History, Natural History & the Arts
Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack’s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
Stanley A. Ransom, Jr.’s new book America’s First Black Poet; Jupiter Hammon of Long Island (Outskirts Press, Inc., 2020) is a collection of poems and writings of Jupiter Hammon, who spent most of his life as a slave in Lloyd Neck, Long Island. [Read more…] about New Book On Early Black Poet Jupiter Hammon of Long Island
Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack’s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
A new children’s book, The Efficient, Inventive (Often Annoying) Melvil Dewey (Calkins Creek, 2020) by Alexis O’Neill and illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham, is a colorful biography about the creator and implementer of the Dewey Decimal Classification system, who had a significant and lasting impact in libraries but ended his career in disgrace for his racist and sexist views. [Read more…] about Melvil Dewey: Efficient, Inventive, Annoyingly Bigoted
Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack’s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
The new book Buffalo at the Crossroads: The Past, Present, and Future of American Urbanism (Cornell University Press, 2020), edited by Peter H. Christensen, is an introduction to Buffalo’s architecture and developed landscape, featuring essays by twelve authors. [Read more…] about New Book: Buffalo at the Crossroads
Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack’s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
Angelica Shirley Carpenter’s new children’s picture book The Voice of Liberty (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2020), with illustrations by Edwin Fotheringham, tells the story of three women’s rights activists, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Lillie Devereux Blake, and Lillie’s daughter, Katherine Devereux Blake, who staged a protest at the dedication of the Statue of Liberty on October 28, 1886.
Why protest that statue? Because they thought it wrong for Liberty to be portrayed as a woman when women had no liberty, not even the right to vote, in the United States. [Read more…] about Statute of Liberty Protest: Picture Book Highlights Women’s 1886 Demonstration
The book Bean Pickers, American Immigrant Portraits by Karen Foresti Hempson (Jacobs Press, Inc., 2019) focuses on eight true-life portrayals of Italian immigrants and their families, all beginning their American lives as summer bean pickers in Upstate New York.
The book features over one hundred authentic photos and documents, illustrating personal stories from the early twentieth century immigration wave, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. Each character finds his/her way out of poverty through such avenues as bootlegging, playing baseball, joining the military. [Read more…] about Bean Pickers: Upstate Italian-American Immigrants
Book purchases made through this link support New York Almanack’s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
The new book A College of Her Own: The History of Barnard (Columbia University Press, 2020) by Robert McCaughey offers a comprehensive and lively narrative of Barnard College from its beginnings to the present day. [Read more…] about A Lively New History of Barnard College Published
This week on The Historians Podcast, Jennet Conant discusses her book The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster That Launched the War on Cancer. Also heard is film maker Nick Spark who lobbied for U.S. government recognition of medical doctor Stewart Alexander whose work chronicling the Bari disaster in southern Italy was the impetus to developing chemotherapy. [Read more…] about Secrets, Poison Gas and Chemotherapy (Podcast)
The new book Old Stone Fort – Guardian of Schoharie County History Since 1772 by Jeff O’Connor features over 79 maps, illustrations, and photographs that help narrate the history of one of upstate New York’s oldest and most beloved museums. [Read more…] about A New Book About Schoharie’s Old Stone Fort
What really happened at Donnelly’s Corners in the spring of 1929?
The question haunts the exciting and thought-provoking novel, The Power Line (Outskirts Press, 2020) by Christopher Shaw.
According to Shaw, the project began in the seventies when the guide and regional historian Abel St. Martin began recording the memories of older people around Saranac Lake and Lake Aurora in the Adirondacks. [Read more…] about New Novel: The Power Line by Christopher Shaw
During the Revolutionary Era much of New York State was a heavily forested frontier, sparsely populated but bitterly divided.
Although the only major campaign in the Adirondacks would end at the Battle of Saratoga, factional raiding parties traversed the mountains and valleys of the Adirondacks throughout the war.
Author Marie Danielle Annette Williams details many of those frontier raids in her new book The Revolutionary War in the Adirondacks: Raids in the Wilderness (Arcadia Publishing, 2020). [Read more…] about New Book: The Revolutionary War in the Adirondacks