New York City

30th Annual Long Island Apple Festival

September 15, 2019 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

For the past thirty years in the hamlet of Setauket, the last Sunday of September is celebrated with apples, from freshly pressed cider to homemade pies. Preservation Long Island is set to host the 30th Annual Long Island Apple Festival at Sherwood-Jayne Farm in Setauket on Sunday, September 29th, from 11 am to 4:30 pm.

The Festival features continuous activities, special programs and apple-related demonstrations including apple pressing with Johnny Appleseed, live music, old fashioned games and relay races, apple crafts, face painting, pony and hayrides, apple cider tasting, colonial cooking demonstrations, historic house and barn tours, local craft artisans and a variety of festival food and beverages will be available for purchase. [Read more…] about 30th Annual Long Island Apple Festival

Southampton History Museum Harvest Fair Set for Sept 21st

September 2, 2019 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The Southampton Historical Museum’s 2019 Harvest Fair has been set for Saturday, September 21st, from 11 am to 4 pm, at Rogers Mansion, 17 Meeting House Lane, Southampton. This event is free and open to the public.

Activities include outdoor crafts, tool making demonstrations, Shinnecock Tribe dancing, farm animals, a thrift shop and an 1850 wedding re-enactment. [Read more…] about Southampton History Museum Harvest Fair Set for Sept 21st

Racism’s War On Equality Has A Long History

August 19, 2019 by Alan J. Singer 3 Comments

As part of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, examining the history of race and racism since slavery was introduced into British North America four hundred years ago, D’Angelo Lovell Williams argues that race and racism have long torpedoed efforts to implement universal health care in the United States.

According to Williams, federal policy, starting with the end of the Civil War in 1865, was based on the belief that “free assistance of any kind” to newly freed Blacks would “breed dependence and that when it came to black infirmity, hard labor was a better salve than white medicine.”

Those are beliefs echoed in politics and rhetoric today, but one of the worst racists in the United States Congress at that time, whose views shaped post-Civil War policy, was Samuel Sullivan Cox. During the 38th session of Congress, Cox led opposition against the formation of a Freedmen’ Bureau to assist newly emancipated Africans based on his belief that that African race was doomed to extinction by its inherent inferiority and inability to survive outside of bondage. [Read more…] about Racism’s War On Equality Has A Long History

Gilded Age Exhibit Opens In Southampton, LI

August 9, 2019 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The Southampton History Museum will open the exhibit High Style in the Gilded Age: Southampton 1870-1930, on Saturday, August 17, with an opening reception from 4 to 6 pm, at Rogers Mansion, 17 Meeting House Lane, Southampton, Long Island. [Read more…] about Gilded Age Exhibit Opens In Southampton, LI

Militant Maids of the Lower East Side

August 8, 2019 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The New York State Archives have announced that the program “Anna & Henrietta Mercy: Militant Maids of the Lower East Side”is set for September 8.

Sisters Anna & Henrietta Mercy were a dynamic duo of socialist activism in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As young children they immigrated to the United States from Austria with their parents in the late 1800s; as young women, they devoted their time and many talents to the East Side Equal Rights League’s agenda of women’s economic and political equality.

Robert Morgenthau’s Statehouse Ambitions

July 31, 2019 by Randall Whitestone Leave a Comment

The recent death at age 99 of longtime Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau recalls his two attempts to run for governor of New York against Nelson Rockefeller. Obituaries featured brief references to his statehouse ambitions, but his 1962 run in particular is worth remembering for its national significance.

Morgenthau, grandson of Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and son of FDR’s Treasury secretary, was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in early 1961 by newly elected President John F. Kennedy. He would soon be asked to aim higher. [Read more…] about Robert Morgenthau’s Statehouse Ambitions

Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss in New York

July 21, 2019 by Randall Whitestone 5 Comments

Seventy years ago this month, a lower Manhattan courtroom provided the stage for a remarkable confrontation – much of which played out in New York – that symbolized the frustration of a nation that had recently won the Second World War but felt more insecure than ever.

The euphoria of victory had been quickly succeeded by a perception of global communism on the march. In Europe, the Soviet Union had only recently ended an 11-month blockade of Berlin and had, since 1945, rung down the Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe. In China, Mao’s communists were winning their civil war against Chiang Kai-Shek’s U.S.-backed Nationalists, who would soon flee the mainland for Taiwan. And the Soviets were about to end the U.S. monopoly on the atom bomb with a successful test explosion. [Read more…] about Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss in New York

Someone Lived Here: Lewis Latimer House in Queens

July 17, 2019 by Kendra Gaylord Leave a Comment

In this episode of Someone Lived Here, Kendra Gaylord visits to the Lewis Latimer House in Queens, NY. Lewis Latimer was an inventor and electrical pioneer who shaped the history of objects we still use every day. He was African American, the son of escaped slaves, and also an artist and poet. [Read more…] about Someone Lived Here: Lewis Latimer House in Queens

Advocates Fight to Preserve Brooklyn Abolitionist Site

July 11, 2019 by Alan J. Singer 1 Comment

Before and during the American Civil War, probably between 1851 and 1863, 227 Duffield Street in downtown Brooklyn was the home of prominent abolitionists Thomas and Harriet Truesdell. The block is officially known as Abolitionist Place.

Harriet was on the organizing committee of the 1838 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. Thomas was a founding member of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society. They were colleagues and friends of well-known abolitionists Lewis Tappan and William Lloyd Garrison. Historians and community activists believe the Truesdell home was probably a stop on the Underground Railroad where freedom seekers escaping from slavery sojourned in relative safety during their trip further north or to Canada, but they have been unable to come up with documented proof. Now the building faces imminent demolition unless enough public support is generated to preserve it. [Read more…] about Advocates Fight to Preserve Brooklyn Abolitionist Site

Gilded Age Exhibit Planned in Southampton

July 1, 2019 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The Southampton History Museum has announced High Style in the Gilded Age: Southampton 1870-1930, a new exhibit set to open Saturday, August 17th with an opening reception from 4 to 6 pm.

With the arrival of the railroad in 1870, Southampton began its swift ascent to fashionable status. New Yorkers, spared a grueling journey by stagecoach or an overnight boat trip, could now make the trip in a few hours. While the early years of the Southampton summer colony were marked by a professed enthusiasm for the informal pleasures of country life, it was perhaps inevitable that the taste for Gilded Age excess, then sweeping over the city, would begin to assert itself in Southampton.