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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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