"1689: Population of Albany County is 2,016 comprised of 662 men. 340 women and 1014 children. Indians in the county total 2,800: 270 Mohawks, 180 Oneidas, five hundred Onondagas, 300 Cayugas, 1,300 Senecas, and 250 River Indians. "(https://history.nycourts.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/
"The economy then was almost 100 percent agricultural. Other vocations existed in the community, but they were service vocations intended to supply the needs of the men and women who actually produced saleable items from the land. Every little hamlet aimed at self-sufficiency, with its own general stores,
"President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862. The act provided settlers with 160 acres of surveyed public land after payment of a filing fee and five years of continuous residence. Designed to spur Western migration, the Homestead Act culminated a twenty-year battle to distribute
Let's Make Sense Together
This week marks my 75th post. I'm realizing it'll require more than just the next two years to understand the numerous throughlines that have led the United States to this dangerous juncture. Here's how my desk looks right now. I'm following several
"You and I have both been parts of faculties and faculty senates and understand that the left has taken over our institutions. The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side
A few days ago, I imagined creating a simple post, an update on a lead mentioned in my essay of September 9. Because this week, I photographed that 1754 painting described by Mohawk Elder Tom Porter. It depicts Porter's ancestors meeting Franklin and Jefferson, along with two other
" . . . the tenants have organized themselves into a body, and resolved not to pay any more rent until they can be redressed of their grievances; and to carry the above resolution into effect, the tenants have pledged their honor and fortune even to the last extremity. The tenants now assume
This week, after finishing the second volume in Jennifer Kabat's memoir diptych, I am sitting with the resonances and ripple effects. Kabat engages deeply with history and the landscape as spaces for understanding our experiences, on both personal and collective levels. I'm not typically drawn to
“. . . the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” ― George Eliot, Middlemarch My post
"Was with Buel most of the day. He thinks a great deal of home but wishes to see this rebellion ended as bad as I do. Hurrah for the Stars & Stripes, long may they wave oer the land of the free & home of the brave. Aint I
"That Martha Ballard kept her diary is one small miracle; that her descendants saved it is another." Laurel Thatcher Ulrich "The fact that these tattered and fading notebooks have survived is overwhelming. Berea carried the 1862 diary as he boarded the steamer Seashore and started the trip
"Even before the famine began, a writer in the Daily Picayune had used Ireland as a benchmark for misery across the British empire, contending that 'the condition of the most abject slave in the Colonies is, in my opinion, better far than that of the unfortunate Irish peasant.
This week, a brief item in Munsell's The Annals of Albany (v. 10) grabbed me. Looking for leads about whether my ancestors participated in the Anti-Rent Rebellion, I found an account of a spectacle instead. It was recorded in January 1838, a year before Stephen Van Rensselaer&
The Executive Order to change the Gulf of Mexico's name in January 2025 foreshadowed more "Donroe Doctrine" to follow. In a year and a half, the president has proclaimed his designs on many countries. He's declared aspirations to absorb, govern, renovate, conquer or subjugate
Last month, after I participated in Montreal's annual March to the Stone, I wrote about that tragic hidden history. The famine walk honors the site where an estimated 6,000 Irish immigrants—most of whom died of "ship fever" (typhus) in the summer of 1847—lie
