History, Natural History & the Arts
In April 2009, the heirs of Berlin-born George Grosz filed a restitution lawsuit against New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) claiming that three paintings by the artist held in the museum’s collection rightfully belong to the family.
The trustees resisted the call. [Read more…] about Painters, Poets, A Manhattan Museum, and the Nazis
Elevated radiation levels have been detected in the yards of over 120 homes in Niagara County, NY. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has been conducting the first radiological survey of the area since 1984 and at least four families have fled their homes.
Governor Kathy Hochul has called on the EPA to step up testing and accelerate distribution of resources to those affected [Read more…] about Niagara’s Manhattan Project Legacy Haunting Homeowners
When Leon “Frog” DeCelle left his small hometown of Mechanicville, in Saratoga County, NY, on December 10, 1942, for induction into the US Army, he set out on a journey that eventually took him to some of the toughest fighting in Italy during World War Two, including the Gothic Line and the Po Valley campaigns. [Read more…] about New Yorkers & Breaking Italy’s Gothic Line in WWII
Launched in July 1900, the transatlantic liner S.S. Vaderland (Flemish for fatherland) sailed the route between Antwerp and Hoboken on behalf of the Red Star Line. Catering for 340 first-class, 200 second-class, and over 600 third-class (formerly steerage) passengers, the liner was one of “mid tier” elegance rather than opulence and designed to compete with its rivals of the Cunard and White Star lines. She played a key role in the early history of mass emigration from Europe to the United States.
On May 25, 1912, the liner left Antwerp, arriving at Ellis Island for immigrant inspection on June 4th. On board was a talented twenty-year-old Polish woman keen to break free from traditional Jewish domestic constraints and find intellectual and sexual freedom in Manhattan. [Read more…] about Lesbian History: Eve Adams, Monocles, Tearooms & Deportations
The National WW II Museum in New Orleans is home to about 250,000 artifacts, including more than 100,000 photographs ranging from battlefield pictures captured by military and press photographers to individual albums full of wartime snapshots donated by veterans and their families. [Read more…] about Mechanicville’s WWII & Korean War Veterans Photo Collection
A soon to be published biography of Andy Rooney (1919-2011) carries readers through the arc of a true American original, a New Yorker who was once one of the country’s most popular television and newspaper commentators.
Born in Albany, he attended Albany Academy, and later Colgate University in Hamilton, NY, before he was drafted into the United States Army in August 1941. [Read more…] about An New Biography Explores Andy Rooney’s Lucky Life
Pax Americana came into being over the course of fifteen weeks in 1947.
Within that brief period of time, President Harry S. Truman and a remarkable group of homegrown statesmen – George Marshall, Dean Acheson and George Kennan, foremost among them – reoriented American foreign policy from the perspective of an insular fortress to that of a global hegemon. [Read more…] about Elise Stefanik’s Last Crusade: Dishonoring American History
It was October 1942, ten months after America’s entry into the Second World War (1941–1945). A cannon ball, said to be from the Battle of Lake George, was donated to a scrap metal drive in Fort Edward.
The Battle of Lake George was a series of three military engagements on September 8, 1755, near the waterway’s south end. The outcome was a British victory over the French and their Indigenous allies during the French & Indian War (1755–1763). [Read more…] about When America Scrapped Its History For The War Effort
After the cold, and snowy winter we experienced this year in the Empire State, it is difficult to imagine a major league ballclub preparing for the season by holding Spring Training in upstate New York.
Many contingencies emerged from the privations which occurred on the home front during World War II. [Read more…] about Bear Mountain Dodgers: Spring Training in the War Years
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist [Read more…] about ‘First They Came’ by Pastor Martin Niemöller
In 1946, New York and the nation were in the throes of what was generally being called “reconversion” – redeploying workers and the industrial base away from the largest war in U.S. history toward a peacetime economy.
A moment in time: on January 25, 1946, the venerable dreadnought U.S.S. New York (BB-34) slipped her moorings at Pier 26 in the North River, at the foot of Beach Street in Manhattan, bound for the Pacific. [Read more…] about In 1946, New York Sailed into Troubled Postwar Waters
In December 1945, after the Second World War, the last refugee departed the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter on February 5, 1946, and the Fort Ontario Military Reservation returned to the War Department at the end of the month.
The property then transferred to the State of New York on April 3, 1946. Approximately 60 wood-frame buildings constructed in 1941 were demolished. [Read more…] about The Creation of Fort Ontario State Historic Site
After the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), remaining friction between Britain and the United States escalated into another war in North America 30 years later.
Both countries were determined to assert control over Lake Ontario, bringing Fort Ontario to the front lines of the War of 1812 (1812-1815). Britain saw Oswego as an integral connection to New York shipyards that could support future naval battles and supply additional American ships. [Read more…] about Fort Ontario Military History, 1812-1945
Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze; nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.
Points to stress are: (1) Fascism is more apt to come to power at a time of economic crisis; (2) fascism inevitably leads to war; (3) it can come to any country; (4) we can best combat it by making our democracy work.
“Fascism” is a word that’s been used a great deal these last few years. We come across it in our newspapers, we hear it in our newsreels, it comes up in our bull sessions. We’ve heard about the cruelties of fascism, its terror, its conquest of country after country. [Read more…] about FASCISM! An Army Orientation Fact Sheet, 1945
Confronting Racism: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Fight for Equality, 1925–1954 (SUNY Press, 2025) by Richard F. Hamm explores how and why an elite member of the legal profession, Arthur Garfield Hays, confronted and fought against the ingrained racism of his society, illuminating key aspects of the long civil rights era.
Beginning in 1925 the corporate lawyer and civil libertarian Arthur Garfield Hays (1881 – 1954) began battling segregation. Best known as a co-founder and general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and for participating in notable cases including the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. [Read more…] about Arthur Garfield Hays and the Fight for Equality, 1925–1954
William Sharp was born Leon Schleifer in 1900 at Lemberg in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Lviv, now part of Ukraine), where he attended the Academy for Arts and Industry and continued his studies in Kraków, Poland, before finishing his education at the University in Berlin in 1918.
After serving briefly in the German army, he stayed on in Berlin and worked as a book illustrator, etcher and painter. He focused on courtroom sketches for the liberal Berliner Tageblatt and the social democratic weekly Volk und Zeit.
As Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party grew in the late 1920s, Schleifer adopted various pseudonyms whilst contributing political cartoons for the anti-Nazi press. Threatened with imprisonment in 1934, Schleifer and his wife Ruth fled to the United States. [Read more…] about William Sharp: An Artist in Troubled Times
Even as Hitler and his Nazi regime ran roughshod over Germany and Europe in the 1930s, there were those in America who championed their rise. And nowhere so much as on Long Island.
Camp Siegfried in Yaphank (a community in the south part of the Town of Brookhaven, Suffolk County) became a focal point for certain German Americans to gather and espouse the Nazi cause. [Read more…] about Nazis of Long Island: Sedition, Espionage & the Plot Against America
From shortly after the nation’s first flight through and beyond World War II, the skies over Long Island’s Hempstead Plains buzzed with activity as the men and women of Mitchel Field faced the risks and dangers of military flight.
These were new challenges and dangerous times for military aviators in the skies and their support crews on the ground. And sometimes, the danger won. [Read more…] about Mitchel Field, Long Island Aviation History
The tugboat, as a distinct vessel type, dates back to Scotland with the construction of the Charlotte Dundas (1801) for towing barges on the Forth and Clyde Canal.
The Staten Island ferry Nautilus inaugurated the modern towing and tugboat industries in the United States on January 26, 1818, when she towed the sailing ship Corsair through the ice-choked lower harbor of New York from one mile below the Narrows to the quarantine dock. [Read more…] about New York’s Tugboats: A Short History
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, with Great Britain and France declaring war on Germany on September 3rd. Italy declared war on Great Britain and France on June 10, 1940. Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and Japan had occupied all of what was then known as French Indochina by July 26, 1941. On December 7, 1941, Japan launched an attack on our US fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – “a day that will live in infamy.”
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941. [Read more…] about World War Two Rural Honor Rolls
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