History, Natural History & the Arts
Artist Mark Priest’s work centers on the intersection of narrative painting, historical inquiry, and figurative representation.
Over the past two decades, Priest has conducted extensive research into the Underground Railroad, slavery, and the lives of Black American freedom seekers, including Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Charles Nalle, and William Still. [Read more…] about Artist Mark Priest Features Struggles of Slavery & the Underground Railroad
“New York City got its first monument of a real Black American in 1946 when the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx dedicated a bronze bust to Booker T. Washington,” David Felsen writes in the introduction to New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide (History Press, 2025). “Behind every first is a story of triumph over adversity and exclusion.”
A 2021 study of the nation’s monuments found that 50% of the top 50 most memorialized people enslaved other people and that only 10% of the top 50 most memorialized people are Black/Indigenous. Just six percent of the Top 50 nationwide are women. It wasn’t until 2007, that the city dedicated its first monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman. [Read more…] about New York City Monuments of Black Americans: A History and Guide
The National Parks Service (NPS), under orders to remove diverse, equitable and inclusive language from its websites by the Trump regime, has taken a portrait of Harriet Tubman off their website about the Underground Railroad and changed the website’s language to remove the term ‘freedom seekers.’
Tubman, whose birth name was Araminta Ross (1822 – 1913), was an activist abolitionist who lived much of her life in New York State, where she is buried. Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad. [Read more…] about Harriett Tubman Removed from NPS Underground Railroad Page
The Gilder Lehrman Institute in New York City has announced the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize will be awarded to Edda L. Fields-Black for her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2024).
The book tells the story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman‘s most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants. [Read more…] about Book About Daring Harriet Tubman Raid Wins Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
Organizers from the Underground Railroad Consortium of New York State (URCNYS) will make a presentation about the proposed Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad New York Corridor. Tubman was an enslaved woman and a freedom seeker who returned many times to the South to free others. [Read more…] about The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad New York Corridor
In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn in Cayuga County built a prison in 1814 that enclosed industrial factories.
There, “slaves of the state” were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system. [Read more…] about Auburn Prison: America’s Original Prison for Profit
From the time slavery was introduced to the Colonies until it was abolished in 1865, enslaved people made ceaseless efforts to escape its reach. The flight to freedom, whether by foot, horseback, carriage, wagon or boat, was difficult and exceedingly dangerous. [Read more…] about USPS Issuing Underground Railroad Forever Stamps
Central New York communities that flourished with canal-related development and rail connections throughout the 19th century also became hotbeds for religious and social movements of the early 1800s as the area’s population rapidly grew.
Religious freedom granted by the United States Bill of Rights combined with rapid societal and technological changes experienced by Americans living through western expansion fueled an American spiritual movement that was exemplified in the newly opened frontier of New York. [Read more…] about Social and Religious Movements in Central New York
The National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum (NAHOF) will present Black History in Upstate New York programs, created by Colgate University graduate Victoria Basulto, beginning August 16th.
The daily programs will provide a combination of bite-sized informational videos and longer presentations by scholars on historical figures and places that emphasize the crucial role Black Americans have played in the history of Upstate New York. The events will be available on the Hall of Fame’s YouTube channel. [Read more…] about Black History in Upstate New York Programs Begin August 16th
On the April 2021 episode of “Crossroads of Rockland History,” the topic was the nationally-touring sculpture: Harriet Tubman – Journey to Freedom by Wesley Woffard.
The sculpture will be placed in the Haverstraw African American Memorial Park for seven weeks beginning April 20th, 2021. Clare Sheridan’s guest was Virginia “Ginny” Norleet, founder of the Haverstraw African American Connection (HAAC). Ginny spoke about how the HAAC arranged for this sculpture to be in Haverstraw, and the auxiliary programs planned for each Saturday while the sculpture is in Haverstraw. [Read more…] about Touring Harriet Tubman Statue on Crossroads of Rockland History
I like the movie Harriet, especially the singing, but again, I also liked Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Wolverine, and Dr. Strange (but not Thor, Aquaman, or the Avengers series). Harriet the movie is about a super-hero whose superpower is that God gives her specific directions about what to do (turn left at the river).
Harriet in the movie is based on an important historical figure, but in the end, she is a movie character, not the historic Harriet Tubman. As a movie, two-thumbs up; as history, too many rotten tomatoes. [Read more…] about Harriet the Movie and the Harriet Tubman of History
In April, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that Harriet Tubman will be featured on the front of new $20 bills. Tubman is the first woman to appear on modern U.S. currency. She displaces former president Andrew Jackson, whose image will move to the back of the bill.
Lew’s decision came after a year’s discussion, including soliciting public input, on images for redesigned currency. [Read more…] about Harriet Tubman: The Long Road To The $20 Bill
Residents of antebellum New York State assumed a large responsibility for sheltering slaves fleeing to Canada. It’s rare that we hear how families dealt with the challenge of concealing a fugitive, a crime for which they could pay high fines or even jail terms. The following account of Martha and David Wright’s experience reveals some of the complications involved when a family with young children offered lodging to runaways.
Martha and David Wright offered their Auburn, New York home as a station on the Underground Railroad from its early years. In letters to her sister, Lucretia Mott, Martha described the stories and challenges that boarding fugitive slaves presented to her and her family. One of those stories happened in January, 1843. [Read more…] about Harboring Runaway Slaves in Antebellum New York
When we visited the national park in Seneca Falls, NY this year we asked Noemi “Ami” Ghazala, superintendent of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park, about the significance of the feds reaching the “stakeholder” phase in the Votes for Women trail process. “We really don’t know what it means,” she said. “The criteria may sit there for a short time or remain there for years.”
This was alarming enough. Then we checked into the statistical probability of Congressional approval for funding the Votes for Women federal trail in the Finger Lakes region. We consulted the tracking web site for Congress and stumbled on the prediction that we might find coal in our stockings this year if we’re expecting a reauthorization of a bill that includes a Votes for Women federal trail. This is complicated by the fact that federal funding must be delivered separately. [Read more…] about Votes for Women Trail: Federal Legislation Needed Now
Each week day there’s a consistent flow of visitors at the Harriet Tubman Home, with people anxious to find out more about Tubman, her life story, and see for themselves where Tubman lived and operated a haven for the aged at 180 South Street in Auburn.
Visitors pull into the parking lot to visit the property, museum exhibit, and take advantage of guided tours from the moment the doors open in the morning until closing at the end of the day. License plates on the travelers’ vehicles are from New York State and beyond. [Read more…] about Harriet Tubman and the Projected National Park
It’s the centennial year of abolitionist and suffragist Harriet Tubman’s death in 1913. Her Auburn, NY house, the home for the aged she founded on the property, and the museum attract considerable attention in upstate New York. We visited the Tubman historic site on the fifth day of our fall 2013 blogging tour of the “Cradle of the women’s rights movement in the US.” [Read more…] about The Politics of Harriet Tubman and Barack Obama
On April 27, 1860, a few months after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, a group of blacks and whites, including Harriet Tubman, came together to free fugitive slave Charles Nalle from slave catchers bent on returning him to his owner in Culpepper, Virginia.
The book Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War (2010) by the late Scott Christianson tells the tale of Nalle, a man whose skin was so fair he could have passed for white but didn’t, and relates the of racial inequality, rule of law, civil disobedience and violent resistance to slavery that circulated in the abolitionist movement during the antebellum period in Troy, NY. [Read more…] about The Rescue of Fugitive Slave Charles Nalle
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