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Editorial Staff

Fort Ticonderoga Executive Director to Step Down

September 8, 2008 by Editorial Staff 1 Comment

North Country Public Radio is reporting this afternoon that Fort Ticonderoga’s longtime executive director Nick Westbrook will step down (Post Star says next year). According to the report board president Peter Paine says Westbrook will remain “affiliated with the historic site in a scholarly and advisory capacity” and described the move as “part of a planned transition.”

Ongoing controversy over the loss of the Fort’s most important benefactor has been covered at length on the New York History Blog before.

This weekend the New York Times covered the story:

This summer, the national historic landmark — called Fort Ti for short — began its 100th season as an attraction open to the public with two causes for celebration: the unveiling of a splashy new education center, and an increase in visitors, reversing a long decline.

But instead of celebrating, its caretakers issued an S.O.S., warning that the fort, one of the state’s most important historic sites, was struggling for survival, largely because of a breach between the fort’s greatest benefactor — an heir of the Mars candy fortune — and its executive director.

The problem is money: The fort had a shortfall of $2.5 million for the education center. The president of the board that governs the fort, which is owned by a nonprofit organization, said in an internal memo this summer that the site would be “essentially broke” by the end of the year. The memo proposed a half-dozen solutions, including the sale of artwork from the group’s collection.

Filed Under: History Tagged With: Essex County, Fort Ticonderoga, Military History, Museums-Archives-Historic Sites, Public History

Teddy Roosevelt and The Adirondack Forest Preserve

September 3, 2008 by Editorial Staff 2 Comments

logging in the adirondacksIn the heart of the Adirondacks is the Town of Newcomb, population about 500. The town was developed as a lumbering and mining community – today tourism and forest and wood products are the dominate way locals make a living. As a result the Essex County town is one of the Adirondacks’ poorer communities.

The folks in Newcomb (and also in North Creek in Warren County) often promote their communities’ connection to Theodore Roosevelt’s ascendancy to the presidency. TR’s nighttime trip from a camp in Newcomb to the rail station at North Creek as William McKinley lay dying from a bullet delivered by Leon Czolgosz‘s .32 caliber Iver-Johnson handgun is usually considered Roosevelt’s great tie to the Adirondack region. [Read more…] about Teddy Roosevelt and The Adirondack Forest Preserve

Filed Under: History, Adirondacks & NNY Tagged With: Adirondacks, Environmental History, Essex County, Forestry, Logging, Natural History, Newcomb, North Creek, Theodore Roosevelt, Warren County

Call for Proposals: Underground Railroad History Conference

September 2, 2008 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The Planning Committee of the Eighth Underground Railroad (UGR) History Conference is soliciting brief proposals for presentations, panels, and workshops that address the theme “The Underground Railroad, Its Legacies, and Our Communities.” Proposals should be made for a 60-minute workshop session, for a poster session or exhibition, or for a cultural/artistic activity.

According to the announcement, conference organizers “ask that all proposals allow for significant audience interaction. And, while we urge that proposals focus on the conference theme, we also invite proposals on other important topics concerning Underground Railroad history. See the full call for proposals pdf here.

The Eighth Annual UGR History Conference will be held at College Park, Union College, Schenectady, NY, on February 27-28, 2009. It is sponsored by the Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region, Inc.

For more information, consult the web site at http://www.ugrworkshop.com/

Proposals should be submitted to the planning committee by September 30, 2008 by mail at URHPCR, PO Box 10851, Albany NY 12201 or via e-mail at urhpcr [AT] localnet [DOT] com

Filed Under: Events Tagged With: African American History, Calls for Papers, Conferences, Underground Railroad

AASLH Annual Meeting in Rochester September 9-12, 2008

September 1, 2008 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The American Association for State and Local History Annual Meeting in Rochester beginning September 9th is geared toward “history professionals, historical sites, historical societies, history museums, military museums, libraries, presidential sites, students, suppliers, and more.”

According to their website:

This is your chance to share your passion, ideas, and knowledge with over 800 of your peers in the field of state and local history. You’ll have an opportunity to learn from over 80 sessions and 17 pre-meeting workshops that directly relate to the latest issues and trends that you face. And, you’ll also have an opportunity to have fun while you explore Rochester’s amazing history through the evening events and tours.

Although apparently they’re keeping the costs of the conference pretty quiet (good luck finding it on the website), you can apparently register here.

Filed Under: Events Tagged With: AASLH, Conferences, Lake Ontario, Monroe County, Museums-Archives-Historic Sites, Rochester

This Week’s Top New York History News

August 29, 2008 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

  • » Mystery of Bldg 7 Collapse Solved?
  • » AHA Considers Oral History Revisions
  • » New York Cemetery Board Audit
  • » Locked Albany HS Room’s Treasures Revealed
  • » Time Running Short For 400-Yr Party

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: nyhistorywire

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

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