History, Natural History & the Arts
The emergence of the bottling industry in New York State occurred due to the rise of the leisure economy and the fashion for the kind of mineral waters available at natural spas.
Prior to the availability of chlorinated water, inhabitants of many highly populated areas of the world avoided unmixed water from most sources for fear of contamination. [Read more…] about The Water Cure, Bottled Water & New York’s Local Bottling Industry
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a singular leader, thinker, and organizer whose fight for women’s emancipation stretched from the 1840s to her death in 1902, a full fifth of America’s history. Yet her legacy is marked by controversy.
In a new biography, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life (Basic Books, 2026) historian Ellen Carol DuBois paints a fresh portrait of this complex woman whose work helped make contemporary feminism possible. [Read more…] about Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life
People have gathered in taverns to drink, relax, socialize, and do business for hundreds of years. For just as long, critics have described taverns as sources of individual ruin and public disorder.
In Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) Dr. Wood argues that men integrated taverns into the nation’s growing transportation network and used them to raise capital, promote businesses, practice genteel sociability, and rally support for favored causes — often while drinking staggering amounts of alcohol. [Read more…] about Taverns in the Early United States
The accomplished tavern-keeper of New York, as well as of London, knew how to welcome his guest and from long experience instinctively knew how to reach his heart. After receiving him with the most unbounded cordiality, occasionally dropping him a piece of news which he knew would interest him, or one of his newest jokes, he soon made him feel glad to be in his house.
When the dinner was ready he was on hand to place the first dish on the table and to give him his company if he saw that it was desirable. [Read more…] about The Taverns of Old New York
Those who recognize the name Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894) usually do so because of bloomers, the clothing item named after her.
While she was a rational dress advocate for a time — calling on women to abandon rigid corsets and heavy petticoats and opt for long trousers, shorter skirts, and sensible boots — it was “but an incident” in the larger story of her life and impact.
Bloomer edited and published The Lily, one of the first newspapers for and by women. Founded to promote temperance, it soon broadened to include some of the most important issues to women in that day, including the right to vote, and included contributions from thinkers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. [Read more…] about Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-fashion Icon
Two documents which connect Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who helped women organize to secure the right to vote, are being offered for sale.
The newly discovered 1853 documents certify Mr. P.S. Kingsley and Mrs. Angeline Kingsley of Minetto in Oswego County, NY, as members of the first organization founded by Anthony and Stanton, the Women’s New York State Temperance Society, formed in 1852. [Read more…] about Rare Documents Highlight Temperance & Suffrage History
In the 1820s, few Americans could imagine a viable future for black children. Even abolitionists saw just two options for African American youth: permanent subjection or exile.
Dr. Anna Mae Duane’s book Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation (NYU Press, 2020) tells the story of James McCune Smith (1813-1865) and Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882), two black children who came of age and into freedom as their country struggled to grow from a slave nation into a free country. [Read more…] about Educated for Freedom: Henry Highland Garnet and James McCune Smith
Lily Dale is a hamlet connected with the Spiritualist Movement in the Town of Pomfret in Chautauqua County, NY. It’s been a home for Spiritualists attempting to make contact with the dead, as well as a gathering place for reformers, a refuge for seekers looking for alternatives to established paths of knowledge, and a target for skeptics since the late 19th century.
Lily Dale was incorporated in 1879 as Cassadaga Lake Free Association, a camp and meeting place for Spiritualists and Freethinkers. The name was changed to The City of Light in 1903 and finally to Lily Dale Assembly in 1906. [Read more…] about Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale
What follows is an article reprinted in Frederick Douglass’ Newspaper from the New York Herald on November 25, 1853.
Drunkenness in New York. The whole number of where alcoholic liquors are sold this city, in this city, is 7,103 says the Tribune — Unlicensed, 1,222; reported disorderly, 1,058; with grocery shops, 3,789; larger beer shops 1,088; exclusively wholesale , 183. [Read more…] about Drunkenness in New York, 1853
How and when did doctors become respected professionals in American society?
The answer lies in early Americans’ fascination with delirium tremens, or alcoholic insanity, and the Temperance Movement of the early-to-mid 19th century.
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, Matthew Osborn, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2014), leads us on an exploration of early American medical history and reform movements. [Read more…] about Alcoholic Insanity in the Early Republic
During Prohibition – which ended on December 5, 1933 – my grandfather’s brother Denis Warren, a veteran of some of the bloodiest American battles of the First World War, was left for dead on the side of Route 9N south of Port Henry on Lake Champlain. He was in the second of two cars of friends returning from Montreal, both “heavily loaded with Canadian ale” according to a newspaper account.
Going through Port Henry, Essex County, local customs agents gave chase and the car he was in hit a rock cut and he was badly injured in the accident. Figuring his was dead, or nearly so, and worried he would go to prison, one of Denis’s best friends rolled him under the guardrail, climbed into the other car, and sped off. [Read more…] about Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
Central New York communities that flourished with canal-related development and rail connections throughout the 19th century also became hotbeds for religious and social movements of the early 1800s as the area’s population rapidly grew.
Religious freedom granted by the United States Bill of Rights combined with rapid societal and technological changes experienced by Americans living through western expansion fueled an American spiritual movement that was exemplified in the newly opened frontier of New York. [Read more…] about Social and Religious Movements in Central New York
Over time, there have been numerous taverns and pubs in England that carried the name of Hole-in-the-Wall. It has been suggested that the name is a biblical reference to Ezekiel 8:7: “And he brought me to the door of the court; and when I looked, behold a hole in the wall.”
There is, in other words, an access to every secret which no man can seal off – there is “a crack in everything.” [Read more…] about Roguery & Mythmaking: Criminal Biographies From Claude Duval to Herbert Asbury
Edward Delavan was born in Westchester County, NY, in 1793. His father died when Edward was eight and he and his mother, brother, and two sisters moved to Albany. Edward began work in a printer’s office at 13 years of age and after several years, left to work at his brother’s hardware store. While at the hardware store, he began selling wine, which proved very successful. [Read more…] about Temperance & Fire At The Delavan House: Albany’s Finest 19th Century Hotel
Ira Harris was born at Charleston, Montgomery County, NY on May 31st, 1802 to Fredrick Waterman Harris and Lucy Hamilton. When he was six years old, his family moved to Preble, NY where his father became one of the largest landowners in Cortland County.
Harris attended Homer Academy and graduated from Union College in 1824. He studied law for one year in Homer, New York and then moved to Albany where he assisted one of that city’s most highly regarded jurists, Ambrose Spencer. [Read more…] about Albany’s Ira Harris: From Rights Advocate to Lincoln’s Assassination
Mark Forsyth’s new book A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the Present, (Viking, 2018) traces humankind’s love affair with booze from our primate ancestors through to Prohibition.
Almost every culture on earth has drink, and where there’s drink there’s drunkenness. But in every age and in every place drunkenness is a little bit different. It can be religious, it can be sexual, it can be the duty of kings or the relief of peasants. It can be an offering to the ancestors, or a way of marking the end of a day’s work. [Read more…] about A Short History of Drunkenness
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