This week on The Historians Podcast, Giovanni Ruscitti of Colorado is author of the memoir Cobblestones, Conversations, and Corks: A Son’s Discovery of His Italian Heritage. Ruscitti chronicles the history of his Italian immigrant family and a visit to his ancestral homeland of Cansano in Abruzzo. [Read more…] about One Immigrant Family’s Italian Roots
Immigration
Amsterdam’s Polish Cowboy and Other Tales
This week on The Historians Podcast, Bob Cudmore’s history columns from Daily Gazette and Amsterdam Recorder provide information for this chit chat podcast with producer Dave Greene.
Hear stories about Amsterdam’s connections with Ukraine, World War II, Amsterdam’s link with singer Jeff Buckley’s popular version of “Hallelujah” by songwriter Leonard Cohen and the story of Jack Patton, the Polish cowboy from Amsterdam. [Read more…] about Amsterdam’s Polish Cowboy and Other Tales
Swiss Americans, Neuchâtel and the Slave Trade
The earliest Swiss immigrants to North America were religious refugees. This group consisted predominantly of German speaking Anabaptists who began settling in eastern Pennsylvania from the mid-seventeenth century onward following a schism among the Brethren in 1693 which led to a division between Mennonites (named after Menno Simons of Friesland) and Amish (named after their leader Jakob Ammann who was born in the canton of Bern). [Read more…] about Swiss Americans, Neuchâtel and the Slave Trade
At Spier Falls Immigrants Built America, Or Died Trying
Adirondack history is naturally rife with river-related stories — wildly successful fishing trips, damaging floods, wilderness exploration, and dam construction.
Rivers were the lifeblood of development: settlements sprang up along waterways, where partial diversion of streams provided the wheel-turning power necessary to many industries. But freshets were so common and destructive that dams were introduced as flood-control measures, and then for hydropower as the electrification of society unfolded. [Read more…] about At Spier Falls Immigrants Built America, Or Died Trying
The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World, Andrew Porwancher, the Wick Cary Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and the Ernest May Fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, joins Liz Covart to investigate the Jewish world and upbringing of Alexander Hamilton using details from his book, The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton (Princeton, 2021). [Read more…] about The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton
Islands of Punishment and Exclusion
The exclusion of “undesirables” to remote lands has a long history. The shameful attempts by contemporary governments to “solve” the refugee problem in that manner has had precedents.
During the mid-1930s Mussolini dumped socialists and anti-fascists in the inaccessible and malaria-ridden southern areas of the country.
The use of islands as off-shore detention centers has a parallel history. The government of Charles I locked up its opponents at Jersey, Guernsey, or the Isles of Scilly. Having lost the English Civil War, Charles I himself was incarcerated in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. Faced with continuing sedition and agitation, Charles II sent several former leaders of the Interregnum into island isolation. [Read more…] about Islands of Punishment and Exclusion
New York: A Metropolis of Murals
Plastered on walls in public spaces and civic buildings, scattered in hotels and restaurants, hidden in private mansions, a plenitude of murals form part of New York City’s infrastructure.
Although American interest in the medium originated in the 1893 World Fair which presented visitors with numerous large-scale murals, the vogue for this form of artistic expression dates back to the Great Depression. With the introduction of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, federal funds were made available to support and promote public art. Muralism became fashionable. [Read more…] about New York: A Metropolis of Murals
Bankers and Brush Makers: What’s in a Name?
Banker and philanthropist Felix Moritz Warburg was born in January 1871 in Hamburg. In 1895 he married Frieda Schiff, the only daughter of the New York financier Jacob Schiff. In 1908 the couple had a six-story mansion built in a French Gothic Revival style on Fifth Avenue. Felix died in October 1937 and was buried in Salem Fields Cemetery, Brooklyn. Seven years later his widow donated their estate as a permanent home for New York’s Jewish Museum.
The source and context of the topographic Warburg surname throws light on complex historical patterns of migration. [Read more…] about Bankers and Brush Makers: What’s in a Name?
Lake George Village Eyes International Student Dorm
Students who travel from foreign countries to work on Lake George face a scarcity of affordable, safe housing, according to Mayor Bob Blais.
As a founder of the Student Connection, a group established to help foreign workers resolve issues related to their employment, Blais has promoted initiatives to improve the stock of available housing, from inspecting facilities to posting listings from landlords. [Read more…] about Lake George Village Eyes International Student Dorm
Free People of Color in Early America
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World Podcast, Warren Milteer Jr., an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885 ((LSU Press, 2020) and Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2021), joins Liz to explore the lives and experiences of free people of color, men and women who ranked somewhere in the middle or middle bottom of early American society. [Read more…] about Free People of Color in Early America