History, Natural History & the Arts
The Ticonderoga Sentinel resumed publication on June 4th, 1875 after several weeks of dormancy — a “New Sentinel” printed on a new Fairhaven brand press, sporting a new masthead and laid out in a new format with additional front-page advertising.
Ticonderoga is in Essex County, NY, between the outlet of Lake George and Lake Champlain. [Read more…] about 1875: The Ticonderoga Sentinel Returns
The socio-political and economic turmoil of the early twentieth century transformed American society. Between the conclusion of the Civil War and the end of the First World War, the country went from being a predominantly rural farming society to an urban industrial one. [Read more…] about Socialism, Greenwich Village & ‘The Masses’
Waterford, NY’s involvement in the Industrial Revolution was more significant than its geographical size would imply. Family-owned and operated business ventures were the norm and usually a first and second-generation operation.
Names that immediately come to the fore such families as brothers Hugh and Canvas White, the Knickerbocker, Kavanaugh, Button, Breslin, and King families all demonstrated the business model of the period; manufacturing firms that employed many hands from Saratoga County and surrounding communities. [Read more…] about The Eddy Family: Capital Region Industrialists
From the early times of explorers and settlers to the present day, the United States has been a nation of immigrants. Diversity makes the nation tick.
In the history of migration the (often neglected) participation of women has been crucial. Tales of hardship and bravery are legion. The plight of women who have had to make painful sacrifices has been highlighted by artists and historians, though more easily forgotten by the general public.
Zaida Ben Yùsuf joined the American labor force in the 1890s. She was in the vanguard of women who became professionally involved in the production of periodicals, as magazines reached a mass readership and photographs supplanted illustrations. But it was her migrant mother who had blazed the trail. [Read more…] about Anna Ben-Yùsuf: The Bravery of a Migrant Mother
In the early 1800s it was unusual for Americans to be interested in sporting matters on their own shores. News from Europe was the only sporting news of merit, and publishing an American sporting journal was considered a risky use of capital.
The first attempt along these lines may have been in 1829 Baltimore, where John S. Skinner published a monthly magazine which focused on race horse pedigrees called The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine. Another early attempt was published in New York by the recognized writer and horseman Cadwallader R. Colden, whose organ was called The New-York Sporting Magazine and Annals of the American and English Turf, first published in 1833.
Among the most notable of the sporting press arrived in 1831, when William T. Porter and James Haw published the first issue of The Spirit of the Times, focusing on horse literature and sporting subjects. They had chosen the name for their broadsheet from a quotation in Shakespeare’s King John, “The spirit of the times shall teach me speed.” [Read more…] about The Spirit of the Times: A 19th Century Chronicle of American Sports
“The dream of my life is not yet realized…I still long for a hearthstone of my own.” (Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).
In 1852, Harriet Jacobs became legally free, but not independent as she yearned. She continued her job as nursemaid for the family of Nathaniel Parker Willis, then editor of the trend-setting magazine Home Journal and one of the country’s most famous authors. The needs of the Willises usually took precedence over her own.
When the family moved to Cornwall, in Orange County, NY, she went too. There, in fits and starts, over the course of more than five years, she wrote the book about her life still read today – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. [Read more…] about ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’: Harriet Jacobs in Orange County, New York (Conclusion)
Albany Poets and the Hudson Valley Writers Guild have announced plans to combine organizations and operate as the Hudson Valley Writers Guild moving forward. [Read more…] about Two Capital Region Literary Orgs Merging Into Hudson Valley Writers Guild
Frances Steloff was the daughter of a Russian immigrant and itinerant rabbi who, in an age of rising anti-Semitism, was one of the early Jewish settlers in Saratoga Springs. The large family lived in dire poverty.
After the death of her mother, Frances was “informally” adopted by a wealthy Boston couple. Having run away from her foster parents, she made her way to New York, worked in a Brooklyn department store selling corsets, before establishing a tiny bookshop in Midtown Manhattan. On her death, after eighty-one years in the business, she was revered as one of America’s most influential booksellers and bibliophiles. Founder of the Gotham Book Mart, she turned her establishment into a center for avant-garde literature. [Read more…] about Saratoga’s ‘Fanny the Flower Girl,’ Gotham Book Mart Founder
During the 1830s, young Romantic poets in Paris were loud and rebellious. They raised the noise levels in literature. Pétrus Borel headed the “Petit Cénacle,” an eccentric group of writers who had declared war on Classicism.
Considered a social nuisance, their rowdy and unruly behavior led to arrests. A journalistic term of abuse was turned into a banner of pride. The group’s members adopted the name Les Bousingos (“faiseurs de bousin” = brawlers). [Read more…] about Charlie Pfaff, Walt Whitman and the King of Bohemia
The history of the modern private press can be said to have started in early 1891 with William Morris’s foundation of the Kelmscott Press at 16 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, and the publication of his own work The Story of the Glittering Plain.
There had been forerunners of course. Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Press, established in June 1757, set a precedent by producing splendid books, pamphlets, and ephemera, but it was Morris who succeeded in establishing a cost-effective press for high quality publications. His initiative gave birth to a host of similar undertakings. He initiated the Private Press Movement which was closely associated with the rise of modernist ideas. Morris also had a remarkable following in New York. [Read more…] about Nancy Cunard, Modernism and the Private Press Movement