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A New York Minute In History

A New York Minute In History

WAMC

A New York Minute In History is a podcast about the history of New York and the unique tales of New Yorkers. It is hosted by State Historian Devin Lander, Saratoga County Historian Lauren Roberts and Don Wildman. Jesse King and Jim Levulis of WAMC produce the podcast. A New York Minute In History is a production of the New York State Museum, WAMC Northeast Public Radio and Archivist Media. Support for the project comes from The William G. Pomeroy Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Humanities New York Action Grant. Find us on social media! Twitter: @NYHistoryMinute
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Top 10 A New York Minute In History Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best A New York Minute In History episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to A New York Minute In History for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite A New York Minute In History episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

A New York Minute In History - 100 Years Of New York’s Local Government Historians Law
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07/08/19 • 66 min

One hundred years ago, on April 11, 1919, New York Governor Al Smith signed the “Historians Law.” The first law of its kind in the United States, the Historians Law allowed for every village, town, and city in the state to have an official historian to gather and preserve historical records. On this episode of [...]
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A New York Minute In History - Remembering The Greatest Generation | A New York Minute In History
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05/22/20 • 22 min

75 years after the end of World War II, the ranks of the so-called Greatest Generation are dwindling. Among those still able to tell their stories, is Lieutenant Colonel Harry Stewart Jr. Turning 96 on the Fourth of July, Stewart was a member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen and is featured in National Geographic’s coverage of [...]
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A New York Minute In History - The Dutch And New Netherland

The Dutch And New Netherland

A New York Minute In History

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12/10/18 • 51 min

On the fourth episode of A New York Minute In History, we detail Henry Hudson’s exploration of what would become the Empire State and how his journey up the aptly named Hudson River led to the Dutch settlement of New Netherland. Join us as we explore how the Dutch colony differed from its counterparts in [...]
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This episode tells the story of Ronek Park, a non-discriminatory housing development built in 1950 in the village of North Amityville. Unlike the many housing developments created in the post-WWII U.S. that followed the practice of redlining and did not allow African American or Jewish people to buy homes, Ronek Park specifically marketed itself as allowing anyone to purchase a home regardless of race or creed.

Marker of Focus: Ronek Park, Village of North Amityville, Suffolk County, Long Island

Interviewees: Mary Cascone, Town of Babylon Historian and Eugene Burnett, Ronek Park resident and former Town of Babylon Police Department Sergeant.

Further Reading:

Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, 2004.

Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, 1985.

Gene Slater, Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America, 2021.

Teaching Resources:

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: Neighborhood Redlining and Home Ownership Lesson.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Understanding Redlining.

National Geographic: Mapmaker: Redlining in the United States.

Follow Along

Devin: Welcome to A New York Minute in History. I'm Devin Lander, the New York State historian.

Lauren: And I'm Lauren Roberts, the historian for Saratoga County. Today, we're heading east to the hamlet of North Amityville, which is part of the town of Babylon on Long Island. The sign is located at the intersection of Albany Avenue and Croydon road, and the text reads, Ronek Park. Honored as a non discriminatory housing development started by Thomas Romano in 1950. A part of the local housing boom after World War II. William G. Pomeroy Foundation 2015. So if you aren't from Long Island, you might be unfamiliar with the name Ronek Park, you probably have heard of a different housing development, also located on Long Island that was built around the same time called Levittown. And, of course, we're going to be discussing what made these two communities very different. Before we get into that, let's jump back for a bit and talk about why we have numerous housing developments popping up on Long Island in the late 1940s and the early 1950s.

Devin: I think really the suburban boom in the United States was the result of several different factors; more immediately was that the United States emerged from World War Two as - that though there were horrific losses of American men and women during the war, the United States was essentially unscathed compared to Europe, Japan - obviously, compared to China, the United States did suffer a direct attack at Pearl Harbor, but otherwise didn't have the catastrophic events unfold that those nations did. And we really have to think about the...

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A New York Minute In History - The Florence Farming Association | A New York Minute in History
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07/28/23 • 29 min

On this episode, Devin and Lauren tell the story of the Florence Farming and Lumber Association, a settlement of free African Americans in Oneida County beginning in 1846. The Association was the creation of abolitionists Gerrit Smith and Stephen Myers, and it developed on land given by Smith, who at the time was New York's largest landowner. The original idea for the settlement was to allow African American men to meet the threshold of owning at least $250 worth of property before they would have been allowed to vote, a restriction imposed upon them at the time by the New York state legislature. It was also seen as an opportunity to provide these men and their families the opportunity for self-sufficiency in a rural location.

Marker of Focus: Florence, Oneida, Oneida County

Guests: Jessica Harney, Camden High School social studies teacher; Rebecca McLain, executive director of the Oneida County History Center; and Matt Kirk, principle investigator at Hartgen Archeological Associates

A New York Minute In History is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio, the New York State Museum, and Archivist Media, with support from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. This episode was produced by Jesse King. Our theme is “Begrudge” by Darby.

Further Reading :

“New Historical Marker Planned at Site Oneida Abolitionist Bought for Black Families to Own,” Edward Harris, Observer-Dispatch, April 14, 2023.

From Slavery to a Bishopric, or, The Life of Bishop Walter Hawkins of the British Methodist Episcopal Church Canada, S.J. Celestine Edwards, 1891. Bishop Hawkins was one of the residents of the Florence Farming and Lumber Association before moving to Canada.

Practical Dreamer: Gerrit Smith and the Crusade for Social Reform, Norman K. Dann, 2009.

Information about Stephen Myers: https://www.albany.edu/arce/MyersXX.html

Teaching Resources :

Consider the Source New York: Finding Florence

Columbia University Mapping the African American Past

Follow Along

Devin: Welcome to A New York Minute in History. I'm Devin Lander, the New York state historian.

Lauren: And I'm Lauren Roberts, the historian for Saratoga County. Today we're focusing on a marker located on Florence Hill Road in the town of Florence in Oneida County, which is in the central part of New York state. And the text reads: “Florence Farming Association existed here circa 1848-1860. Settlement of free Blacks promoted by Stephen Myers, other notable abolitionists. William G. Pomeroy Foundation, 2016.”

Now, the Florence Farming Association was a community of free Blacks established in the 1840s. And it may sound familiar to some of our listeners, who remember our episode on Timbuctoo up in Essex County. They are related in that they come out of the same idea from Gerrit Smith, about enabling African Americans to own land in the hopes that they would then be able to vote in New York state.

Devin: Absolutely. The Timbuctoo episode that we did a couple years ago was something that I think some people knew about, because John Brown was associated with Timbuctoo. Less people, certainly, know about the Florence Farming Association. But for a little bit of background about why Gerrit Smith and these abolitionists came up with this idea to give away land, let's revisit what we discussed with author Amy Godine, during the Timbuctoo episode.

Amy: It really starts, in my view, around 1821 or so, when the New York state Assembly enacted a law which deprived Black, free New Yorkers of the right to vote unless they could prove they owned $250 worth of real property. It was racialized voter suppression, with the intent of tamping down the possibility of an anti-slavery voting block that could vote against slavery's business interests, and it was very effective. This law would effectively disenfranchise Black New Yorkers really until 1870. It wasn't stripped from the books, and then only by federal law, not by stat...

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The coronavirus pandemic has altered the world. And it’s upended how many people go about their daily lives. One organization in New York’s Capital Region wants to collect and preserve the stories of how ordinary people are living through COVID-19. The Schenectady County Historical Society is asking county residents to share their experiences of how [...]
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A New York Minute In History - Georgia O'Keeffe and Her Visit to Wiawaka | A New York Minute in History
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06/16/22 • 29 min

On this episode, Devin and Lauren discuss how the poor conditions of female textile workers in Capital Region cities led to the creation of a retreat where women could “escape” the cities. Wiawaka was founded by Mary Fuller, an advocate for women workers in Troy, and the wealthy philanthropists Katrina and Spenser Trask. Wiawaka originally included a planned artist’s retreat, called Wakonda, where Georgia O’Keeffe was invited to stay as a young artist and member of the Arts Students League. This introduction to Lake George had a monumental effect on O’Keeffe’s life and art, and she spent several years working in the area.

Marker of Focus: Georgia O'Keeffe, Lake George, Warren County

Guests: Doreen Kelly, executive director of Wiawaka, and Karen Quinn, art historian and curator at the New York State Museum

A New York Minute In History is a production of the New York State Museum, WAMC, and Archivist Media, with support from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. This episode was produced by Jesse King. Our theme is "Begrudge" by Darby.

Further Reading:

Messinger, Lisa Mintz. Georgia O'Keeffe. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001.

O'Keeffe, Georgia. Georgia O'Keeffe. New York: Viking, 1976.

Wiawaka Holiday House: https://upstatehistorical.org/items/show/84?tour=7&index=10

Capital Region Textile Industry: https://www.albanyinstitute.org/textile-industry.html

The Collar City by Don Rittner: https://rensselaer.nygenweb.net/article11.htm

Collar Maid Cuffed Bosses by Pam Trudeau: https://rensselaer.nygenweb.net/article4.htm

More on Georgia O’Keeffe: https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/about-georgia-okeeffe/

Follow Along

Devin: Welcome to A New York Minute in History. I'm Devin Lander, the New York state historian.

Lauren: And I'm Lauren Roberts, the historian for Saratoga County. On this episode, we're taking a deeper look at a marker located along Route 9L on the eastern shores of Lake George, which is located in Warren County. The title of the marker is “Georgia O'Keeffe,” and the text reads: “Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887 to 1986. American artist who stayed at Wakonda in June 1908 on a scholarship from the Art Students League. William G. Pomeroy Foundation, 2016.”

The artist Georgia O'Keeffe is pretty much a household name, but I'm guessing many of our listeners haven't heard of Wakonda, which is the lodge Georgia O'Keeffe stayed in, or the Art Students League. So let's take a step back and talk about what brought this young artist to the shores of Lake George in the summer of 1908.

In the 19th century, the city of Troy in Rensselaer County was known as the "Collar City," because Troy produced the majority of detachable shirt collars in the country. Detachable collars are now a thing of the past, but in the 19th Century, they were really popular. The collar was usually the dirtiest part of the shirt, and it needed to be laundered most frequently, and in the days before washing machines, this was really a pain. So someone in Troy — there's a couple of conflicting stories about who actually came up with the idea — but someone in Troy created the concept of a detachable shirt collar, and eventually detachable cuffs as well. So the idea was, you could just remove the collar and replace it when it was dirty, saving the laundresses from having to wash the entire shirt. This industry exploded in Troy, and by the early 1900s, 15,000 people were working in the collar industry in that city.

It also expanded into the larger textile industry, which made it a desirable location for new immigrants to settle, because jobs were readily available. The majority of workers in the textile industry in Troy were female, and many of them were immigrants, most of them with very low incomes, who worked extremely long hours. And this is where Mary Fuller enters the story. Mary Fuller was the daughter of a wealthy Troy industrialist who was an advocate for women's rights. Mary Fuller was sensitive to the fact that these women working in the industries in and around Troy, such as the shirt collar factories, mills, and laundries — they couldn't have afforded a vacation. ...

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On this episode, Devin and Lauren tell the forgotten story of Boston Corners, which once belonged to Massachusetts, but was ceded to New York state by an act of Congress in 1855. The area, now part of the Town of Ancram, was remote in the mid-19th century and hard to access from Massachusetts, while New [...]

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A New York Minute In History - Radio Cloak and Dagger | A New York Minute in History
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06/01/23 • 29 min

On this episode, Devin and Lauren tell the recently declassified story of a covert radio station built by the FBI on Long Island to deceive the Nazis during World War II. From 1942-1945, double agents worked in secret from a remote home in Suffolk County on the major operations "Bodyguard" and "Bluebird," and dug up information that some believe contributed to the United States' development of the atomic bomb. After the war, the Wading River Radio Station was taken apart by the FBI, but the house itself (then called "Owen Place," but now known as the "Benson House") is open to visitors at Camp DeWolfe. The property was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2018.

Marker of Focus: Wading River Radio Station, Wading River, Suffolk County

Guests: Dr. Raymond J. Batvinis, former supervisory special agent for the FBI now with the Institute of World Politics; Rev. Matthew Tees, executive director of Camp DeWolfe

A New York Minute In History is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio, the New York State Museum, and Archivist Media, with support from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. This episode was produced by Jesse King. Our theme is “Begrudge” by Darby.

Further Reading :

Raymond J. Batvinis, Hoover’s Secret War Against Axis Spies: FBI Counterespionage During World War II

Raymond J. Batvinis, The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence

Neil Kagan, The Secret History of World War II: Spies, Code Breakers, and Covert Operations

Joshua Levine, Operation Fortitude: The True Story of the Key Spy Operation of WWII that Saved D-Day

Teaching Resources :

International Spy Museum, Educator Resources

The National Law Enforcement Museum, Virtual Classes

The National WWII Museum, Educator Resources

Follow Along

Devin: Welcome to A New York Minute in History. I'm Devin Lander, the New York state historian.

Lauren: And I'm Lauren Roberts, the historian for Saratoga County. On this episode, our marker of focus is not one of the blue-and-yellow New York state Historic markers that we usually talk about. The marker is brown and white, and it's part of another marker program that the William G. Pomeroy Foundation offers called the "National Register Signage Grant Program." This program offers a historic marker to individual properties or districts that have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This idea came out of the observation that once a property is listed, there is no provision for signage to acknowledge that accomplishment. So Pomeroy's National Register Signage Grant Program looks to fill that gap so that these sites get the deserved recognition.

The marker we're speaking about today is located at 408 North Side Road in Wading River, Suffolk County, out on the North shore of Long Island, on property that is now part of Camp DeWolfe. And the text read...

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A New York Minute In History - Cardiff Giant Celebrates 150th Birthday

Cardiff Giant Celebrates 150th Birthday

A New York Minute In History

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10/17/19 • 5 min

On this special episode of A New York Minute In History, we attend a birthday party for one of America’s greatest hoaxes. The Cardiff Giant, a 10-and-a-half foot so-called petrified man, was uncovered in 1869. And he is still marveled at by the public today. Just inside the front door of the Farmers’ Museum in [...]
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FAQ

How many episodes does A New York Minute In History have?

A New York Minute In History currently has 59 episodes available.

What topics does A New York Minute In History cover?

The podcast is about Society & Culture, Podcasts and Arts.

What is the most popular episode on A New York Minute In History?

The episode title 'Baseball: Myths And The Early Game' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on A New York Minute In History?

The average episode length on A New York Minute In History is 32 minutes.

How often are episodes of A New York Minute In History released?

Episodes of A New York Minute In History are typically released every 33 days, 16 hours.

When was the first episode of A New York Minute In History?

The first episode of A New York Minute In History was released on May 10, 2018.

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