History, Natural History & the Arts
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With over 500 miles of shoreline, the fireboats of the FDNY have protected the city of New York for the last century and a half.
Utilizing historic images, David Rocco showcases their fascinating evolution from wooden-hull tugboats to modern-day specialized watercraft in Fireboats of the FDNY (Arcadia Press, 2026). [Read more…] about A NYC Fire Department Fireboats History
A man thought to be a Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid fleeing poverty are hardly the images we have of America’s august founders. In Newcomers (Liveright, 2026), Alan Mikhail upends the traditional story of America’s origins through the revelatory tale of a seventeenth-century immigrant couple by the names of Anthony and Grietje.
Married in Amsterdam, the destitute pair emerged from lives of piracy and prostitution in Europe and arrived in 1630s Dutch New Amsterdam, hoping to build a new life. Upon landing on New York City’s shores, the swarthy Anthony was attacked for being the Muslim he was not, while Grietje, branded a whore by crude harbor denizens, would become the model of an independent colonial American woman, defiantly mooning her attackers rather than accepting their derision. [Read more…] about Newcomers: Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York
New York’s Great Lost Ballparks (SUNY Press, 2022) by Bob Carlin tells the story of New York playing grounds and ballparks of yesteryear. Organized by region and city, the book includes a complete list of New York’s historic ballparks in an easy-to-read guidebook format.
Each listing includes the name and location of the park, the years in operation, the names of the professional baseball clubs that called it their home, the park’s seating capacity, and a fun fact or two that distinguishes each locale. [Read more…] about New York’s Great Lost Ballparks Zoom Presentation Aug 13th
In March 1902, eighty-five-year-old Alvah Dunning traveled from the Adirondacks to New York City for a sportsmen’s exhibition. By then, photographs and newspaper profiles had made his white beard and weathered face familiar. Visitors were not meeting an unknown woodsman.
They were being introduced to “Uncle Alvah,” a man presented as one of the last survivors of the Adirondacks before railroads, hotels and private preserves changed the region. [Read more…] about Alvah Dunning: The Guide Behind the Adirondack Hermit
In June, 1883, Jefferson and Helen Beardsley of Ithaca, New York, were indicted, tried, and sentenced for “selling and exhibiting obscene pictures.”
In Smut: An 1883 Obscenity Trial and Its Echoes Today (Paul Dry Books, 2026), historian Carol Kammen draws directly from the trial transcript and reveals the fascinating history surrounding the case and its surprising relevance today. [Read more…] about Smut: An 1883 Obscenity Trial and Its Echoes Today
The American Revolution was not only fought militarily in the colonies, artists also played an integral role. In The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2025) Dr. Zara Anishanslin highlights the intertwined lives of three of them: Robert Edge Pine, Prince Demah and Patience Wright.
Of particular interest to New Yorkers, Wright was born a Quaker (and a relative of the Townsend family) in Oyster Bay, Nassau County, on Long Island. She had a talent for sculpting and her medium was the wax figure. Her museum in the city of New York was a popular attraction, featuring lifelike replicas of notable figures. [Read more…] about Patience Wright: A Revolutionary NY Artist in England
Revolutionary New York City: America at 250 (2026) is a five-borough collaborative multi-year effort by The Bronx County Historical Society, Historic Richmond Town, Center for Brooklyn History, and the Gotham Center, with contributions from Philipse Manor Hall, the Lott House, Queens County Farm, and others.
This book of essays moves beyond the iconic battles and founding fathers to reveal the complex, messy, and deeply human reality of the American Revolution in New York City. [Read more…] about Revolutionary New York City: America at 250
In many respects the American Revolution was a civil war pitting Americans loyal to the Crown against other Americans loyal to the vision of a new nation they sought to create. Neighbor fought against neighbor, brother against brother, father against son. One of the epicenters of this desperate struggle was New York’s Hudson Valley.
Suffering for the Crown: The Hudson Valley Loyalists and the Violence of Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2026) by Kieran J. O’Keefe details the extreme violence, persecution, and displacement experienced by white, Black, and Native American Loyalists during the Revolution. [Read more…] about Hudson Valley Loyalists and the Violence of Revolution
America’s founding generation drank a staggering amount of alcohol by today’s standards. It influenced their politics, built and sustained their relationships, and drove the economy.
Booze was not a small part of colonial society, nor covertly consumed in private spaces — it was integral to American life. [Read more…] about An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution
Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children (Beacon Press, 2026) examines how the lynching of Black children became not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American racial violence.
Drawing on meticulous archival research Strung Up traces how white supremacy trained itself socially, culturally, and psychologically to tolerate and ritualize the destruction of Black childhood, including the unborn. [Read more…] about ‘Strung Up’ Explains How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children
Jordan B. Smith’s The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) is a complex history of distilled alcoholic spirit made from sugarcane byproducts, from its production to its consumption, and from its origins in the Caribbean to its impact on the Atlantic World.
It was strong. It was cheap. It was ubiquitous. Fermented and distilled from the refuse of sugar production, rum emerged in the seventeenth-century Caribbean as a new commodity. [Read more…] about The Invention of Rum: Quintessential Atlantic World Commodity
North Country writer Sandra Weber recently joined the ADK Talks podcast to discuss John Brown Farm: From Abolitionist Vision to Memorial Site (Purple Mountain Press, 2026), is a book devoted entirely to the history and meaning of the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba, Essex County, NY. [Read more…] about John Brown Farm: Abolitionist Vision to Memorial Site
America, USA: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries (Crown Publishers, 2026) details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s legacy. It is a complex combination of lessons and voices — from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.— that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. [Read more…] about How Race Shadows the America’s Anniversaries
Glen Underwood, the author of the recently published Discovering George Foster Peabody (Abenia Cottage Press, 2025) was at the Lake George Historical Association recently to discuss the life and legacy of the banker and philanthropist. The program included the unveiling of a portrait of Peabody that will hang in the museum.
Appropriately enough, the museum overlooks Shepard Park, named in honor of Peabody’s close friend, Brooklyn politician Edward Morse Shepard (1850-1911). Shepard is remembered at Lake George today largely because the Village park bears his name. Peabody, who actually paid for the park and gave it to the Village, has fared less well. [Read more…] about George Foster Peabody and Lake George
St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village began in 1849 with a simple, but radical mission: to care for all those in need regardless of race, creed, or financial means. For more than 160 years, the hospital carried out that work, serving notables and the nameless alike, from impoverished immigrants and those stricken by devastating nineteenth-century epidemics to AIDS patients and the victims of the attacks of 9/11.
Part of the former Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Centers healthcare system in New York City, St. Vincent’s closed on April 30, 2010, was demolished two years later and has become luxury condos. [Read more…] about St. Vincent’s Hospital: New York City’s Other ‘Ground Zero’
Donna (D.M.) Green never intended to publish a book for the general public. “My first idea was just to write a book for my kids and grandkids,” the Hope Falls writer recalls. “But after my husband, Jeff, proofread In the Moment, In the Forest, he encouraged me to consider getting it published.”
And we’re so glad she took his advice! Readers of In The Moment, In The Forest (Troy Bookmakers, 2024), a beautifully written book of day-by-day journal entries, accompany Green for one full year as she observes and records the natural wonders of her beloved North Country. [Read more…] about Adirondack Author Sees Magic & Mystery Outside Her Door
Described in numerous news articles as the Spanish Alps, Las Villas, as they were collectively known, was a lively enclave of Spanish, Puerto Rican and other Hispanic summer resorts in Plattekill, NY, and the Catskill Mountains.
Las Villas of Plattekill and Ulster County (Arcadia Publishing, 2016) by Ishmael Martinez is the first comprehensive historical retrospective on Las Villas of Plattekill and Ulster County. [Read more…] about Las Villas of Plattekill and Ulster County
When most Americans think of slavery, they do not picture the colonial or revolutionary eras. Yet, in fact, one of six inhabitants of the thirteen original colonies was enslaved.
The Escapes of David George: an Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution (St. Martin’s Press, 2026) reveals a remarkable, untold experience of the American revolutionary period ― a Black man’s quest for the freedom espoused by our Founders, but denied him and other enslaved people. [Read more…] about The Escapes of David George: Slavery, Freedom & The American Revolution
SUNY Press has re-published Main Street to Mainframes: Landscape and Social Change in Poughkeepsie by Harvey K. Flad and Clyde C. Griffen in a Second Edition. A social and urban history of the city on the Hudson River in Dutchess County, NY, tracing its transformation from a 19th-century market town to a 21st-century urban region.
The book examines economic shifts, immigration, race, housing, and revitalization efforts through a blend of social history and spatial analysis, using Poughkeepsie as a case study for broader trends in American small-city development. [Read more…] about Landscape & Social Change in Poughkeepsie
The work of novelist William Kennedy marks the union of encyclopedic knowledge, built over ninety-eight years spent soaking up the city of Albany, and a profound empathy for human experience in all its forms, from the underworld of gangsters, gamblers, and hustlers to the heights of power and politics.
In the recently published Library of America edition of The Albany Trilogy, three of Kennedy’s greatest works set in New York’s capital take readers through vastly different but interrelated lives. [Read more…] about William Kennedy’s Albany Trilogy: An Interview with Paul Grondahl
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