Historical News and Views from the Empire State
An often overlooked and forgotten New York City landmark, Castle Clinton welcomed many of the city’s residents into its walls as a place of innovation, entertainment, and new beginnings.
The circular sandstone fort which currently stands in Battery Park, was built to improve harbor fortifications in 1811. The Southwest Battery, as it was known, never fired a shot. [Read more…] about Castle Clinton: New York’s Almost Forgotten Landmark
The Ticonderoga Historical Society is set to open for their 2020 season on Friday, March 27 with “The Singing of the Green, The Irish in American Musical Theater,” a presentation by Diane O’Connor. [Read more…] about Ti Historical Opening With ‘Singing of the Green’
In his new book Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America (Cornell University Press, 2019) biographer John Loughery tells the story of John Hughes, son of Ireland, friend of William Seward and James Buchanan, founder of St. John’s College (now Fordham University), builder of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, pioneer of parochial school education, and American diplomat. [Read more…] about Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and Irish America
Who gets to be a citizen of the United States? How does the United States define who belongs to the nation?
Early Americans asked and grappled with these questions during the earliest days of the early republic. [Read more…] about Birthright Citizenship
Angolans are in the news. Recently there has been a surge in migrants from Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. After a decade of hardly any migration from these countries, suddenly the numbers have increased specifically to Portland, Maine and to San Antonio, Texas. The surge has reportedly overwhelmed some in those communities. Central African migrants are less likely to have relatives already in the country to whom they can turn for assistance. [Read more…] about Slavery in New York: An Angolan Case Study
Author Karen Foresti Hempson is set to discuss her new book Bean Pickers: American Immigrant Portraits, which shares eight true-life portrayals that focus on the Italian-Americans who begin their American lives as summer bean pickers, on Wednesday, June 5th at 5:30 pm, at the Oneida County History Center, 1608 Genesee Street, Utica. [Read more…] about Bean Pickers: Italian Immigrant Portraits in Utica
Zachary J. Violette’s new book The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) reexamines urban America’s tenement buildings born of the housing reform movement embraced by the American-born elite in the late nineteenth century, centering on the immigrant neighborhoods of New York and Boston.
Violette focuses on what he calls the “decorated tenement,” a wave of new buildings constructed by immigrant builders and architects who remade the slum landscapes of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the North and West Ends of Boston in the late nineteenth century. [Read more…] about New Book on Immigrant Builders and Architects in New York
The American Irish Historical Society has announced “Eugene O’Neill and Ireland,” a talk by Dan McGovern, president of the Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Tao House, has been set for Thursday, April 25th, at 6:30 pm.
Eugene O’Neill was the only American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was at Tao House in Danville, California, where O’Neill wrote his greatest plays, including Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh. [Read more…] about Eugene O’Neill and Ireland: A Talk by Dan McGovern
Neighborhoods change. Ours was changing when my single parent mom managed to buy a modest house for cash in Rochester’s Near Northside in 1952. My mom was an immigrant from Toronto whose own mother had emigrated from England.
She had grown up in this working-class immigrant neighborhood somewhat northeast of downtown. In 1937, she graduated from Vocational High, located in the Bausch and Lomb plant. In 1952 she was newly divorced and had been hired to work on an assembly line – she could walk to work. [Read more…] about Rochester’s Near Northside and Neighborhood Change
The 22nd International James Fenimore Cooper/Susuan Fenimore Cooper Conference has been set for September 25-28, 2019, at SUNY Oneonta.
This years conference will examine Cooper within this tension between native purity and immigrant amalgamation.
Organizers have announced they are seeking papers that address the role of Cooper and his contemporaries in forging an American identity out of the cultural mixture of overlapping empires and immigration. [Read more…] about 22nd International Fenimore Cooper Conference Call for Papers