History, Natural History & the Arts
Between 1840 and 1860, a great wave of Irish immigrants washed up on the shores of Lake Champlain. So many, in fact, that the inland sea was nicknamed “the Irish lake.”
The reason, of course, was poverty and job opportunities. Although Irish Catholics had started arriving in New York and Vermont in numbers by 1820, Champlain truly became the Irish lake in the mid-1840s during the Great Famine. [Read more…] about Lake Champlain: The Irish Lake
An outspoken critic of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, Jewish photojournalist Gisèle [Gisela] Freund fled her native Germany in 1933 with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Having settled in Paris, she obtained her PhD at the Sorbonne in 1936 and would become the most talented chronicler of the vibrant and multi-national bohemian community of artists and writers that made its home in Paris during the 1930s.
By 1939, Freund had photographed many of the greatest writers and artists of the twentieth century, amongst them Henri Matisse, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, André Breton, Colette, André Malraux, Paul Valéry, Tennessee Williams, Peggy Guggenheim, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. [Read more…] about The Battle for Ulysses in Paris & New York
Recent artifacts donated and purchased at the Sackets Harbor Battlefield State Historic Site include a War of 1812 uniform button. The one-piece copper button with low-convex face with Prince of Wales’s plume, coronet, and motto with “100” below is in excellent shape and appears to be a water recovery. It comes with the original card stating it was recovered in Sackets Harbor in 1961.
This may not seem a particularly desirable purchase, but it has a unique story. Although the 100th Regiment arrived May 29th, 1813 with the Crown Forces, of the many war-era buttons in the site’s collection there were no 100th Regiment buttons. [Read more…] about The Irish 100th Regiment at Sackets Harbor & A Mysterious Button
Novelist Hedwig “Vicki” Baum was born in January 1888 in Vienna into a Jewish family. She attracted international attention in 1929 with her novel Menschen im Hotel which started off a vogue for the “hotel novel.” It was staged as a play in Berlin by the great director Max Reinhardt that same year.
Translated into English as Grand Hotel, the story was turned into an Academy Award winning film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1932, starring Greta Garbo. The author had moved to Los Angeles whilst writing the screenplay, but the rise of fascism stopped her from returning to Europe. By 1935 the Nazis had banned her work. She became an American citizen three years later and began writing in English rather than in German. [Read more…] about Common Carp and Christmas
The March 2025 episode of the Crossroads of Rockland History podcast celebrates both Women’s History Month and Saint Patrick’s Day in a discussion with Eve Kahn, the former Antiques Editor for the New York Times and Elizabeth Stack the Executive Director at the American Irish Historical Society who explore the life of Anna Frances Levins (1876-1941). [Read more…] about Irish American Photographer Anna Frances Levins
What can butter and ham tell us about Irish history? According to Leslie and Dan Landrigan’s A History of the Irish, As Told By Their Food: A Book About Ireland and Irish America, With Recipes (Self-Published, 2023), quite a lot. So can the “Salmon of Knowledge,” the priest’s drop of whiskey and the pig — “the little gentleman who pays the rent.” [Read more…] about A History of the Irish, As Told By Their Food
Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a good place to be a woman. Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America were many young women who traveled on their own, hoping for a better life. Some lived lives of quiet industry and piety.
Others quickly found themselves in trouble – bad trouble, and on an astonishing scale. [Read more…] about Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women
As millions of Irish immigrants and their descendants created community in the United States over the centuries, they neither remained Irish nor simply became American. Instead, they created a culture and defined an identity that was unique to their circumstances, a new people that they would continually reinvent: Irish Americans. [Read more…] about Becoming Irish American: Making and Remaking a People
Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was free from regulation until anti-Asian racism on the West Coast triggered the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese immigration in the 1880s. Studies of European immigration and government control on the East Coast have, meanwhile, focused on Ellis Island, which opened in 1892. [Read more…] about Expelling the Poor: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy
Many people from Clinton County, NY have ancestors from Ireland or Canada. In the 1850 census, in the Town of Ausable, one in four people were born in Canada or Ireland. In the Town of Clinton, every other person would have been born in Canada or Ireland. In the whole of Clinton County in 1850, only half could claim to be born in New York, as was the case for the Town of Black Brook. [Read more…] about Clinton County’s Irish Immigrant Legacy
Call it a flower or call it a weed – clover is a plant everyone knows. Who hasn’t idled away an hour hunting for a four-leaf clover, hoping for good luck? [Read more…] about Clover: A Widely Naturalized Non-Native
On July 26, 1788, the Convention of the State of New York, meeting in Poughkeepsie, ratified the Constitution of the United States and, in doing so, was admitted to the new union as the eleventh of the original thirteen colonies joining together as the United States of America.
For New Yorkers, it had been an eventful year. [Read more…] about The African Burial Ground, Columbia University & Manhattan’s Grave-Robbers
Beyond 2022 is working to recreate, digitally, Ireland‘s lost national treasure. This all-island and international research program combines historical research, archival discovery and technical innovation to track down copies and transcripts of original records lost in 1922.
Reuniting collections scattered around the globe, the aim of Beyond 2022 is to launch the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland — an open-access, virtual reconstruction of the Record Treasury destroyed at the Public Record Office of Ireland in the Four Courts Fire of 1922.
[Read more…] about Ireland’s Public Record Office Virtual Reconstruction Primer
Patrick and Bridget Kennedy arrived in the United States following the Great Famine — penniless and hungry. Less than a decade after their marriage in Boston, Patrick’s sudden death left Bridget to raise their children single-handedly.
Her rise from housemaid to shop owner in the face of rampant poverty and discrimination kept her family intact, allowing her only son P. J. to become the first American Kennedy elected to public office — the first of many. [Read more…] about The First Kennedys: Roots of an American Dynasty
The Friends of the Albany Rural Cemetery will hold a ceremony on Saturday, August 21st to dedicate a military marker for Irish immigrant Civil War Medal of Honor recipient Terrence Begley.
Begley was born in Ireland and raised in Albany. He enlisted as a private in the 7th NY Heavy Artillery regiment, an Albany regiment, on February 11th, 1864.
[Read more…] about Irish Immigrant, Medal of Honor Winner Terrence Begley Being Honored in Albany
On November 11th, 1919, the first anniversary was celebrated of the Armistice that ended the First World War. For the occasion, a grand ball was held at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Top of the bill was the hugely popular Southern Syncopated Orchestra, one of the first jazz bands to visit Britain, Scotland, and Ireland. [Read more…] about Anxiety Over Jazz In Ireland Followed A Tragic Shipwreck
In 1844 America was in a state of deep unrest, grappling with xenophobia, racial, and ethnic tension on a national scale that feels singular to our time, but echoes the earliest anti-immigrant sentiments of the country.
In that year Philadelphia was set aflame by a group of Protestant ideologues — avowed nativists — who were seeking social and political power rallied by charisma and fear of the Irish immigrant menace. [Read more…] about Fires of Philadelphia: A New Book On The 1844 Nativist Riots
Martin Van Buren’s relationship with the Irish community in New York was rather incidental, developing in parallel to the rise of his career.
The root of what became a favorable association between the two seems to be an inadvertent outcome grounded in political events that shook Ireland and America beginning in 1798 and continued throughout Van Buren’s career/life. [Read more…] about Martin Van Buren and New York’s Irish Community
The Irish American Heritage Museum has announced “Irish Involvement in American Labor,” a program with Terry Golway, PhD, set for Friday, May 7th. [Read more…] about Irish Involvement in American Labor (Virtual Talk)
This season of A New York Minute in History features a brand new format. Each episode will delve into a chapter of New York’s history through a topic introduced by one of the William G. Pomeroy Foundation’s historic markers, which collectively tell the story of the state’s unique and important history.
In this first episode of the new series, Devin Lander and Lauren Roberts investigate the invasions of Canada by the Fenian Brotherhood, a group of Irish Nationalists intent of freeing Ireland from British control. These invasions were launched from several locations in upstate New York. [Read more…] about The Irish Invasions of Canada (Podcast)
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