Blog Posts by Subject: American Studies

Seeking further enlightenment into the city we call home, I recently took a class on the literary and cultural history of New York City. Among the many themes common to New York City novels we discussed was the portrayal of the city itself as a character with power to shape the lives of its citizens.

Tom Deignan, writer of the weekly Sidewalks column in the Irish Voice and author of Irish Americans, spoke at the Mid-Manhattan, West New Brighton, and Riverdale libraries last month. The occasion was Immigrant Heritage Week — celebrated yearly in New York City — a great time to remember and honor our immigrant forebears. He has quite an encyclopedic knowledge on the topic of Irish America, and this time he chose to present 20 books that he considers to be required reading for Irish Americans.

In these tight economic times, we’re all looking for ways to save money, and as summer approaches this applies to vacation plans as well. About this time of year Americans start to dream of vacations to faraway places, respite from the daily grind and a little sun and relaxation. Conventional wisdom says that in recessions we lean towards travel options light on the wallet, heading to locales closer to home, such as a national park or an American destination city.
 

Nearly everything you thought you knew about the Pony Express is wrong. Well, perhaps not wrong, but exaggerated or romanticized. If you’re like me, you’re probably imagining men dressed in fringed leather uniform on horses, riding at break-neck speeds to carry important business and love letters hundreds of miles, perhaps while simultaneously shooting their Wincester rifles in the air. When not dashing across the prairie, the riders would be found roping cattle, drinking and playing cards in saloons, hunting buffalo, and dodging Black-Hatted Bandits and Indians.

Gotham. The Big Apple. The City of Light. Crossroads of the World. And my personal favorite: the City of Superlatives. These are all sobriquets that have been applied to New York City at one time or another.

The city that has insinuated its way into the hearts of so many travelers has inspired an incredible outpouring of travel guides and literature.

Travel writing at its best is half reporting and half myth-creating by the adventurer fortunate to visit an unknown, perhaps exotic destination. These treatises offer a snapshot of a particular place and period of time, capturing the local culture, quirks, cuisines and curiosities. Travel essays are excellent guides for an 

Working as an archivist I often come across collection items that change the way I see the world around me. I had such an experience recently when processing a manuscript collection. As I sorted through the papers of a woman who had donated her papers to the library, an article title caught my eye, “Is Feminism Dead?”

Those who are interested in the Feminist movement will remember the Time magazine cover from 1998 that asked this question, featuring the images of four women across a stark black background: Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and…Ally McBeal. The lead article by Ginia Bellafante chastised the newest generation of women for 

Folk singer Pete Seeger looked up 'log cabin' at The New York Public Library when he wanted to build a home in upstate New York, according to a recent New Yorker interview (Wilkinson, Alec. "The Protest Singer." New Yorker v.82, no. 9 (April 17, 2006): p44). Curious, I repeated his query in the library catalog starting with a simple search for "log cabin*" (the asterisk wildcard finds both singular and plural). Now I've posted a guide to these resources, attached below and downloadable from the library's website. I wonder if Seeger learned his cabin craft from How to Build Your Home in the Woods (1952). More recent, The Science Industry and 

Last week, while doing some research on abolitionism in one of our best historical newspaper databases, I came across some references to organizations called Free Produce Societies. As I had previously never come across these groups, I decided to do some further research. Free Produce Associations were formed in the early decades of the 19th century by radical abolitionists, generally Quakers and free blacks, who hoped to disengage themselves from participating in a culture they found to be both un-Christian and un-American. Through these societies they ran stores and markets in which they tried to pool their resources and their skills in order to offer for sale only products of