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
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
The book Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War (Oxford University Press, 2022) by Friederike Baer takes a look at the thirty thousand German soldiers that Great Britain hired to fight in its war against the American rebels between 1776 and 1783.
Collectively known as Hessians, the soldiers and accompanying civilians, including hundreds of women and children, spent extended periods of time in locations as dispersed and varied as Canada in the North and West Florida in the South. [Read more…] about Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War
From the Iroquois confederacy serving as a model for the US Constitution, to the connections between the matrilineal Iroquois and the woman suffrage movement, to the living legacy of the famous “Sky Walkers,” the steelworkers who built the Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge, the Iroquois are viewed as an exceptional people who helped make the state’s history unique and forward-looking. [Read more…] about Iroquois and the Invention of the Empire State
In the late 18th century, planters in the Caribbean and the American South insisted that only Black people could labor on plantations, arguing that Africans, unlike Europeans, had bodies particularly suited to cultivate crops in hot climates.
Katherine Johnston’s The Nature of Slavery (Oxford Univ. Press, 2022) disrupts this longstanding claim about biological racial difference. [Read more…] about The Nature of Slavery: Environment & Plantation Labor
The new book Madison’s Militia: The Hidden History of the Second Amendment (Oxford Univ. Press, 2023) by Carl Bogus is an engaging history overturning the conventional wisdom about the Second Amendment – showing that the right to bear arms was not about protecting liberty but about preserving slavery. [Read more…] about Madison’s Militia: The Hidden History of the Second Amendment
The new book The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram: An Elizabethan Sailor in Native North America (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dean Snow rights the record on a shipwrecked sailor who traversed the length of the North American continent only to be maligned as deceitful storyteller. [Read more…] about The Extraordinary 1569 Journey of David Ingram
The exploration continues with Amateur Musicians in the Early United States. Glenda Goodman, an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the book Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2020) joins Liz Covart to investigate the role of music in the lives of wealthy white Americans during the earliest days of the early American republic. [Read more…] about Amateur Musicians in the Early United States
The Hudson River Valley Institute will host “The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution,” a virtual presentation by Dr. Kevin Weddle set for Wednesday, April 13th. [Read more…] about ‘Compleat Victory’: Saratoga and the American Revolution
Have you ever considered early American cities as places where Native Americans lived, worked, and visited?
Native Americans often visited early American cities and port towns, especially the towns and cities that dotted the Atlantic seaboard of British North America.
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History, Colin Calloway, an award-winning historian and a Professor History and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, joins us to investigate Native American experiences in early American cities with details from his book, The Chiefs Now In This City: Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2021). [Read more…] about Native Americans in Early American Cities