Books

19th Century Divorce, Shakers Subject of Author Talk

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Ilyon Woo, author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times (2010), a new work of popular history set in the Capital Region, will discuss the book at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, October 21, 2010, in the Shaker Meeting House, 25 Meeting House Rd, near Albany International Airport. Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m. the author will present an informal seminar in the Standish Room, Science Library on the UAlbany uptown campus. Sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and the Shaker Heritage Society, the events are free and open to the public.

Ilyon Woo’s first book is a highly-praised work of popular history set in the Capital Region. Eunice Chapman is compelled to seek custody of her three children after their 1814 abduction by her estranged, alcoholic husband James, who elected to become a member of the Shaker community. James, who had sold the family home in Durham, New York, absconding with the money and leaving his family destitute, first brings the children to live at the Watervliet Shaker Settlement, located near what is now the Albany International Airport, before taking them into hiding at another Shaker site in New Hampshire. Much of the action also takes place at sessions of the New York State Legislature, where Eunice is compelled to use &#8220feminine wiles,&#8221 and a previously untapped talent for public speaking, in order to win lawmakers over to her cause.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Debby Applegate called the book &#8220masterfully written, deeply suspenseful, and filled with fascinating facts and insights,&#8221 and National Book Award winner Nathaniel Philbrick said, &#8220Woo brings the past to life in all its wonderful strangeness, complexity, and verve…. This is what history is all about.&#8221 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner in nonfiction, John Matteson said, &#8220A writer of extraordinary empathy and great resourcefulness, Ilyon Woo has transformed a neglected historical record into a vivid evocation of an era and an amazing tribute to a remarkably tenacious woman, Eunice Chapman. Meticulously researched and compellingly narrated, &#8216-The Great Divorce’ will stand beside the work of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in the pantheon of American women’s history writing.&#8221

A graduate of Yale and Columbia, Ilyon Woo has been interested in the Shakers since girlhood. In 2000 she starred in a short film directed by celebrated African American film pioneer Charles Burnett about the inter-generational divide between a young Korean American woman and her grandmother, set against the backdrop of a Little League baseball game. In recent days, she has been working on dramatic readings of portions of &#8220The Great Divorce,&#8221 which have been staged at Harvard University’s Fruitlands Museum and other venues.

For more information contact the New York State Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or visit www.albany.edu/writers-inst.

Harlem Vice: Playing the Numbers

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In New York City during the 1920s, an employee of the New York Clearing House, an august downtown financial institution composed of the city’s elite banks, would descend every day and mark three numbers on a chalkboard, each of which was meant as a general economic indicator to be used by the financial industry. Two of these numbers were immediately copied down by a different sort of employee and phoned uptown to a different sort of bank, one whose doings possessed a good deal more relevance for the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who had recently transformed the sleepy neighborhood of Harlem into a budding “black metropolis.”

The uptown bankers, known colloquially as “kings” and “queens,” dealt not in stocks and bonds but in millions of paper slips, each one marked in pencil and each one representing a one, five, or maybe a ten-cent bet placed by a resident on the outcome of a three-digit number derived via a set formula from that day’s Clearing House results. “Playing the numbers” was a cultural institution in Harlem, one that about half the neighborhood’s population seems to have engaged in each day, one that tied them in strange ways to the city’s licit economy, but one that has been strangely understudied by scholars, who in the past have trained their focus largely on the high-cultural manifestations of Harlem’s remarkable flowering.

Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars takes a different tack, utilizing the authors’ remarkable research to tell a story that illuminates the lives of the ordinary Harlemites who most often form little more than a colorful backdrop to accounts of the Harlem Renaissance. For a dozen years the “numbers game” was one of America’s rare black-owned businesses, turning over tens of millions of dollars every year. The astronomical success of “bankers” like Stephanie St. Clair and Casper Holstein attracted Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano, and organized crime, fresh off Prohibition and in need of a new hustle, to the game. By the late 1930s, most of the profits were being siphoned out of Harlem. All in all, Playing the Numbers reveals a unique dimension of African American culture that made not only Harlem but New York City itself the vibrant and energizing metropolis it was.

Interestingly, the authors of Playing the Numbers are four Australian academics who received a grant from their government to research this remarkable phenomenon. You can get a taste of the data itself on an innovative website they’ve produced called Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915-1930, which won the Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History this year from the American Historical Association.

Note: Books noticed on this site have been provided by the publishers. Purchases made through this Amazon link help support this site.

Andy Flynns Sixth Adirondack Attic Book

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Hungry Bear Publishing recently released its sixth volume in the “Adirondack Attic” book series, highlighting dozens of artifacts from the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake.

Author Andy Flynn, of Saranac Lake, tells 53 more stories about the museum’s collection in New York State’s Mountain Heritage: Adirondack Attic, Volume 6, bringing the story count to more than 300 for the six-volume series that began in 2004. Stories, and artifacts, come from all over the Adirondack region.

“Each story is special unto itself- however, taken as a whole, this series gives us the big picture,” Flynn told the Almanack. “Thanks to these artifacts, we now have a unique perspective on the Adirondack experiment and a better understanding of the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, its people and communities, and how life has changed here over the past 300 years.”

Stories from Adirondack Attic 6 come from the following communities: Au Sable Forks, Bangor, Blue Mountain Lake, Brantingham Lake, Canton, Chestertown, Cranberry Lake, Dickinson Center, Elizabethtown, Hague, Johnsburg, Lake George, Lake Placid, Long Lake, Loon Lake, Lyon Mountain, Mohawk, Newcomb, North River, Northville, Paul Smiths, Port Henry, Raquette Lake, Saranac Lake, Ticonderoga, Tupper Lake, Warrensburg and Wilmington.

Flynn created the Adirondack Attic History Project to “promote the heritage of the Adirondack Park to residents and visitors through publications and programs.” As the owner/operator of Hungry Bear Publishing, he works with curators at the Adirondack Museum and other historical associations and museums in the region to tell human-interest stories about their artifact collections.

Flynn’s “Adirondack Attic” column ran weekly in several northern New York newspapers from 2003 to 2009. The stories in Adirondack Attic 6 represent the columns from 2008. Each volume includes columns from a specific year- for example, Adirondack Attic 1 featured columns from 2003, the first year of the Adirondack Attic History Project.

In April 2010, North Country Public Radio began running Flynn’s new Adirondack Attic Radio Series, sponsored by the Adirondack Museum and singer/songwriter Dan Berggren. It airs the first Tuesday of the month during the Eight O’Clock Hour with Todd Moe. For each program, Flynn features a different artifact from the collection of a museum in the Adirondack North Country Region. He uses the Adirondack Museum as his “History Headquarters” but also visits other museums to track down the objects people have made, used and left behind.

In 2008, Andy Flynn was awarded a Certificate of Commendation from the Upstate History Alliance for the Adirondack Attic History Project. He has since presented programs on his work with the Adirondack Museum to scholars at the New York State Archives Conference (2008), Association of Public Historians of New York State (2008) and Conference on New York State History (2009).

Flynn also publishes the Meet the Town community guide series with booklets for Saranac Lake, Lake Placid/Wilmington, Canton, Potsdam, Tupper Lake/Long Lake/Newcomb and the Au Sable Valley. From 2001 to 2009, he was employed as the Senior Public Information Specialist at the Adirondack Park Agency Visitor Interpretive Center in Paul Smiths.

Flynn is an award-winning journalist, garnering merits of excellence from the National Newspaper Association, New York Newspaper Publishers Association and the New York Press Association. While the staff writer at the Lake Placid News, he was named the 1996 NYPA Writer of the Year for weekly New York state newspapers with circulations under 10,000. Before joining the VIC staff, he was a writer and editor for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in Saranac Lake and the Lake Placid News, a correspondent for the Plattsburgh Press-Republican, an announcer for WNBZ 1240-AM in Saranac Lake, and a general assignment news reporter and radio documentary producer for North Country Public Radio in Canton. He is a graduate of the SUNY College at Fredonia (1991) and the Tupper Lake High School (1987).

For more information about the Adirondack Attic book series and radio program, call (518) 891-5559 or visit online at www.hungrybearpublishing.com.

ADIRONDACK ATTIC 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS

1: Delaware & Hudson Railroad guides

2: Camp Santanoni Gate Lodge rendering (Newcomb)

3: Long Lake fire truck

4: Snowbug and Luvbug snow machines

5: Lake Placid bobsledding cassette tape (Saranac Lake, Lake Placid)

6: Mystery of Ironshoes, the bobsled (Lake Placid, Port Henry, Lyon Mountain, Elizabethtown)

7: Nehasane Park wagon (Long Lake)

8: Republic Steel miner’s helmet (Port Henry)

9: J. & J. Rogers Company safe (Au Sable Forks)

10: Paul Smith’s hotel stagecoach photo

11: Willcox & Gibbs sewing machine (Mohawk)

12: Bonnie Belle Farm ensilage cutter (Chestertown)

13: Maple sugaring sledge (Dickinson enter, North River)

14: Acme Leader cooking stove (Warrensburg)

15: Steamer Vermont III menu (Lake Champlain, Lake Placid, Loon Lake)

16: Au Sable Forks archery set

17: Bear Pond Preserve posted sign (Raquette Lake)

18: Fire tower string map (Warrensburg, Lake George)

19: Whiteface Mt. Ski Center brochures

20: Hendrik Van Loon’s Wide World Game

21: “Uncle Mart” Moody pocket watch (Tupper Lake)

22: Civil War memorial poster (Warrensburg)

23: “Assaulted by Mosquitoes” photo

24: Bug dope in the Adirondack woods

25: Sunset Cottage (Forked Lake)

26: Frederic Remington painting (Canton, Cranberry Lake)

27: A Pleasant Day at Lake George painting

28: Picturesque America book

29: Swizzle sticks (Ticonderoga, Port Henry, Hague)

30: E.R. Wallace guidebooks

31: Long Lake church souvenir tray

32: In Nature’s Laboratory book

33: Clock Golf lawn game

34: Altamont Milk Company cooler (Tupper Lake)

35: Blue Mountain House artist’s cottage

36: North River crazy quilt

37: 18th century clay pipe fragment (Blue Mountain Lake)

38: Raquette Lake sectional rowboat

39: Ticonderoga Indian Pageant booklet

40: Lake George souvenir china

41: Sacandaga Park souvenir china (Northville)

42: O.W.D. Corporation 5-cent token (Tupper Lake)

43: 1833 needlepoint sampler (Johnsburg)

44: Warrensburg hearse

45: Lake Placid violin

46: Mystery of the postal hand stamp (Bangor)

47: Dwight P. Church’s aerial camera (Canton)

48: Civilian Conservation Corps ring (Glens Falls/Hudson Falls)

49: Tupper Lake baby shoes

50: 1929 firemen’s convention ribbon (Saranac Lake)

51: Dr. William Seward Webb mailbag

52: Brantingham Lake rustic chair

53: Newcomb Snow Plow

Note: Books noticed on this site have been provided by the publishers.

Henry Knox: Myth and History

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Don’t tell the folks at Knox’s Headquarters State Historic Site where he held court as the Revolutionary War came to an end, but no one really cares about Henry Knox. It’s not that we shouldn’t, it’s just that we don’t &#8211 don’t have the stomach for it. It’s mostly Knox’s own fault, he was kind of a jerk who lived opulently after his retirement in Maine where he hoped to exploit a retinue of labors and craftsmen in shipbuilding, brick-making, and cattle-raising. His neighbors came to despise him, rejected his leadership, threatened to burn him out, and tore down his mansion after his death.

Knox’s Maine estate, Montpelier, was the center-piece of his million acre holdings &#8211 an empire acquired through graft and corruption. Once a right-hand man of General George Washington who later served as the nation’s first Secretary of War, Knox was so unpopular in his later years that local settlers armed themselves and threatened to burn his home to the ground and voted him out of office (electing a local blacksmith in his place). Unfortunately, Mark Puls’s Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution ignores these details and instead paints an all-too-friendly portrait of the man who served as a model for Col. Pynchon in Nathanial Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables.

Puls’s Henry Knox is just a simple hero and the basic outline of his career is rehashed as a central figure in the American Revolution. &#8220In many instances,&#8221 Puls writes,&#8221 Washington depended on Knox to save the army, and in doing so, he placed the fate of the country in his hands.&#8221 Perhaps this is just the value of Puls narrative, to remind us that there were others who participated in the the revolution that established a new government here in America. But serious students of history want more, a fuller picture of a complicated man.

For example, it’s inconceivable that any treatment of Henry Knox can leave out Joseph Plumb Martin. Martin joined the Revolution in 1776 as a Private and was eventually made a Sargent. Compared to Knox, he was a relatively obscure man during his life. After the war he spent some time as a teacher in New York and then settled in Maine where he was elected Selectman, Justice of the Peace, and for more than 25 years, Town Clerk. Martin’s popularity with his neighbors isn’t the only thing that separates him from Henry Knox. There was also that time Henry Knox drove him from his 100 acres.

Henry Knox’s encounter with Joseph Plumb Martin (and his other neighbors) might have not come to light at all had it not been for the work of more serious historians and Joseph Plumb Martin himself. His narrative A narrative of some of the adventures, dangers, and sufferings of a Revolutionary soldier, interspersed with anecdotes of incidents that occurred within his own observation, published anonymously in 1830 and rediscovered by the general public in the 1960s, has become a central primary source for the American Revolution. Puls certainly must have known about it, and recognized Henry Knox’s role in the life of his fellow patriot.

&#8220I throw myself and my family wholly at the feet of your Honor’s mercy,&#8221 Plumb Martin wrote Knox in a last ditch effort to save himself and his family from losing his 100 acre farm to a man who owned a million acres, &#8220earnestly hoping that your Honor will think of some way, in your wisdom, that may be beneficial to your Honor and save a poor family from distress.&#8221

Henry Knox didn’t bother to respond to that request and Joseph Plumb Martin lost his farm. In what might be considered a fitting twist of fate, Knox’s businesses failed and he was forced to sell his holdings to pay his debts. Knox coked on a chicken bone a few years later in 1806 and was a burden no more to the people of Maine. When his widow died Knox’s grand mansion was neglected and torn down for a railroad right-of-way.

In the nativist revival of the 1920&#8242-s, a local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter organized to rebuild the Knox home. In a way not unlike Mark Puls’s sprucing-up of the old General’s career, the rebuilt Knox home was made of concrete block &#8211 sturdier than it ever was in real life.

Mark Puls is the author of Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution, winner of the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, and co-author of Uncommon Valor: A Story of Race, Patriotism, and Glory in the Final Battles of the Civil War with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Melvin Claxton. Puls has worked as a journalist for The Detroit News. He lives in Hawntranck, MI.

Note: Books noticed on this site have been provided by the publishers. Purchases made through this Amazon link help support this site.

Adirondack Fire Towers History and Lore

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A few years ago I made a list of the Seven Human Made Wonders of the Adirondacks. Taking a look at Martin Podskoch’s two-volume Adirondack Fire Towers: Their History and Lore, I feel like I left one wonder off that list. Podskoch’s endeavor to chronicle the history and lore of each of the nearly 60 Adirondack fire towers deserves a spot on the shelf of not just those interested in the history of the Adirondacks (where it’s an essential volume), but also those with an interest in the history of forestry, conservation, wildfires, rural labor and community life in remote places. Podskoch’s extensive interviews with those familiar with the towers serves as an important Adirondack oral history of New York’s leadership in wildfire suppression.

After the great fires of 1903 and 1908, when the fire tower system was young, spotters in their lofty perches reported the majority of Adirondack fires, and Forest Ranger set out to put them out. &#8220Times changed for both fire towers and rangers,&#8221 Podskoch writes &#8220With advances in telephone communications and a greater awareness of the dangers of fire, more and more fires were being reported initially either by a passerby or by the person who caused the fire.&#8221 A 1987 study confirmed once and for all that the fire towers were no longer necessary compared to cheaper overflights. In the previous four years, observers had reported just four percent of the state’s 2,383 wild fires.

Today we don’t generally think of Adirondack forest fires as a threat (that much), but in the early 1960s, dry conditions fostered thousands of fires &#8211 1,532 in 1962. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller closed the Forest Preserve completely on three occasions during 1963 and 1964. More visitors and second home owners in the late 1960s meant more fires, but at the same time better spotting and reporting using aircraft meant better control.

Still, damaging forest fires seemed so threatening as late as 1971 during the debate over creation of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA), that Chair of the Essex County Board of Supervisors James DeZalia could argue against the APA by saying that &#8220these proposals call for the removal of fire spotting towers, exposing the property and homes of the people in the Adirondacks to destruction by fire.&#8221 Thirty years later the debate continues over whether to remove long abandoned fire towers (see Almanack pieces by Dave Gibson and Phil Brown).

There had once been 57 fire towers in the Adirondacks (public and private). In the 1970s and 1980s the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) closed more than 40. In 1990, when the DEC closed the last of the Adirondack fire towers &#8211 Bald (Rondaxe), Blue, Hadley, and St. Regis mountains &#8211 just 26 remained standing. During the 1990s historic preservationists, local community boosters, and other began organizing to save their local fire towers. Although the Whiteface mountain tower was moved to the Adirondack Museum in 1974, the Blue Mountain tower was the first of the abandoned towers to be restored in 1994.

The two volumes of Adirondack Fire Towers, covering the southern and northern districts, are filled with pictures, memories, and stories, but also hard facts about the origins, locations, and life of the observers who lived and worked them.

Podskoch is now working hard on a new book about Civilian Conservation Corps camps in the Adirondacks.

Note: Books noticed on this site have been provided by the publishers. Purchases made through this Amazon link help support this site.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

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During Prohibition my grandfather’s brother Denis Warren, a veteran of some of the bloodiest American battles of World War One, 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 with a small supply of beer. Going through Port Henry 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.

Joe Kennedy, never really enthusiastic about World War One, spent the war as an assistant general-manager of Bethlehem Steel and used the opportunity to buddy up to Franklin D. Roosevelt who was then Assistant Secretary of the Navy. During Prohibition Kennedy went to England and with the help of FDR’s eldest son James Roosevelt secured the exclusive American rights for Gordon’s Dry Gin and Dewar’s Scotch. Contrary to rumors, Kennedy wasn’t a bootlegger, he imported his British booze legally under a permit to distribute medical alcohol. Kennedy was of course, the father of John F. Kennedy.

The story of these two Irish-Americans serves as a kind of microcosm of the story of Prohibition, when all of America seemed upside down. &#8220In almost every respect imaginable, Prohibition was a failure,&#8221 Daniel Okrent writes in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. &#8220It deprived the government of revenue, stripped the gears of the political system, and imposed profound limitations on individual rights. It fostered a culture of bribery, blackmail, and official corruption. It also maimed and murdered, its excesses apparent in deaths by poison, by the brutality of ill-trained, improperly supervised enforcement officers, and by unfortunate proximity to mob gun battles.&#8221

The medical exemption to Prohibition, along with the sacramental wine exemption, and the fruit exemption for homemade wine and cider, meant that Prohibition was fairly doomed from the start according to Okrent. In fact it’s a wonder that Prohibition even got started. In the late nineteenth century drinking was at an all time high, a central part of American life. But immigration was also at an all time high, along with the Protestant Christian reformers, xenophobia, and racism. An unlikely alliance emerged to battle &#8220Demon Rum&#8221 that included racists (including the Klan), progressives, suffragists, and populists.

Okrent lays out the story of this coalition in a readable way, avoiding much of the political minutiae, while still illuminating the personalities &#8211 people like Mother Thompson, Frances Willard, axe-wielding Carry Nation, bible-thumping Billy Sunday, William Jennings Bryan (who helped bring the Democratic party on board), Wayne Wheeler (the long-forgotten man considered the father of Prohibition), and Mabel Willebrandt (the Assistant US Attorney General despised by the nation’s drinkers).

The usual suspects are all here: the rise of organized crime from scattered minor street gangs, the rum runners contributions to boat design, the rise of Sam Bronfman’s Seagrams empire. The most interesting parts of the book however, detail how leading suffragists sought the vote after being denied leadership positions in the temperance movement and then used that vote to secure first the income tax (considered crucial to weaning the government off the alcohol excise tax teet) and finally Prohibition. Okrent also clearly presents the brewers’ failure to band together with the distillers, and their lack of action against the Prohibitionist until it was too late. Mostly German-Americans, World War One sealed their fates.

Also illuminating is Okrent’s telling of how the Eighteenth Amendment, which along with the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery is the only constitutional amendment to deal with personal property and the only one to have been repealed, came to be reversed. Last Call chalks it up to a few primary factors. The ease of access to booze which was no longer regulated, and so could be found everywhere, not just at bars (the old joke went &#8220Remember before Prohibition? When you couldn’t get a drink on Sunday?&#8221). The presidential campaign of solidly wet New York Governor Al Smith (defeated by mostly dry anti-Catholics) that changed the political mood of the country’s immigrants [video]. The Great Depression, and the need for the billions in excise tax (which helped fund the New Deal) that gave Repeal a push. But the biggest factor was perhaps the right-wing wealthy anti-tax (and future anti-Roosevelt) Pierre S. DuPont who believed so profoundly that Repeal would mean an elimination of the income tax that he bankrolled the fight himself. Fundamentally though, it was the Democratic title-wave that swept FDR into office [music] that changed the make-up of the Congress that allowed the crucial Repeal vote.

Okrent avoids the obvious comparisons to today’s Drug War, but even the causal reader, can’t miss them. The seemingly limitless supply, the institutionalized hypocrisy of legal tobacco and alcohol while pot smokers go to overcrowded prisons. The overzealous and expensive enforcement on the one hand (particularly in the inner cities), alongside marijuana buyers clubs and lax enforcement that amounts to a defacto local option.

It took about 10 years to understand that Prohibition only increased lawlessness, corruption, greed, and violence. Last Call leaves the astute reader wondering how long it will take us to come to the same conclusion about the War on Drugs.

Note: Books noticed on this site have been provided by the publishers. Purchases made through this Amazon link help support this site.

Fur, Fortune, and Empire: A History of American Fur Trade

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&#8220The fur trade was a powerful force in shaping the course of American history from the early 1600s through the late 1800s,&#8221 Eric Jay Dolin writes in his new comprehensive history Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. &#8220Millions of animals were killed for their pelts, which were used according to the dictates of fashion &#8212- and human vanity,&#8221 Dolin writes. &#8220This relentless pursuit of furs left in its wake a dramatic, often tragic tale of clashing cultures, fluctuating fortunes, and bloody wars.&#8221

The fur trade spurred imperial power struggles that eventually led to the expulsions of the Swedes, the Dutch, and the French from North America. Dolin’s history of the American fur trade is a workmanlike retelling of those struggles that sits well on the shelf beside Hiram Martin Chittenden’s 1902 two-volume classic The American Fur Trade of the Far West, and The Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 1686-1776., the only attempt to tell the story of the fur trade in New York. The latter volume, written by Thomas Elliot Norton, leaves no room for the Dutch period or the early national period which saw the fur trade drive American expansion west.

Dolin’s Fur Fortune, and Empire, is not as academic as last year’s Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World by Susan Sleeper-Smith. It’s readable, and entertaining, ranging from Europe, following the westward march of the fur frontier across America, and beyond to China. Dolin shows how trappers, White and Indian, set the stage for the American colonialism to follow and pushed several species to the brink of extinction. Among the characters in this history are those who were killed in their millions- beaver, mink, otter, and buffalo.

Eric Jay Dolin’s focus, as it was with his last book Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, is the intersection of American history and natural history. Readers interested in the history of the New York fur trade will find this book enlightening for it’s connection of the state’s fur business with the larger world as the first third deals with the period before the American Revolution, when New York fur merchants and traders were still a dominate factor. Yet, like last year’s Sleeper-Smith book, Dolin’s newest volume is simply outlines the wider ground on which the still necessary volume on the fur trade in New York might be built.

Note: Books noticed on this site have been provided by the publishers. Purchases made through this Amazon link help support this site.

Oral History Books: Lost Voices from the Titantic

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On April 15, 1912, the HMS Titanic sank, killing 1,517 people and leaving the rest clinging to debris in the frozen waters of the North Atlantic awaiting rescue. In a new Oral History of the disaster, historian Nick Barratt provides a narrative of the disaster in the words of those involved &#8212- among them the designers and naval architects at the White Star Line- first-class aristocratic passengers and the families in third class and steerage- and the boards of inquiry.

Lost Voices from the Titanic: The Definitive Oral History combines tales of folly and courage. Barratt has gathered the aspirations of the owners, the efforts of the crew, and of course, the eyewitness accounts from those lucky enough to survive. Barratt was lucky enough to interview the last surviving passenger of the Titanic about the way the disaster had shaped her life.

The majority of the book however, relies on letters, newspaper articles, memoirs, correspondence, and a few large collections, such as those collated by the historian Walter Lord. In part because the work rests on the words of witnesses rather than a technical account of the sinking, the book uses a surprising amount of original heretofore unpublished material.

Nick Barratt is a columnist for the Daily Telegraph and writes for Ancestor magazine. He is a director of Firebird Media and is on the National Executive Board of the Federation of Family History Societies. He lives in London.

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Books: Historic Photos of The Hudson Line

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Henry John Steiner’s new book, Historic Photos of The Hudson Line showcases more than 200 striking black-and-white images that take you on a journey up the Hudson River between the years 1850 and 1970 when the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad came to dominate transportation along this important American travel corridor. In the process the colonial-era river towns and landings were transformed in commercial, manufacturing, and political centers in their own rights.

Stiener, a local author and the municipal historian of Sleepy Hollow, captures the events from parades to politics, celebrations to sporting events, steamboats to airplanes &#8211 the people and places that contributed to the growth of this historic region. He uses fact-filled captions and chapter introductions to highlight the large format photographs culled from the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the New York State Archives.

The book is published by Turner Publishing.

Note: Books noticed on this site have been provided by the publishers. Purchases made through this Amazon link help support this site.

Books: Silver Seasons of Rochester Baseball

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Taking us back to the early nineteenth century, when baseball was played in the meadows and streets of Rochester, New York, Silver Seasons and a New Frontier: The Story of the Rochester Red Wings retraces the careers of the players and managers who honed their skills at the city’s Silver Stadium and later at Frontier Field. The many greats who played for the Rochester Red Wings—Stan Musial, Cal Ripken, Jr. (who provides the book’s forward), Bob Gibson, Boog Powell, Jim Palmer, Eddie Murray, and Justin Morneau are among those brought to life in this story rich with quirky performances and poignant moments.

This updated version of Silver Seasons: The Story of the Rochester Red Wings, first published in 1996, includes three new chapters covering the team’s record-setting tenth International League championship, being named top minor league franchise by Baseball America, and their new affiliation with the Minnesota Twins.

Silver Stadium opened in 1929, as Red Wing Stadium, in the middle of a thriving urban residential neighborhood which later fell into decline. In late 1956, the St. Louis Cardinals, then the major league affiliate of the Rochester Red Wings considered abandoning the franchise. In response, Morrie Silver, a Rochester businessman, spearheaded an effort to purchase the team and the stadium was renamed Silver Stadium in 1968. Although renovated in the 1980s, the desire for corporate suites and better parking led to the construction of Frontier Field, a new stadium located in downtown Rochester, which opened in 1996- Silver Stadium was demolished the following year is now an industrial and office park.

Silver Seasons tracks the history of the two stadiums and the teams that played there and in the process recalls moments like the longest game in pro baseball history, a thirty-three-inning affair between the Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox that stretched from April to June. Highlights also include one of the greatest teams in minor league history, the 1971 Junior World Series champion Red Wings, homers hit by Estel Crabtree in 1939 and Jim Finigan in 1961 and the unlikely Red Wings championship in the first season at their new park in 1997.

About the Authors
Jim Mandelaro has covered the Rochester Red Wings for the Democrat and Chronicle since 1991. He has twice been honored as Sportswriter of the Year by the Rochester Press-Radio Club. He was inducted into the Frontier Field Walk of Fame in 2007.

Scott Pitoniak is the author of ten books, including Memories of Yankee Stadium. He was inducted into the Frontier Field Walk of Fame in 1999 and the Newhouse School of Public Communications Hall of Fame in 2000.

Note: Books noticed on this site have been provided by the publishers. Purchases made through this Amazon link help support this site.