New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

Art History

Massacres & Migrants at Sea: Deadly Voyages To New York

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Diagram (1787) of the Liverpool-launched slave ship BrookesThe 1840s brought about a transformation in the nature of transatlantic shipping. With the development of European colonial empires, the forced transportation of African slaves had become big business.

Liverpool was the focus of the British slave trade. As a result of crusading abolitionist movements and subsequent legal intervention, the brutal practice declined there during that decade. But more or less simultaneously a new form of people trafficking took its place. [Read more…] about Massacres & Migrants at Sea: Deadly Voyages To New York

Museum Spotlight: Dia Beacon, Dutchess County

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Dia:BeaconDia Beacon, on the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon, Dutchess County, NY, is a museum of contemporary art with more exhibition space than Manhattan’s Guggenheim, Whitney Museum, and MoMA combined. [Read more…] about Museum Spotlight: Dia Beacon, Dutchess County

Edward Lange Long Island Artworks Sought For Research

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Winter scene by Edward LangeDuring the 1970s, staff at Preservation Long Island launched the first major effort to document all the known Long Island works by the artist Edward Lange who depicted local communities with precise detail during the 1870s and 80s. [Read more…] about Edward Lange Long Island Artworks Sought For Research

Manhattan’s Great Art Dealers: Some History

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Mary Mason Jones’ marble mansionManhattan’s 57th Street, the world’s “most expensive” street, was laid out and opened in 1857 as the city of New York expanded northward.

With the Hudson and East Rivers on either end, the area was until then largely uninhabited and clustered with small factories and workshops. As late as the 1860s, the area east of Central Park was a shantytown with up to 5,000 squatters.

Half a century later it was Manhattan’s cultural heart and an intercontinental meeting place of artists, collectors and dealers. [Read more…] about Manhattan’s Great Art Dealers: Some History

A Christmas in Kingston in the 1880s

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McEntee- Christmas in the Catskills,1867“I went out after a Christmas tree and some laurel, through seas of mud,” Jervis McEntee of Kingston wrote on Christmas Eve 1881, “to the place where I always go on the cross road between the Flat-bush and Pine bush roads. It rained a part of the time and turned into a snow storm on our return.”

Another year, McEntee’s usual places for a tree were so wet that he settled for a small hemlock on the side of the hill where he lived. It was a hill that offered a panoramic view of the entire village as well as the Rondout Creek and the Hudson River. His father James, an engineer who had helped build the nearby Delaware and Hudson Canal, had built the first house on the hill and the family still lived there. [Read more…] about A Christmas in Kingston in the 1880s

America’s First Christmas Card & An Early Albany Department Store

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America's First Christmas Card, Designed and printed by Richard H. Pease for his "Pease's Great Variety Store in the Temple of Fancy" c.1851. Image courtesy of Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections.Before F. W. Woolworths’, Whitney’s, or even Myer’s department store, there was Pease’s Great Variety Store, located in the Temple of Fancy at 516 and 518 Broadway in Albany, NY.

As with other fancy goods stores, Pease’s catered to the middle and upper middle class selling highly decorated goods like ceramics, prints, furniture and other decorative household items that progressively thinking people might have wanted to purchase. [Read more…] about America’s First Christmas Card & An Early Albany Department Store

Music and Politics in the Early United States

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ben franklins world podcastWhat was music like in Early America? How did different early Americans — Native Americans, African Americans, and White Americans — integrate and use music in their daily lives? This episode of Ben Franklin’s World is the fourth of a 5-episode series about music in Early America.

The exploration continues with music and politics in the early United States. Billy Coleman, an Assistant Teaching Professor of History at the University of Missouri and author of the book Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865 (UNC Press, 2020), joins Liz Covart to investigate the role music played in early American politics. [Read more…] about Music and Politics in the Early United States

Joseph Pollet Self-Portrait Acquired by Woodstock Historical

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Joseph C. Pollet (1897–1979) “Self Portrait” after conservationBorn in Switzerland, Joseph C. Pollet (1897–1979) emigrated to New York City in 1911 from Albbruck, Germany. By age 21 he had a promising career as an advertising copywriter, while studying painting at the Art Students League with John Sloan, Robert Henri, and Homer Boss.

An important member of the Woodstock Art Colony, Pollet was best known for his portraits and realistic rural landscapes. He settled near Woodstock where he retained ties, even during the several years from 1954 until 1961 when he lived in Paris and Italy. In 1971, a fire destroyed nearly 150 of his paintings in his Greenwich Village studio. [Read more…] about Joseph Pollet Self-Portrait Acquired by Woodstock Historical

The Origins of Rockwell Kent: The Development of an Artist and His Craft

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Our America a series designed by Kent for sets of chinaRockwell Kent, the artist who made the Adirondacks his home from 1928 until his death in 1971, mastered more media than any of his contemporaries, even if one were to include Andy Warhol.

And no one was more skillful than he at agitprop – exhorting the masses to political action through expressive combinations of images and words, in posters, pamphlets, books and even bottle caps, those he used to seal the milk bottles from his Ausable Forks dairy farm. [Read more…] about The Origins of Rockwell Kent: The Development of an Artist and His Craft

$25M in Improvements Planned for Olana State Historic Site

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Frederic Church Center, View from Lakeside Terrace to WestOlana State Historic Site will undergo a $25 million site improvement project over the next two years, including construction of the Frederic Church Center for Art and Landscape, a new entry and orientation facility at the historic site in Hudson, Columbia County.

The sustainably designed, all-electric Frederic Church Center will be a gateway to all visitors to Olana State Historic Site [Read more…] about $25M in Improvements Planned for Olana State Historic Site