History, Natural History & the Arts
Built to supply American forces in World War I, the enormous Cass Gilbert-designed Brooklyn Army Terminal served as a supply base for the American military for nearly 50 years, employing more than 20,000 people during World War II.
Not far away Brooklyn Navy Yard, founded in 1801, was once the nation’s premier naval shipyard, building, repairing, and outfitting vessels from the War of 1812 through the Cold War. [Read more…] about Brooklyn Navy Yard & Army Terminal Highlight NYC Military History
In 1946, New York and the nation were in the throes of what was generally being called “reconversion” – redeploying workers and the industrial base away from the largest war in U.S. history toward a peacetime economy.
A moment in time: on January 25, 1946, the venerable dreadnought U.S.S. New York (BB-34) slipped her moorings at Pier 26 in the North River, at the foot of Beach Street in Manhattan, bound for the Pacific. [Read more…] about In 1946, New York Sailed into Troubled Postwar Waters
About 11,500 Americans lost their lives aboard British prison ships from 1776 to 1783. More soldiers, sailors and civilians died aboard the prison ships than in all of the Revolutionary War battles combined. It started with the Battle of Brooklyn (the Battle of Long Island).
The City of New York played an important role throughout the American Revolution. Not only was the city an important port of commerce, providing supplies and food to the Continental Army, but it served as a central communications route between the northern and southern states. [Read more…] about Remembering the British Prison Ship Martyrs of New York City
As Nazi Germany began its domination of Europe, America was woefully unprepared for fighting. Our military was small, poorly supplied and without the prospect of a robust manufacturing sector that might have provided the arms, planes, ships, tanks and other equipment it would have needed.
And then, on December 7, 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. [Read more…] about New York City During World War Two
On July 1, 1944, as the Second World War raged in Europe and the Pacific, a Western Union telegram arrived at the Saratoga Springs home of Aurora Asheych notifying her of the death in combat of her 21-year-old son, U.S. Marine Corps Pfc. Joseph Leonard Gagnon. Two months later, she received word that another son, Army Pvt. Victor Francis Gaynor, 19, was reported killed in action in France. Earlier that year, all six of Aurora’s sons were in the military. [Read more…] about The Saratoga County Family That Lost 2 Of 6 Sons During WWII
Initially many thought the severe Wall Street crash of October 1929 was a temporary phenomenon and like many subsequent crashes (i.e. 1987, 2008) the stock market would recover in a few months or years.
Unfortunately, this did not prove to be the case. After some upward spurts, stocks on the New York Stock Exchange continued to fall for the next three years and economic conditions throughout the country continued to worsen, so that by 1932 the market closed at 41, a drop of 89% over its 1929 high of 381. Employment in Wall Street firms plummeted, as the once heady activity evaporated and the Great Depression took hold.
The response would require a great reset between Wall Street and working Americans. [Read more…] about The First Great Reset: Wall St, the Great Depression & the Pecora Commission
For thousands of years prior to the early 1800s maritime transportation was dependent on sailing ships. In the first few decades of the 19th century however, entrepreneurs in New York helped revolutionize the industry so that one hundred years later sailing ships were an anachronism that hardly existed, except for show.
In the latter part of the 1700s the development of the Boulton & Watt steam engine in England made it theoretically possible to power a boat. Before 1800 a number of inventors, including New Yorkers such as Nicholas Roosevelt, John Fitch, Robert R. Livingston, John Stevens III and others, experimented with boats that used such steam engines. Before Robert Fulton made his first run in the North River steamboat (later renamed Clermont) in 1807 more than a dozen steamboats had been constructed in the United States with varying degrees of success. There were difficulties in making such craft commercially viable. [Read more…] about Fulton’s Steamboat, The Black Ball Line & The Erie Canal
The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (State Parks) have announced that nine projects and one individual are being recognized with a 2021 New York State Preservation Award for their efforts to preserve the state’s history.
The honors include the restoration of a Mohawk Valley Carnegie Library, the adaptive reuse of a Buffalo grain silo, and the recognition of a historic neighborhood on Fire Island. [Read more…] about NYS Historic Preservation Awards Announced
The city of New York was at the center of the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade during the 1850s and early 1860 conveying kidnapped and enslaved Africans from the coast of West Africa primarily into Cuba where there was an expanding sugar industry.
In The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage (Yale Univ. Press, 2020), John Harris, a professor of history at Erskine College in South Carolina, estimates that between 1853 and 1867, 474 shipments carrying almost 200,000 men women and children were brought to Cuba. Most of this was brokered by transplanted Brazilians and Portuguese known as the Portuguese Company, who shifted their operation to New York because of the decline of the Angola to Brazil slave trade in the 1850s. Harris argues they were supported by the pro-slavery faction of the city’s Democratic Party and its chief financial institutions. [Read more…] about New Book Considers The Last Slave Ships & New York
A decidedly unglamorous black-hulled cargo barge plying the turbid waters off Staten Island represents the last working evidence of two centuries of New York history. McAllister Towing & Transportation Co.’s Atlantic Trader, a 300-foot container-carrying barge which entered service in 1977 appears to be the last vessel built from the ground up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. [Read more…] about Decades After Closure, Brooklyn Navy Yard Sails On
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jennifer Egan and historian and activist Annelise Orleck will be the honorees on Thursday, November 29 at the New York Labor History Association’s 32nd Annual John Commerford Labor Education Awards.
Egan and Orleck are being honored for the work they do bringing workers’ history to life and illuminating its relevance for today. Egan’s most recent novel, Manhattan Beach, and Orleck’s most recent book, We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now, demonstrate just how much workers’ stories matter to understanding history. [Read more…] about Jennifer Egan, Annelise Orleck Win Labor Education Awards
Robert Furman’s book Brooklyn Heights: the Rise, Fall and Rebirth of America’s First Suburb (The History Press, 2015) is a substantial illustrated history of Brooklyn. The book takes a look at the moving forces of history, and shows that technology is the great creator and destroyer, especially in the rise and fall of cities.
Brooklyn was once a great industrial city, like many others. It was enabled by transportation technology: steam ferries, railroads, canals. It was once the largest freight port in the world, in particular in Red Hook’s Atlantic and Erie Basins. They were the discharging end of the Erie Canal, and later expanded into international shipping. [Read more…] about Brooklyn Heights: An Industrial History
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