New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

Editorial Staff

Researching New York Call For Papers Extended

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The 10th annual Researching New York Conference will be held at the University at Albany on November 20th and 21st, 2008. The Conference organizers have extended the deadline for proposals for panels, papers, workshops, roundtables, exhibits, documentary, and media or multi-media presentations on any facet of New York State history. Proposals are now due by until Tuesday, July 15, 2008.

Researching New York brings together historians, researchers, archivists, public historians, librarians, graduate students, teachers, Web site creators, filmmakers, and documentarians to share their work on New York State history. Presentations that highlight the vast resources available to researchers, as well as scholarship drawn from those resources, are also sought.

To mark the upcoming 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state university system, the State University of New York, we especially welcome proposals that explore any aspect of education in New York State-formal and informal, in public and private institutions, in the development of public policy, and in schools and communities throughout the New York State. While all aspects of New York history are welcome, submissions that explore this long, rich, and diverse history from any perspective and in any time period are encouraged.

Full panel proposals, workshops, roundtables, exhibits, film screenings and media presentations are preferred. Partial panels and individual submissions will be considered. For panels and full proposals, please submit a one-page abstract of the complete session, a one page abstract for each paper or presentation, and a one-page curriculum vita for each participant. Individual submissions should include a one-page abstract and one-page curriculum vita. All submissions must include name, address, telephone number, and e-mail address. All proposals must clearly state any anticipated technology needs or scheduling considerations. If you would like to serve as a commentator for a panel, please send a note to the organizers indicating your area of expertise, along with a one-page vita.

New Nathanael Greene Biography

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Nathanael Greene – the seemingly forgotten (yet most successful) American general of the American Revolution, is the subject of a new biography by Rhode Island journalist Gerald Carbone.

The publisher blurb for Nathanael Greene: A Biography of the American Revolution promises to expose Greene’s “dark side”:

Despite his huge military successes and tactical genius Greene’s story has a dark side. Gerald Carbone drew on 25 years of reporting and researching experience to create his chronicle of Greene’s unlikely rise to success and his fall into debt and anonymity.

Probably a former Quaker by the time of the war began, the Rhode Islander Greene is mostly remembered for his leadership of the Southern Campaign. Take it from the great Wiki:

Greene’s Southern Campaign showed remarkable strategic features. He excelled in dividing, eluding and tiring his opponent by long marches, and in actual conflict forcing the British to pay heavily for a temporary advantage; a price that they could not afford. He was greatly assisted by able subordinates, including the Polish engineer, Tadeusz Kościuszko (recently of the Mohawk River Bridge), the brilliant cavalry officers, Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”) Lee and William Washington, and the partisan leaders, Thomas Sumter, Andrew Pickens, Elijah Clarke, and Francis Marion.

Greene gave us Greene County, actually fourteen of them, stretching as far west as Iowa and including our own Greene County, NY. His most popular victories came in the South, and combined with a New York tendency toward Knox, Gates, and Putnam and Greene settling in the South after the war, New Yorkers have pretty much forgotten him – how many remember that “e” at the end of Greene?

Greene commanded the rebel city of Boston after it was evacuated by Howe in March 1776 but then spent a lot of time in New York during the war. He was in command of the Continental Army troops on Long Island, and commanded the construction of Fort Putnam (now Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn’s first).

He was sick during the Battle of Long Island, and made the controversial argument to evacuate New York City and destroy it’s usefulness with the torch. It will be interesting to see what Carbone’s new biography says about that.

In New Jersey, he commanded Fort Lee and Fort Washington, commanded at the battles of Trenton, Brandywine (Greene commanded the reserve), and Germantown. He became Quartermaster General in 1778 at Valley Forge (another particularly interesting point worthy of a book in itself), and led the right wing of the army at Monmouth that Spring. In August, Greene (with Lafayette) commanded the Battle of Rhode Island and led at the Battle of Springfield. He also battled with Congress over how to fund the war, and commanded West Point. In 1780 he presided over the court that sentenced Major John André to death.

Then he was asked to command the South.

2008 Museum Institute at Sagamore

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Upstate History Alliance has announced their 2008 Institute at Sagamore. According to UHA’s website, this year’s institute “will address the challenges and creative solutions for Interpreting Historic Spaces:”

Interpretation– the process of bringing about meaning, it’s what museums do best, or is it? What are the best ways to utilize our collections to illustrate connections and evoke thought amongst our visitors?

Participants will explore ways to tell their stories and engage their visitors through creative methods and practical applications. Experts will share their innovative thinking on interpretive planning and incorporating those plans, utilizing reader’s theater, employing interpretive technology, interpreting contentious stories as well as hearing from msueums with exemplary interpretive programs.

The Museum Institute at Sagamore is open “to individuals who are currently employed or serve in a leadership position with a museum or museum service organization.” Space is limited to 25, and their is a competitive application process.

The 2008 Institute is September 23-26; applications are due postmarked by July 25, 2008.

More information is located here.

Strange Maps to Strange Ideas

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One of the blogs we follow here at the New York History Blog, is Strange Maps, a blog of some of the weirdest, wackiest, and thought provoking maps in the world. Here is are some samples of some recent posts you may not have seen, they are not all New York History related, but they do point to unique uses of mapping that NY historians can appreciate:

Federal Lands in the US
The United States government has direct ownership of almost 650 million acres of land (2.63 million square kilometers) – nearly30% of its total territory. These federal lands, which are mainly used as military bases or testing grounds, nature parks and reserves and indian reservations, are managed by different administrations, such as the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the US Department of Defense, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Bureau of Reclamation or the Tennessee Valley Authority. [New York is tied with Iowa for 2nd from last at .8%; Connecticut and Rhode Island are tied for last with just .4% – of course they don’t count New York’s state lands (Adirondack, Catskills, and more), so the map is not really reflective of actual government ownership.]

Where News Breaks
Researchers extracted the dateline from about 72,000 wire-service news stories from 1994 to 1998 and modified a standard map of the Lower 48 US states (above) to show the size of the states in proportion to the frequency of their appearance in those datelines. New York is the largest news provider of the country, of course nearly all originating in New York City (pop. 8.2 million; metro area 18.8 million). Compare this to Illinois, home of the the nation’s third largest city, Chicago (pop. 2.8 million; metro area 9.5 million). Especially when considering metropolitan areas, Chicago/Illinois should be half the ‘news size’ of New York City/New York, while in fact it seems to be less than one fifth. Could this underrepresentation be down to another ‘capital effect’ (i.e. New York being the ‘cultural capital’ of the US)?

Area Codes in Which Ludacris Claims to Have Hoes
“In [the song “Area Codes”] Ludacris brags about the area codes where he knows women, whom he refers to as ‘hoes’,” says Stefanie Gray, who plotted out all the area codes mentioned in this song on a map of the United States. She arrived at some interesting conclusions as to the locations of this rapper’s preferred female companionship:

Ludacris heavily favors the East Coast to the West, save for Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Las Vegas.

Ludacris travels frequently along the Boswash corridor.

There is a ‘ho belt‘ phenomenon nearly synonymous with the ‘Bible Belt’.

Ludacris’s ideal ‘ho-highway’ would be I-95.

Ludacris has hoes in the entire state of Maryland.

Ludacris has a disproportionate ho-zone in rural Nebraska. He might favor white women as much as he does black women, or perhaps, girls who farm.

A World Map of Manhattan
This map celebrates that diversity by assembling Manhattan out of the contours of many of the world’s countries. Danielle Hartman created the map based on data from the 2000 US Census. In all, 80 different countries of origin were listed in the census. The map-maker placed the country contours near the census area where most of the citizens of each country resided.

The Comancheria, Lost Homeland of a Warrior Tribe
Under the presidency of Sam Houston (1836-’38, 1841-’44) the then independent Republic of Texas almost came to a peace agreement with the tribal collective known as the Comanche. The Texas legislature rejected this deal, because it did not want to establish a definitive border with the Comanche; for by that time, white settlers were pushing into the Comancheria, the homeland of one of the most fearsome Native American peoples the Euro-Americans ever had to deal with.

Thomas Jefferson’s Plan for the division of the Northwest Territory into 10 new states.

Regionalism and Religiosity

A Map of the Internet’s Black Holes

A Diagram of the Eisenhower Interstate System

Birthplaces of Mississippi Blues Artists

Ancient Mississippi River Courses

Copyright Renewal Records Available for download

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Thanks to Jill Hurst-Wahl’s Digitization 101 blog, we learned last week that there may be some movement in the pace of book digitization with the release of bulk copyright renewal records from 1978 onward. This is big news for the online availability of many secondary sources of history.

Here is a snippet:

How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn’t digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly corrected the OCR.

Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we’ve gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.

Jill also pointed us to comments made by Siva Vaidhyanathan of The Institute For The Future of The Book:

This is great news for historians, journalists, researchers, publishers, and librarians. It’s also great for the Open Content Alliance and other book digitization projects.

Of course, this does not help much with books published and copyrighted outside of the United States. But that’s always a complication

Google itself is going to use these records to change the format of many of the scanned books published between 1923 and 1963. Currently, these are only available in “snippet” form. Will Google Book Search change significantly now that this file is available?

It looks promising that there may be an expansion of the online availability of titles published between 1923 and 1963 at Google Book Search, the Internet Archive, and places like Boing Boing. Today, the news that Microsoft’s Live Book Search is no more, seems even more antithetical to the trend.

New Tenement Museum Reflects Irish Immigration

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From the New York Times comes a report on the newest Tenement Museum in New York City:

The [Joseph and Bridget Moore family] place will become the sixth apartment of former immigrant residents of 97 Orchard Street to be recreated. The apartments are all nearly identical in size at about 325 square feet. One represents the home of a German Jewish family soon after the father disappeared; another a Lithuanian Jewish family whose father had just died. Another is the remade home of Italian Catholics about to be evicted.

The museum was established in 1988 in 97 Orchard, an 1864 brick building, and attracts 130,000 visitors a year. The building is a time capsule of primitive bathrooms and windowless passageways. In 1935, the building’s owners sealed off most of the 20 units rather than make changes to meet new housing codes.

The fourth-floor apartment for the Moores — it is not known exactly where in the building they lived — will be the museum’s earliest simulation and the first to reflect the huge influx of Irish immigrants in the 19th century.

“We take these dynamic, compelling family stories, and use them to draw people into the greater historical context of immigrants in America,” said Stephen H. Long, the vice president of collections and education at the museum. Members of the staff began researching the Moores five years ago.

The Moores’ experience, Mr. Long added, also made for teachable moments about the history of medicine and public health. “When the Moores lived here,” he said, “the mortality rate for Irish immigrant children was 25 percent.”

Only four of the Moores’ eight children, all girls, reached adulthood. Mrs. Moore died in 1882, when she was 36, shortly after giving birth to her eighth daughter. Curators speculate that the malnutrition that killed Agnes was brought on by drinking swill: milk from diseased cows, which street vendors ladled out of dirty vats and sometimes adulterated with chalk or ammonia.

A Virtual tour of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is available on the web.

State Ed Department Wants Your Opinion

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The New York State Education Department (NYSED), which includes the New York Sate Library, is redesigning its web site. As part of the process, NYSED is conducting a brief survey to learn more about how visitors use the web site. If you use the SED and/or the Library site, take a few minutes to complete their six-question survey and let them know what you like or dislike about the site, and how it could be more useful.

3rd Annual Pethick Archaeological Site Open House

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The 3rd Annual Pethick Archaeological Site Open House will be held Monday, June 30th, and Tuesday, July 1st, 10am – 2pm on Smith Road in Central Bridge (directions below).

The Pethick Site is in its fifth season of excavation as an archaeological field school co-taught by the University of Albany, SUNY, and the New York State Museum. It is a rich and important Native American site, and to date has yielded almost 200,000 artifacts and 350 soil features. Evidence recovered in the excavations suggests that this location has been used for several thousand years by the indigenous people of the Schoharie Valley.

According to SUNY Archaeologist Sean Rafferty:

The Pethick Site is a newly discovered village and campsite located on a terrace overlooking Schoharie Creek, a major tributary of the Mohawk River. The site was discovered by the class of the 2004 summer field school based on information provided by local artifact collectors. A shovel test pit survey of the site indicated that there were extensive and rich archaeological deposits present. These were concentrated at one end of the site on a small rise in the local topography. Initial excavations were concentrated in that area.

Our excavations first uncovered a dark black organic layer, believed to represent a decomposed trash midden dating from the most recent occupations of the site. Based on artifacts recovered from the midden layer, the most recent and most extensive occupation at Pethick dates from approximately AD 1000 to AD 1400, a period archaeologists refer to as the “Late Woodland Period” in northeastern North America. The occupants of the Schoharie Valley at that time are generally believed to have been the ancestors to modern Iroquois cultures, including the Mohawk. Remains from that period at the site include numerous hearths, fire cracked rock deposits, storage pits, and post-mold patterns. Artifacts from the site include numerous chipped stone waste flakes, stone tools including projectile points, and potter sherds. Preliminary analysis suggests the presence of at least one longhouse.

While the discovery of a possible early Iroquoian village site is a major occurrence, there is more to Pethick than this. Soil stratigraphy and artifacts indicate that Pethick is a multicomponent site, which was repeatedly occupied over thousands of years of prehistory. Artifacts recovered during the 2004 season indicate occupations during the pre-agricultural Early and Middle Woodland Periods, from approximately 1,000 BC to AD 200. Also identified were artifacts indicating occupations during the preceding Transitional Period, from approximately 1,500 to 1,000 BC. During these early periods the site probably served as a seasonal encampment where occupants could take advantage of locally gathered plant and animal resources, including fishing in the nearby Schoharie Creek.

We have been informed by local collectors that the site may also contain remains from the Early Archaic Period, dating to as early as 8,000 BC. If true, this would be a very rare occupation, dating to one of the earliest periods of New York State prehistory, just following the end of the last Ice Age. Surveying the areas purported to contain this evidence will also be a priority of the next field season.

Visitors to the site will be given tours by university students, but they are welcome to explore at their own pace and stay as long as they would like. Professional archaeologists, including State Archaeologist Dr. Christina Rieth and Dr. Sean Rafferty of the University at Albany, will be on hand to look at private artifact collections, which visitors are encouraged to bring. The site is fairly easily accessed (in a farm field). For safety reasons, guests will not be allowed to excavate.

Visitors of all ages are welcome! There is no cost for this event.

For more information, email or call: Jaime Donta, jm141615@albany.edu or (413)237-2822

From Albany: Take I-88W to Exit 23– Schoharie/Central Bridge. At the end of the ramp, turn right. At the flashing red light, turn left onto 30/7A. Cross the Schoharie Creek, then take your first left onto Smith Rd. Follow to the end– the site is visible on the left.

Schnectady County Historical Society Genealogy Talk

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Schenectady County Historical Society is Hosting a Talk by Jean Nudd of the National Archives

Revolutionary War Records at the National Archives, a talk by Jean Nudd, Archivist, NARA, Northeast Region, Pittsfield, MA, will be held on Saturday, June 28, 2008, at 2:00 p.m. at the Schenectady County Historical Society, 32 Washington Avenue, Schenectady, NY.

The talk by Jean Nudd is free and open to the public. The library at the Historical Society will be open without charge to researchers from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Refreshments will be served at 1:30 p.m. The Schenectady County Historical Society is wheelchair accessible.

For more information contact Katherine Chansky at (518) 374-0263 or via email at librarian AT schist DOT org.

Largest Event at Fort Ticonderoga in Modern Times

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It’s a big year at Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain. First it’s the 100th anniversary of their opening with a dedication attended by President William Howard Taft. The Pell family began it’s restoration that year, a project that is continuing with the completion of the Deborah Clarke Mars Education Center that will open on July 6.

This year also marks the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War of the Battle of Carillon, which was designated as the I Love NY “signature event,” and the opening of the new exhibit “Face of War; Triumph and Tragedy at Ticonderoga, 1758-1759,” the first new exhibit in many years. It details the lives of soldiers taken directly from their diaries and letters. [Read more…] about Largest Event at Fort Ticonderoga in Modern Times