History, Natural History & the Arts
On August 21, 1790, President George Washington composed a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, and to its leader, Moses Seixas (1744–1809). Seixas had written a letter to Washington four days earlier.
Washington responded with the brief letter below, expressing America’s enduring commitment to the principle of tolerance and the freedom of conscience. [Read more…] about George Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, 1790
Consider the pickle. Whether sour or sweet, sliced or speared, it’s a seasoned veteran vegetable with a story to tell. New York City plays a big part in that tale, as does Long Island.
The latest Long Island History Project podcast reaches deep into the barrel of food history and talks with Paul van Ravestein, co-author along with Monique Mulder of The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles (Princeton Architectural Press, 2026). [Read more…] about Food History: Long Island’s Pickle Kings
Daniel Talbot did not simply show movies. He helped teach America how to watch them.
My father was born in the Bronx in 1926 to Polish Jewish immigrants. He came of age during the Depression and World War II, part of a generation that understood culture not as decoration, but as a way of thinking about the world.
He was tough, funny, exacting, deeply humanistic, and unmistakably New York. [Read more…] about Daniel Talbot, New Yorker Films, and the Art of Cultural Courage
History is often kindest to people who leave something permanent behind — a building, a business, a name etched onto a marquee. Their legacy remains visible. But those who built careers around live entertainment worked in a far more fleeting medium. The worlds they created existed in sound, light, energy, and memory, disappearing almost as quickly as they arrived.
Harry Altman (1890-1966) was one of those people: a once-prominent Buffalo nightclub owner and entertainment promoter whose name has largely faded from New York’s cultural memory, despite decades spent shaping the nightlife of Western New York. [Read more…] about The Man Buffalo Forgot: Harry Altman’s Lost Entertainment Empire
Arnold Rothstein was of the most famous of America’s 20th century criminal masterminds, and for more than 20 years, the New York City native spent his summers in Saratoga Springs, gambling on the horses by day – and just plain gambling by night.
He first started coming to Saratoga on a regular basis in 1904, when he was 22 years old, and he largely gave up on Saratoga after 1925 – by then, he was able to make so much money bootlegging liquor that he no longer spent much time gambling at the Saratoga Race Course. [Read more…] about Arnold Rothstein’s Saratoga Club & The 1919 World Series Scandal
Poet Emma Lazarus was active from the mid-1860s until her death in 1887. She descended from a well-established Sephardic family in Manhattan. Her presence coincided with the arrival of waves of Ashkenazi refugees from Eastern Europe. Their customs, Yiddish language, and political activism were distinct from the assimilated Sephardic community.
Emma created two contrasting sonnets on immigration, both dated 1883. Set against the socio-political background of their time of publication, these poems highlight some of the historical and continuous controversies surrounding the issue. [Read more…] about Emma Lazarus, Nativism & The Gates of Immigration
Launched in July 1900, the transatlantic liner S.S. Vaderland (Flemish for fatherland) sailed the route between Antwerp and Hoboken on behalf of the Red Star Line. Catering for 340 first-class, 200 second-class, and over 600 third-class (formerly steerage) passengers, the liner was one of “mid tier” elegance rather than opulence and designed to compete with its rivals of the Cunard and White Star lines. She played a key role in the early history of mass emigration from Europe to the United States.
On May 25, 1912, the liner left Antwerp, arriving at Ellis Island for immigrant inspection on June 4th. On board was a talented twenty-year-old Polish woman keen to break free from traditional Jewish domestic constraints and find intellectual and sexual freedom in Manhattan. [Read more…] about Lesbian History: Eve Adams, Monocles, Tearooms & Deportations
From December 1852 until August 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted, who later gained renown as a landscape architect for designing New York City’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, traveled through the American South as a special correspondent for the New-York Daily Times, the predecessor of The New York Times.
His reports published by the Times under the name Yeoman, were included in a 1856 book as A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States; With Remarks on Their Economy. [Read more…] about Frederick Law Olmsted’s Reports on Slavery in the South
In 1903, Ashkenazi Jews in Ukraine suffered systemic discrimination and severe poverty. Brutally enforcing residency laws, officers conducted nighttime raids and expelled those who lacked proper paperwork. A wave of (state-sanctioned) antisemitic attacks throughout the Russian Empire caused panic and displacement.
This persecution preceded the terrifying pogrom in Kyiv (Kiev) in October 1905. By that time, the Dibner family, like many fellow Jews, had fled from repression to New York City and settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. [Read more…] about Bern Dibner: Electrical Engineer, Industrialist, and Historian of Science
The rampant industrialism of the Gilded Age and early Progressive Era eventually took root in Little Falls, NY. The city and the surrounding Mohawk Valley had served as a hub for immigrant and migrant labor for a significant time. The construction of the Little Falls Canal and the Erie Canal during the 18th and 19th centuries attracted a multitude of predominantly Irish laborers.
In the latter half of the 19th century, as industrialism took hold, the mass construction of railroads attracted even greater numbers of immigrant workers to Little Falls in search of jobs within the burgeoning factory apparatus. [Read more…] about Immigration and Labor in Little Falls, New York
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist [Read more…] about ‘First They Came’ by Pastor Martin Niemöller
Today the state of Minnesota is engaged in the first General Strike in nearly 80 years. There have been thousands of strikes in American history, but only about a dozen General Strikes. One of the first strikes took place in the city of New York in 1677. Afterward a dozen cart-men (one-horse cart operators) were criminally prosecuted “for not obeying the Command and Doing their Dutyes as becomes them in their Places” and fined.
About 80 strikes in the U.S. have involved over 100,000 workers. Here are 13 strikes every New Yorker should know about: [Read more…] about Strike! 13 Strikes Every New Yorker Should Know About
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
Today’s battle over Christianity in American public schools has deep roots. In the nineteenth century it was an intramural struggle between Protestants and later-arriving Catholics.
But at Christmastime in 1905, when the Presbyterian principal of a Brooklyn elementary school urged his Jewish students to be more like Jesus Christ, Jews entered the fray in a big way. [Read more…] about The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906
The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025), offers a new look at over a century of New York City‘s history of Yiddish popular culture.
Henry H. Sapoznik – a Peabody Award-winning co-producer of NPR’s Yiddish Radio Project – tells the story in over a baker’s dozen chapters on theater, music, architecture, crime, Blacks and Jews, restaurants, real estate, and journalism. [Read more…] about A Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City
Social Realism as a movement in art and fiction emerged between the World Wars in response to the political and socio-economic turmoil of the period. To create in the 1930s, both in Europe and the United States, meant making an ideological choice.
The direction might be reactionary or revolutionary, it could be religious or materialist – the routes had in common a shift away from the experimentation of previous decades towards tradition, from individualism towards shared views. [Read more…] about Labor and Art: Pins, Needles & Depression
In 1867 nineteen-year-old Brooklyn-born painter Edwin Blashfield traveled to Paris to study with Léon Bonnat whose studio attracted French and foreign students (John Singer Sargent was another American attendee).
The young painter enjoyed his apprenticeship and spent a considerable time exploring Europe and the Middle East before returning to the city of New York in 1881. [Read more…] about Belly Dancing, Sol Bloom & the Middle East
Throughout Saratoga County’s long history, many religious and spiritual communities have called our home their home, with the land even being sacred to some. This article will highlight the founding of several of Saratoga County’s religious communities through the 19th century, with a focus on Saratoga Springs.
Today, diverse people of faith have joined those long-established denominations to call Saratoga home, including Jewish communities, several Indigenous Cultural Revival Movements, and a Mosque, Masjid Al-Arqam in Halfmoon. All of them play important roles in the Saratoga Community. [Read more…] about Early Saratoga County Religious Communities: Some History
I attended Poughkeepsie’s progressive private school until I was half-way through the third grade. Then our teacher so offended my sensibilities, by not getting angry even though I had thrown a roll of newspapers onto her desk and overturned an inkwell, that when my mother picked me up from school I said, “I want to go to a real school, where the teachers get mad.”
The next day I was enrolled in Poughkeepsie Public School No. 8, Governor George Clinton Elementary School. [Read more…] about Welcome to 1940s Gov. George Clinton Elementary School
Schmulka Bernstein is standing on the sidewalk in front of the butcher store and smokehouse that bear his name, in the filtered grey sunlight that illuminates Rivington Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I am standing next to him.
He is my grandfather, and he has asked me to accompany him. I am ten years old and pleased to be invited. In his right hand is a smallish, rumpled paper bag filled with birdseed. [Read more…] about Schmulka Bernstein: Everybody Eats
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