Each Friday morning New York History compiles for our readers the previous week’s top web links about New York’s state and local history. You can find all our weekly round-ups here.
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Saratoga National Historical Park (the Saratoga Battlefield), located on Routes 4 and 32 in Stillwater, will celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2013 and is looking for photographs showing people enjoying or working in the park from the 1900s to today.
This is a special one-time opportunity to share your nostalgic memories of the park for its 75th anniversary exhibit and to preserve your battlefield photos for current and future generations. In appreciation for sharing your images (up to 20 per family or individual), trained park volunteers will scan your hard copy photos and put them onto a compact disc for you to keep. Read more
Proposals are now being sought for the 2013 Conference on New York State History to be held at the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown on June 6-8, 2013. Presentations may consider any aspect of New York State’s History.
To mark the Civil War sesquicentennial, the organizing committee is also soliciting proposals for one set of sessions that will examine aspects of the New York City draft riots of July 1863. Guidelines and proposal forms are available at www.nysha.org/cnysh . Read more
The Frick Collection has announced the launch of its new website. Key features of the redesigned and expanded site include a new interactive virtual tour with access to information and zoomable images for more than 1,000 works of art in the permanent collection and enhanced content in the areas of research, programs, and media.
Additionally, the site has been streamlined to allow greater integration between the institution’s museum and library, and highlights the improved layout and easier navigation of sections relating to exhibitions, membership, special events, and the Museum Shop. Read more
Producers of the PBS series American Experience have announced the launch of The Abolitionist Map of America, an interactive website that explores events, characters and locations connected to the anti-slavery movement, one of the most important civil rights crusade in American history.
The map engages communities around their local history, connecting the stories told in The Abolitionists, premiering Tuesdays, January 8-22, 2013 on PBS, to real geographic locations, bringing events from the past to life and integrating them into present-day American cities. Read more
In 1999, Fox 2000 Pictures released the film Lake Placid. Despite the title, the story takes place on fictional Black Lake in Maine. The folks at Fox apparently figured the name of an internationally renowned Olympic site in New York might attract more attention than Black Lake, which was, after all, placid, just like the title said. Except for those times when a giant killer crocodile was thrashing on the surface, gulping down humans for lunch.
Read more
Ruin porn is in. Ruin porn is hot. Ruin porn is sexy. Ruin porn is the term coined by Jim Griffioen, who writes a blog about his life as a stay-at-home dad in Detroit.
As part of that effort he periodically posts photographs he has taken of the more than 70,000 abandoned buildings in his city. Such images included (as reported in the New York Times) “‘-feral’ houses almost completely overgrown with vegetation- a decommissioned public-school book depository in which trees were growing out of the piles of rotting textbooks”. The term has become a familiar one in the city not without some misgivings by the locals as they watch tourists take souvenirs of their city back home. Read more
Friends of Senate House are seeking pictures of Ulster County’s veterans and active duty military to use in their holiday decorations at the Loughran House located on the grounds of the Senate House Historic Site.
The front room of the Victorian Italianate-style home will be decorated in a military theme, and the volunteers will decorate the tree (the largest one in the house), with the pictures they receive. Volunteers will copy and mount the pictures as ornaments which will list the name of the service member, their military branch and dates of service. Read more
Details of mid-19th-century life come alive in the letters of a German immigrant, translated by Sigrid Wilshinsky and recently published as My Life in America Before, During and After the Civil War.
Louis Hensel was born in 1817 and lived a life of travel and adventure, as colorfully described in letters to his granddaughter back in Germany. Wilshinsky translated them from Suderlein German into modern English. Read more