Editorial Note [HTML] Articles John Broven, “Golden Crest Records: The Independent Record Industry Comes to Long Island” [HTML] or [PDF] Frank J. Cavaioli, “Albert A. Johnson and the Agricultural School at Farmingdale” [HTML] or [PDF] Hilary May, “Expanding Horizons: Long Islanders Involved in the East Asian Trade, 1850-1890” [HTML] or [PDF] Stephen R. Patnode, […]
Continue ReadingLee Koppelman Full Interview from Wolf Schafer on Vimeo.
Continue ReadingTrack 1: “Big Duck Ramble” Editor’s Note Caroline Doctorow, a resident of Bridgehampton, has established herself as a major figure on the acoustic music scene, touring the east coast as well as co-hosting the syndicated folk radio show, “The Song Trails Radio Hour.” She has six albums to her credit with her most recent, “Another […]
Continue ReadingSarah Garland. Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence are Changing America’s Suburbs. New York, NY: Nation Books, 2009. Notes, index. Pp. 320. ISBN 1568584040. $26.95. Are there gangs in Garden City? Sarah Garland digs into the heart of Long Island’s suburbs to uncover the truth, the fact that gangs do not exist […]
Continue ReadingPlease enter below … The eMuseum of the LIHJ expands with each new issue
Continue ReadingLee E. Koppelman Video Interview by Noel Gish, 23 September 2009 Origins of Suffolk County Planning Department, 1960 1:37 min. Suffolk’s Farmland Preservation Program 2:06 min. Robert Moses and Transportation 3:16 min. Long Island — the fifty-first State? 2:26 min. Long Island’s Clean Energy Future 3:10 min. Long Island’s Demographic Changes Since 1965 2:42 min. […]
Continue ReadingFigure 1: View of the Brooklyn City Water Works (Ridgewood Reservoir), copy of lithograph print by G. Kraetzer, 1859. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Long Island Division, Eugene L. Armbruster Collection. The formation of Greater New York in 1898 cemented the city’s position as the nation’s premier metropolis and promised to address, if […]
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Archaeologists from the New York State Museum uncovered the foundation remains of a small house along North Country Road in Rocky Point, New York, in 1991. The house was occupied during parts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then left abandoned in the wilderness for roughly 150 years. The site was rediscovered during a cultural […]
Continue ReadingIn December 2009, when I announced the rebirth of the LIHJ as an online journal, I proclaimed that the semiannual publication will follow the original LIHJ format of “late Fall and Spring issues” (publisher’s note). The date of this announcement was December 14, 2009 – a few days before winter solstice. Calling that “late Fall” […]
Continue ReadingCourtesy Christiane Jancke “The Big Duck Ramble” (song)
Continue ReadingLong Island educators should consider the positive results to be gained for themselves as teachers, and more importantly for their students, through the teaching and studying of America’s history from the perspective of the history of our scenic and diverse Atlantic home. While I often used examples from Long Island’s past in my teaching of […]
Continue ReadingRichard Acritelli is a social studies teacher at Rocky Point High School and an adjunct history professor at Suffolk Community College. He has previously published military history articles in the Long Island Historical Journal and the North Shore Sun. Emanuel Boussios is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York’s Nassau Community […]
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Bradley Harris, Kiernon Lannon and Joshua Ruff. Smithtown. Mount Pleasant, S.C.: Arcadia Press, 2009. Illustrations. Pp 128. ISBN: 0738564532. $21.99. The Township of Smithtown deserves recognition for its own story, and this book is ably put together by three authors who keenly know and embrace their subject. Settled in 1665, the town’s name derives from […]
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Gary Williams, Seal of Honor: Operation Red Wings and the Life of LT. Michael P. Murphy, USN. Annapolis, MD.: United States Naval Institute Press, 2010. Photographs, appendix, index. Pp. 216. ISBN: 1591149576. $29.95. Michael P. Murphy was a young man from Patchogue, Long Island, who heroically served his country and was tragically killed in the […]
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James Mauro. Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World’s Fair on the Brink of War. New York: Ballantine Books, 2010. Photographs, bibliographical references and index. Pp. 401. ISBN: 9780345512147. $28.00. New York’s 1939-1940 World’s Fair has long staked its claim on American popular memory, and seven decades on, it […]
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Sarah Garland. Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence are Changing America’s Suburbs. New York, NY: Nation Books, 2009. Notes, index. Pp. 320. ISBN 1568584040. $26.95. Are there gangs in Garden City? Sarah Garland digs into the heart of Long Island’s suburbs to uncover the truth, the fact that gangs do not […]
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Figure 1: View of the Brooklyn City Water Works (Ridgewood Reservoir), copy of lithograph print by G. Kraetzer, 1859. Courtesy of the Queens Borough Public Library, Long Island Division, Eugene L. Armbruster Collection. The formation of Greater New York in 1898 cemented the city’s position as the nation’s premier metropolis and promised to address, if […]
Continue ReadingI am very pleased to welcome you to our Winter 2011 issue, the third in the online version of the Long Island History Journal. In this issue, you will find an article by Jeffrey Kroessler addressing Brooklyn’s problems with insuring an adequate water supply and Allison Manfra McGovern’s examination of an archaeological site in Rocky […]
Continue ReadingNotes From The Publisher and The Editor From the Publisher From the Editor Articles Jeffrey A. Kroessler, “Brooklyn’s Thirst, Long Island’s Water: Consolidation, Local Control, and the Aquifer” [HTML] or [PDF] Allison Manfra McGovern, “Rocky Point’s African American Past: A Forgotten History Remembered through Historical Archaeology at the Betsey Prince Site” [HTML] or [PDF] […]
Continue Reading“Isle of Beauty, Fare-Thee-Well” (song)
Continue ReadingIntroduction to “Isle of Beauty, Fare-Thee-Well”
Continue ReadingTrack 1: Introduction to “Isle of Beauty, Fare-Thee-Well” Track 2: “Isle of Beauty, Fare-Thee-Well” (song) Editor’s Note With this issue of the LIHJ, we expand our resources section by presenting “Isle of Beauty, Fare-Thee-Well,” the first of what will be occasional recordings linked to Long Island’s history. Stephen and Susan Sanfilippo are educators, researchers and […]
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Colson Whitehead. Sag Harbor. New York: Doubleday, 2009. Pp. 273. ISBN: 0385527659. $24.95. Colson Whitehead is rapidly emerging as one of the major literary voices of the new millennium. Like Philip Roth a generation earlier, Whitehead writes elegantly and eloquently about what it feels like to be an upwardly mobile outsider in pursuit of the […]
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Robert Roper. Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War. New York: Walker & Company, 2008. Pp. 432 ISBN: 0802715532. $18.00. Much has been written about Walt Whitman, the iconic American poet and native Long Islander. You might think the topic would be thoroughly exhausted by now. But authors […]
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David Kushner. Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb. New York: Walker Publishing Company, Inc., 2009. Photographs, index. Pp. 237. ISBN: 0802716199. $26.00. In American popular culture, the 1960s have come to be identified as the seedbed of civil rights for African Americans, as well as other […]
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Adam M. Grohman, introduction by Henry J. Hendrix II, Commander US Navy. Presidential Plunge: Theodore Roosevelt, The Plunger Submarine, and the United States Navy. Locust Valley, NY: Underwater Historical Research Society, 2009. Pp. 168. Photographs, notes, appendices, index. ISBN: 9780578031224. $15.95. Theodore Roosevelt aficionados will delight in this thorough account of the president’s descent in […]
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Figure 1: The Wedding of Pocahantas with John Rolf, 1867. Lithograph by Joseph Hoover. Library of Congress. One of the more compelling dramas associated with the settlement of North America is the story of Pocahontas. Historians, artists, poets, and novelists have celebrated her rescue of John Smith and her marriage to John Rolfe.[1] Pocahontas’ conversion […]
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Geoffrey K. Fleming and Amy Kasuga Folk, 2009. Hotels and Inns of Long Island’s North Fork. Charleston, S.C.: The History Press. Photographs. Pp. 156. ISBN: 1596297255. $21.99. In their delightful book, Hotels and Inns of Long Island’s North Fork, Geoffrey K. Fleming and Amy Kasuga Folk have captured the spirit of a vacation destination that […]
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Kenneth Wayne and Erik Neil, editors. Long Island Moderns: Art and Architecture on the North Shore and Beyond. Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum of Art (Distributed by University Press of New England, Lebanon, NH), 2009. Illustrations, bibliography. Pp. 128. ISBN: 9781879195158. $29.95. In their essay “Learning from Levittown” Robert Venturi and Denis Scott Brown use that […]
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At first glance, a banner of Adolf Hitler would seem out of place near a banner of George Washington and the American flag. Yet, on the night of February 20, 1939 at Madison Square Garden members of the German-American Bund saw no contradiction between a founding father of the American democracy and the fascist European […]
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On September 10, 1938, a swirling air mass began to take shape off the west coast of Africa. Eleven days later it made a mad dash up the eastern seaboard of the United States striking Long Island and greater New England. The following morning, Long Islanders awoke to a scene of utter devastation. Legions of […]
Continue ReadingJonathan Bergman, Assistant Professor of Modern American History at Texas A&M University–Commerce, was born and raised on Long Island where he practiced law before embarking on a career in academe. He is working on a book on the disaster relief operations of the Hurricane of 1938. Frances Campani is an architect and partner at Campani […]
Continue ReadingThis was my first time reading your fascinating magazine filled with stories about living on Long Island and written by well informed writers who obviously spent years researching their findings. The Fall/Spring issue (2007/2008) in particular contained a marvelous story of how the 1938 hurricane was handled. “A New Deal For Disaster,” written by Professor […]
Continue ReadingI am very pleased to invite you to explore the second issue of the Long Island History Journal. We continue our mission to place Long Island’s history in a national as well as global context while taking full advantage of the resources of online publication to enhance some LIHJ features and introduce new ones as […]
Continue ReadingEditorial Note [HTML] Articles Jonathan Bergman, “Church, Community, and Religious Disaster Relief in Suffolk County: Three Case Studies From The Hurricane of 1938” [HTML] or [PDF] John Strong, James Van Tassel, and Rick Van Tassel, “In Search of Catoneras: Long Island’s Pocahontas” [HTML] or [PDF] Ryan Shaffer, “Long Island Nazis: A Local Synthesis of Transnational Politics […]
Continue ReadingThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages hosted the exhibition Growing Up on Long Island from February 21 until October 25, 2009. The exhibit explored the many ways that childhood has changed across this region since 1800. Funded by the New York Council on the Humanities and the beneficiary of many expert […]
Continue ReadingLee Koppelman Long Island: A Unique Corner of the World (1:31 min.)
Continue ReadingLee Koppelman A Planner’s Model: Singapore (5.38 min.)
Continue ReadingLee Koppelman Long Island’s Demographic Changes Since 1965 (2:42 min.)
Continue ReadingLee Koppelman Long Island’s Clean Energy Future (3:10 min.)
Continue ReadingLee Koppelman Long Island — the fifty-first State? (2:26 min.)
Continue ReadingLee Koppelman Robert Moses and Transportation (3:16 min.)
Continue ReadingLee Koppelman Suffolk’s Farmland Preservation Program (2.06 min.)
Continue ReadingLee Koppelman Origins of Suffolk County Planning Department, 1960 (1.37 min.)
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Historians still debate how significantly the American Revolution altered the people who experienced it.[1] Fortunately, biographies of participants can enhance our appreciation of the momentous changes sweeping across American society between 1763 and 1789. By studying an individual before the Revolution, gauging his or her expectations for the future, and then assessing how much the […]
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Physiography, climate, and location have all combined to make Long Island a farming country. Gabriel, The Evolution of Long Island, 1921, 34. Through its nearly one hundred years of development as a leading educational institution, Farmingdale State College, SUNY, has mirrored Long Island’s transition from rural to suburban and from agriculture to high technology. It […]
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Figure 1: Aerial View of the Nissequogue River. Source www.striperonline.com/kayaking_nissequogue_river.htm Shakespeare alleged that “what’s past is prologue.” If this is true, then millennial ecological concerns such as those unveiled in recent films ranging from Al Gore’s award-winning An Inconvenient Truth to Gregory Greene’s The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American […]
Continue ReadingNotes From The Publisher and The Editor From the Publisher From the Editor Articles Wolf Schäfer, “Long Island: Global, National, and Local” [HTML] or [PDF] Joshua Ruff, “Diasporas in Suburbia: Long Island’s Recent Immigrant Past” [HTML] or [PDF] Noel Gish, “Lee E. Koppelman: Master Planner” [HTML] or [PDF] Neil P. Buffett, “We were pretty gung-ho; we were […]
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Dr. Lee E. Koppelman’s name is synonymous with the planning and development of Long Island in the second half of the twentieth century. For twenty-eight years (1960-1988), he was Director of the Suffolk County Planning Department and for forty-one years (1965-2006), the Nassau-Suffolk County Regional Planning Board Executive Director. Koppelman was a planning gymnast, contorting […]
Continue ReadingCatherine Ball is the supervising librarian of the Richard H. Handley Collection of Long Island Americana (also known as the Long Island Room) at the Smithtown Library. Richard Barons is the Executive Director of the East Hampton Historical Society. He has authored a number of monographs and catalogues, including Severity and Simplicity: the American Arts […]
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Figure 1: Twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration, Schackman (of Riverhead) and Barish (of Freeport), c. 1927. Both were Russian Jewish immigrant families. The Long Island Museum Collection, Gift of Elaine Schackman Kimpel. Figure 2: Santos Hernandez (center back) and Sinia Miranda (right back) and their family, from El Salvador and now living in Bay Shore, taken […]
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Howard Kroplick (foreword by Florence Ogg). Vanderbilt Cup Races of Long Island. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008. 128 Pp. Photographs. ISBN: 073855751X. $21.99. Despite its occasional reputation as a highway with shopping malls, Long Island is a place rooted in a history both fascinating and varied. One strain of that history concerns the first international […]
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Lee E. Koppelman and Seth Forman. The Fire Island National Seashore: a History. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008. Pp. 208. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN: 0791473422. $21.95. In 1839, Benjamin Thompson, Long Island’s eminent historian and natural scientist, believed that Long Island was created from the sea. We now know differently. […]
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Cynthia Zaitzevsky. Long Island Landscapes and the Women Who Designed Them. Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities with W.W. Norton & Company, New York & London, 2009. 304 Pp. Black-and-white photographs, plans, 14 pages of color plates, appendix of project lists. ISBN: 0393731243. $75.00. For half a century, between 1890 and 1940, Long […]
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Claudia Gryvatz Copquin, introduction by Kenneth T. Jackson. The Neighborhoods of Queens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007 (paperback 2009). 259 Pp. Maps, photographs, timeline, bibliography, and index. ISBN: 0300112998. $35.00. The Neighborhoods of Queens offers an astonishing array of surprises in its descriptions of all 56 neighborhoods in Queens. Queens Village, we learn, […]
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Dan Rattiner, foreword by Edward Albee. In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires, and Celebrities. New York: Harmony Books, 2008. 368 Pp. Photographs. ISBN: 0307382958. $24.95. If there was an honorary mayor of the Hamptons it would have to be Dan Rattiner. Of course, some South Fork natives don’t believe there is […]
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Geoffrey K. Fleming and Sara Evans, et. al. A Shared Aesthetic: Artists of Long Island’s North Fork. Southold, New York: Southold Historical Society, in association with Hudson Hills Press, 2008. 169 illustrations, artists’ biographies, bibliography, index. Pp. 250. ISBN: 155595300X. $50.00. According to Fleming, the director of the Southold Historical Society and the lead author […]
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Richard Guy Wilson. Harbor Hill: Portrait of a House. New York: Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities with W.W. Norton Company, 2008. Pp.178. Photographs, illustrations, architectural designs, endnotes, index. ISBN: 0393732169. $60.00. Ever since the destruction of Harbor Hill, the subject of this once grand estate on Long Island’s Gold Coast has deserved […]
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Either as independent laboratories or as connected nodes, islands are instructive settings. They can be interpreted as sites of natural experiments providing laboratory-like case studies of flora and fauna as well as nature-and-society systems. Finches from the Galápagos Islands have inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution; and the environmental destruction of Easter Island’s Polynesian society has […]
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Edwin G. Burrows. Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War. New York: Basic Books, 2008. Pp. 384. ISBN: 0465008356. $27.50. Edwin G. Burrows is the Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 and Distinguished Professor of History at Brooklyn College. He has also authored […]
Continue ReadingIn his recent call for placing United States history in a global context, Peter Stearns offered the observation that “the global is often more local than we imagine, and vice versa,” recalling the oft-quoted comment by former Speaker of the House Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill, that “all politics is local.” As one who has spent […]
Continue ReadingThe Long Island Historical Journal died October 28, 2008, when Associate Editor Ann Becker informed the LIHJ Editorial Board in an e-mail that the twenty-year old journal “has ceased publication” with Volume 20 snail-mailed out three months earlier. Yet the fact that you are reading this note on a screen that shows Volume 21, Issue […]
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