History, Natural History & the Arts
Henry David Thoreau was a leading figure in the American Transcendentalist movement and the era of US literary emergence. He achieved worldwide renown as an essayist, social thinker, naturalist, environmentalist, and sage.
Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), an autobiographical narrative of his two-year sojourn in a self-built lakeside cabin, is one of the most widely studied works of American literature. [Read more…] about Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently
Mary Mildred Botts Williams (1847–1921) was a light-skinned Black child born into enslavement in Virginia. She became identified in the popular imagination with the character Ida May, the fictional kidnapped white child in Mary Hayden Pike’s novel, Ida May: A Story of Things Actual and Possible (1854). Mary was used as an example of a “white slave” in the years before the Civil War. [Read more…] about Slavery & Race: Mary Mildred Botts Williams, 1847–1921
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
During a 1793 outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia 5,000 of the city’s 50,000 residents died making it the worst epidemic in American history, with a death rate of 10%. As disease spread, the national government was slow to react but citizens soon donned protective masks and the authorities ordered quarantines. The streets emptied. Doubters questioned the science and disobeyed. [Read more…] about America’s First Plague: The Deadly 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic
Whales were always part of Hudson River life (they were spotted at Albany in 1647), and whaling was a major industry in New York, especially on the Hudson River, for over 60 years. It helped to shape the region’s economy and culture, and it left a lasting legacy. Today, there are several historical markers and museums in the Hudson Valley that commemorate the region’s whaling past and the Great Seal of the City of Hudson still includes a whale. [Read more…] about Hudson River Whaling Industry History
The modern era has produced a number of great speeches that have withstood the test of time. Amongst them are Winston Churchill’s “Fight on the Beaches” (June 1940), John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”(June 1963) and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” (August 1963), but the speech that may have had the biggest impact in the history of political thought was Abe Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” (November 1860). [Read more…] about Sigmund Freud, Adirondack High Peaks and American Colitis
On November 2, 1820, the city of New York‘s Chamber of Commerce placed an advertisement in the Commercial Advertiser and other newspapers inviting merchant clerks to meet in Tontine Coffee House at 82 Wall Street and discuss forming of an organization that would be similar to Boston’s Mercantile Library (founded earlier that same year).
Nearly two hundred and fifty young men responded to the notice and joined the meeting which led to the creation of Manhattan’s Mercantile Library Association. [Read more…] about 1820s Literary Rivalry: Manhattan Versus Boston
This week on the Historians Podcast, stories from the American Revolution. Eric Schnitzer and Nina Sankovitch, spoke at last month’s Revolutionary War conference sponsored by Fort Plain Museum. [Read more…] about American Revolution Stories on the Historians Podcasts
While Theodore Roosevelt employed his abilities to rise from unknown New York legislator to the youngest man to assume the U.S. presidency in 1901, in his book The Rough Rider & the Professor: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, & the Friendship that Changed American History (Pegasus Books, 2023), Laurence Jurdem argues that this rapid success would not have occurred without the assistance of the powerful New Englander, Henry Cabot Lodge. [Read more…] about TR & Henry Cabot Lodge: A Friendship that Changed History
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World, Kyera Singleton, the Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, joins host Liz Covart to investigate the story of slavery and freedom within the first state in the United States to legally abolish slavery. [Read more…] about Freedom and Slavery in Massachusetts