog, in 1905, the New York State Legislature set aside preservation funs, and in 1910 the house was moved to Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse. New York City is a perfect location for a memorial to Edgar Allan Poe – he loved the city, any city.

The Boston of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth in 1809 was one of the world’s wealthiest international trading ports and one of the largest manufacturing centers in the nation. It was also a city of squalor and vice, with a grim and ghastly underworld. It was a fitting start for Poe, whose mother and father (both actors) died when he was young. He came to be a master of the macabre weaving elaborate short stories into a shroud of mystery and death and launching a number of new American pop culture phenomenons.

Poe was a man of the new American city, having lived in the five largest cities in America during his lifetime. His first published work – Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) – was credited only to “a Bostonian,” but as a young boy he was taken from his native city to Richmond, Virginia, and in his short life he also lived in Charleston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City and the world’s largest city – London.

Poe was a sport, a libertine, as familiar with gambling, hard drinking, and womanizing, as he was with his many literary pursuits. Known to frequent Oyster cellars, brothels, casinos, and other dens of inequity, his literary work reflects the characters he met in his own life, the scoundrels, the bawdy women, and those on the margins of society – he delighted in showing local police unsympathetically in his writing.

Poe was also the first well-known writer in America to try and earn a living through writing alone. As a result, he suffered financially throughout his career until the day he was found on the streets of Baltimore, delirious and “in great distress… in need of immediate assistance” according to the man who found him. At the time of his death, newspapers reported Poe died of “congestion of the brain” or “cerebral inflammation”, common euphemisms for death from a disreputable cause like alcoholism. Thanks to a disparaging, and now long forgotten literary rival, Poe’s death at 40 remains a mystery – in the end he was the personification of a genre he is credited with inventing.

Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is the first true detective story. The Dupin character established a number of literary devices that inspired the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot – the brilliant detective, his personal friend serving as narrator, and the final revelation offered before the reasoning is explained. But beyond inventing the detective mystery, Poe is best known as a master of the physiological horror story. The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Raven are disturbing and unsettling works that have found their way into popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. Poe’s writing influenced the creation of science fiction (he often mentioned emerging technologies, such as those in The Balloon-Hoax), and the areas of esoteric cosmology and cryptography. He continues to influence Goth pop culture.

Poe’s most recurring themes deal with death, its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, premature burial, reanimation of the dead, and mourning. But outside horror, Poe also wrote burlesque, satires, humor tales, and hoaxes often in an attempt to liberate the reader from cultural conformity – he wrote for the emerging mass market by including popular cultural phenomena like phrenology and physiognomy. He was also a literary critic, and a newspaper and magazine editor.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Cultural History, Manhattan, New York City, The Bronx, Urban History

New Netherland Institute’s Rensselaerswijck Seminar

August 20, 2008 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The New Netherland Institute has announced its 31st Rensselaerswijck Seminar, “Neighbors in the New World: New Netherland and New France,” a one-day conference to be held on Saturday, September 13, 2008, in the Kenneth B. Clark Auditorium of the Cultural Education Center at the Empire State Plaza in Albany.

The theme is the relationship between the Dutch and French in 17th-century North America. Major attention will focus on interactions of these European powers and their respective Indian allies. The following speakers will explore various aspects of this relationship, including direct and indirect contacts between these two European trading powers both in Europe and in the New World:

James Bradley, ArchLink, Boston, MA
“In Between Worlds: New Netherland and New France at Mid Century”

José António Brandão, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI
“An Unreasonable Offer: Iroquois Policy towards their Huron and Mahican Neighbors”

Willem Frijhoff, Free University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
“Jesuits, Calvinists, and Natives: Attitudes, Agency, and Encounters in the Early Christian Missions in the North.”

Joyce Goodfriend, University of Denver, CO
Introduction and presentation of the Hendricks Manuscript Award

Conrad Heidenreich, York University, Ontario, Canada
“The Skirmish with the Mohawk on Lake Champlain: was Champlain a ‘trigger-happy thug’ or ‘just following orders?’”

The conference program and registration information can be found online [pdf].

The New Netherland Institute is the friends group of the New Netherland Project, which, according to their website:

Was established under the sponsorship of the New York State Library and the Holland Society of New York. Its primary objective is to complete the transcription, translation, and publication of all Dutch documents in New York repositories relating to the seventeenth-century colony of New Netherland. This unique resource has already proven invaluable to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. It also serves to enhance awareness of the major Dutch contributions to America over the centuries and the strong connections between the two nations. The Project is supported by the New York State Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the New Netherland Institute.

The New Netherland Institute (formerly Friends of New Netherland) seeks to increase public awareness of the work of the New Netherland Project and supports the Project through fund raising. The Institute assists authors of scholarly and popular material; disseminates information to educators, researchers, historians, curators, genealogists, and anthropologists; develops collaborations with academic institutions and other organizations interested in early American history; provides learning opportunities, such as internships, as well as research and consulting services pertaining to New Netherland; and sponsors activities related to the work of the New Netherland Project.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Albany County, Cultural History, New France, New Netherland, Rensselaer County, Rensselaerswijck

The Big 400: Champlain Descendants Still Local

August 19, 2008 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

2009 will mark the celebration of the 400th Anniversary of Samuel de Champlain’s arrival on the big lake, Henry Hudson’s on the big river, and the 200th Anniversary of Fulton’s steamship. Both New York and Vermont will be celebrating Champlain. [Read more…] about The Big 400: Champlain Descendants Still Local

Filed Under: History Tagged With: 400th, Albany County, Clinton County, Dutchess County, Essex County, Genealogy, Hudson River, Lake Champlain, NYC, Putnam County, Rensselaer County, Vermont, Warren County

Debate Over The Future of The Erie Canal

August 18, 2008 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

There is an interesting piece in the Canadian Press about using Thruway tolls to support the Erie Canal. It’s correctly notes that it’s been a periodic debate over the canal’s nearly 200-year history:

Advocates say the Erie – and New York’s three smaller canals – are historical treasures that are essential to the state’s economy and worthy of public investment.

Opponents counter that the canal system is no longer a critical part of the state’s transportation network and the money would be better spent elsewhere, especially as the state faces crushing deficits in coming years…

New York City soon became one of the country’s busiest ports and the canal spurred development of major upstate cities including Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany, whose proximity attracted industry. Dozens of smaller industrial hubs also sprouted along its banks.

There were two major upgrades – one completed in 1862 and the other in 1918 – to accommodate heavier traffic and larger vessels. But the rise of the railways in the late 1800s and the advent of the interstate highway system in the 1950s plucked the vast majority of freight off the canal.

In 1949, 3.5 million tonnes of freight plied the waters of New York’s canals. Last year, it was just over 11,790 tonnes, according to Canal Corp. figures.

For more than 10 years, state officials have been trying to reinvent the canal, marketing it as a tourist attraction and keeping its locks – most of which still use equipment installed in the early 1900s – operating.

The aim is to lure pleasure boaters to spend their money in the communities along the canal, many of which have suffered a decades-long economic slump following the decline of the region’s once thriving manufacturing industry.

[Carmella] Mantello [director of the New York State Canal Corp] says the canal agency has spent $250 million to help those communities fix up waterfront amenities…

Mantello points out that there were roughly 200 festivals and other events planned on canal shores this year, compared with about 30 just three years ago.

She and other canal boosters point to a study that found canal tourism contributed about $380 million a year to the state’s economy in 2002 – a little more than one per cent of the total $34.4 billion the Travel Industry Association of America estimates travellers spent in New York that year. An update of that study is scheduled to be done this year.

The canals cost about $80 million a year to operate but take in only about $3 million from users. The rest comes from tolls collected from drivers on the New York State Thruway.

Filed Under: History Tagged With: Erie Canal, Public History, Tourism, Transportation

This Week’s Top New York History News

August 15, 2008 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

  • » FBI Seeks Owners of 137 Artworks
  • » America’s First Railroad Tunnel Located?
  • » Rock Hall of Fame Headed to NY
  • » Mark David Chapman Denied Parole
  • » Saratoga Raceway Celebrates 140 Years
  • » Gen. Herkimer Marker Rededicated

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: nyhistorywire

Brooklyn College Aquires Boxing History Collection

August 15, 2008 by Editorial Staff 2 Comments

The New York Times is reporting that the Brooklyn College Library has acquired an outstanding collection of boxing history materials from boxing historian Hank Kaplan. According to his obituary (he died at 88 in 2007), Kaplan served was “founder and editor of Boxing Digest magazine, editor of Boxing World and served as consultant to such media outlets as Sports Illustrated, London Times, Der Stern and HBO.” According to the Times:

As yet unavailable to researchers, the collection — so far publicly confined to a small exhibition area in the library — consumes a 10-foot-high chamber in the Archives and Special Collections Division.

Crammed into the space are 2,600 books, 200,000 rare prints and negatives, 790 boxes of newspaper clippings from 1890 to 2007, 300 tapes of fights and interviews, reams of correspondence and hundreds of items of memorabilia, including belt buckles, trading cards and signed boxing gloves. Among the treasures is a heavy punching bag pounded by Cassius Clay in Miami before he renamed himself Muhammad Ali.

Although it might seem incongruous for an academic institution to devote space to a boxing collection, Professor Anthony M. Cucchiara said he hoped the Kaplan collection would be “a valuable archaeological dig” for scholars. “I suppose some people would want to turn their noses up at a boxing collection,” he said. “But the story of America is in this archive. Boxing is a prism for our cultural history, and is important for its associations with immigration, ethnicity, class, race and nationalism.”

Hank Kaplan received the James J. Walker Award from the Boxing Writers Association of America for “Long and Meritorious Service to Boxing” in 2002. In 2006 he was elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

A number of his recent feature pieces are available online at The Sweet Science.

Filed Under: History Tagged With: boxing, Broklyn College, Museums-Archives-Historic Sites, Sports History

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