History, Natural History & the Arts
Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern (Reaktion Books, 2023) by Lottie Whalen, is an eye-opening new history of the women in New York City.
This is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth-century capital of modern culture. [Read more…] about Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern
This week’s article was submitted during the summer by David Fiske who passed away on October 28 after a battle with cancer. We publish this story posthumously in his memory.
Rebecca Jones was born in Schoharie County, NY in the 1820s. Her family moved to Ballston Spa, in Saratoga County, where Becky attended a girl’s school. By 1850, she was living in the city of New York and working as a domestic servant for the family of Andrew Gordon Hammersley, a lawyer and banker. [Read more…] about Obstinate Becky Jones: At Home in Ludlow Jail
Deborah Sampson was born in Plympton, Massachusetts, in 1760. She was hired out as an indentured servant to a family in Middleborough, MA. Upon gaining independence at age 18, she worked as a weaver and briefly as a schoolteacher.
In 1782, Sampson disguised herself in men’s clothing and enlisted in the Continental Army under the name “Robert Shurtliff.” [Read more…] about Call Me Robert: Deborah Sampson, Continental Army Soldier
Nicholas L. Syrett’s new biography, The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (The New Press, 2023), tells the story of one of the most important female doctors of the nineteenth century, a tale with unmistakable parallels today.
“Madame Restell,” the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control, delivered children, and performed abortions for decades in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. “Restellism” becoming a term detractors used to indict her. [Read more…] about The Trials of Madame Restell: A Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime
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
The Dalton-Loines Family Papers reflect a family’s commitment to preserving nature through generations and exemplifies the role women took in grassroots environmentalism during the 20th century.
The papers consist mainly of materials that focus on the family’s lake houses in the Northwest Bay of Lake George. [Read more…] about Dalton-Loines Family Papers Recall Lake George Preservation
If you are writing a historical novel, be sure to dress your characters in the fashion of the period. One 19th century fashion writer advised to be courageous and wear a violet tux – or just about any color except for black. [Read more…] about 19th Century Fashion Tips From Northern New York Newspapers
On Christmas night, December 25, 1843, in a serene village on Staten Island, shocked neighbors discovered the burnt remains of twenty-four-year-old mother Emeline Houseman and her infant daughter, Ann Eliza. In a perverse nativity, someone bludgeoned to death a mother and child in their home — and then covered up the crime with hellfire. [Read more…] about The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine
On a cold, snowy January evening in 1874, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson became one of the first women of national prominence to speak on women’s suffrage in Clinton County, NY. Those gathering to hear her at the Palmer Hall, located upstairs at 60 Margaret Street in downtown Plattsburgh, were described as the most intellectual and cultivated in the community.
The crowd that night would have known her reputation. [Read more…] about Anna Elizabeth Dickinson: ‘America’s Civil War Joan of Arc’
This week on the Historians Podcast, author Christopher C. Gorham discusses his biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman aide Anna Rosenberg, The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WW II and Shape Modern America (Citadel Press, 2023).
Anna Rosenberg was dubbed by Life magazine as “far and away the most important woman in the American government.” From New York City, Rosenberg devised a plan that helped diversify the ranks of factory workers during the Second World War. She also served as deputy defense secretary during the Korean War. [Read more…] about Anna Rosenberg: A Key Aide to FDR and Truman