A full listing of our scheduled events can be found on our Events page. Interested in an event?  Simply click on the event and you can add it to your personal calendar.

New York’s “Indian Problem”: Ely Parker and the Whipple Report, 1850-1889 (webinar)

Date: Friday, October 15, 2021

Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm

To register for this webinar, go to:  https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__xLgkzgTTeSu7T5v0-_ysA

This webinar juxtaposes Seneca leader Ely S. Parker’s vision for Indian policy in the early 1870s with the policy of extreme assimilation that state and federal governments adopted by the 1880s. During his time as Commissioner of Indian Affairs under President Grant’s Peace Policy, Parker envisioned an alternate relationship between Native nations and the United States, one that respected treaty terms and Native territories. This moment of radical possibility did not last, as proponents of extreme assimilation and land allotment thwarted Parker’s efforts. Back in New York, the Senecas worked throughout the nineteenth century to develop American-style agricultural lands and alter their diplomatic approaches to be more acceptable to federal and state officials. Despite these settler-approved advancements, the state released the Whipple Report in 1889 after an investigation of the conditions of Native Americans in New York. This report, rather than an introspective examination of the failures and limits of past policies that Parker worked to overcome, blames what the state perceived as their “Indian problem” on groups like the Senecas themselves. As New York fell in line with the federal government’s assimilationist policies, the state deemed their own project of assimilation a failure because the Senecas still resided in New York despite the states’ intention since the eighteenth century for them to disappear.

Elana Krischer holds a PhD in American History from the University at Albany-State University of New York. She is writing a history of Native futurity and settler colonialism entitled Empire State Interrupted: Seneca Sovereignty and Settler Debates Over Land, 1779-1889.

Canal Records at the New York State Archives (webinar)

Date: Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm

To register for this webinar, go to: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0y2g-UjVS5OY6YJFOfc9zg  

With over 5,000 cubic feet of records, researching the history of canals at the New York State Archives can be a formidable task. Archivists Keith Swaney and Mike Maloney will present on the wide variety of resources at the New York State Archives that can help with your canal research. 

Mike Maloney is an Archives and Records Management Specialist at the New York State Archives where he works to make collections more accessible by creating finding aids and assisting researchers with reference questions. He has previously worked as the librarian/archivist for the Schenectady County Historical Society.   Keith Swaney is an Archives and Records Management Specialist at the New York State Archives. He supervises the processing and digitization of State Archives holdings, and regularly assists researchers in the Archives’ reading room and through email. He is a co-author of the World War I exhibit catalog, A Spirit of Sacrifice: New York State in the First World War (SUNY Press, 2017). 

The Erie Canal – Resources Available at the New York State Library (webinar)

Date: Wednesday, October 27, 2021 

Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm 

Registration Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0c6EyVSyQ0CEI2ZH4p9Lrw 

The Erie Canal is one of the most important works of civil engineering and construction in North America.  The New York State Library has a wide variety of primary source documents and published materials on the Erie Canal ranging from the construction and maintenance of the Canal to life on the Canal.  Senior Librarians Stephanie Barrett and Elizabeth Jakubowski will present an overview and highlights of the Library’s collection including maps, music, images, broadsides, diaries, laws & regulations, journals, books, and NYS agency reports.  

Gender Determinations in Contemporary U.S. Asylum Law (webinar)

Date: Wednesday, November 3, 2021

Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm

To register for this webinar, go to: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_As3BIrVXQ0GkR59ekHn7fQ

Practices for determining and classifying individuals’ genders and sexualities have long been part of the immigration process in the United States. Though laws focused on excluding gender and sexual minorities have been repealed, transgender people still face situations where they must prove their gender identities to courts or immigration officials. This talk will discuss one of those situations: claiming political asylum due to persecution on account of one’s gender identity. Although transgender people can now claim asylum based on their gender identities, I show that the gender classification process favors those with “ideal” gender development trajectories that do not always accurately fit immigrants’ identity development paths.

Stefan Vogler is a research scientist with NORC at the University of Chicago and author of Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification. His research focuses on gender- and sexuality-related issues in law and the criminal legal system. Dr. Vogler’s work has appeared in outlets such as Law & Society Review, Theoretical Criminology, Law & Social Inquiry, and Gender & Society.

Writing Indigenous Diplomacy: Indian Removal and the History of Native American Literature (webinar)

Date: Friday, November 12, 2021

Time 1:00pm – 2:00pm

To register for this webinar, go to: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7IgKgzZVQHiMCjBRvw4x9Q

In the nineteenth century, when the crisis of Indian removal profoundly reshaped Indigenous America, many Native American diplomats and intellectuals turned to public speaking and writing to protest or negotiate U.S.-Indian relations. Through their efforts, scenes of Indigenous diplomacy—in Washington DC, at tribal councils, and in military outposts—became an important seedbed for Native American literature. In this lecture, Dr. Frank Kelderman explores the relation between these diplomatic settings and the history of Native American writing and oratory in the era of Indian removal. How did Native writers and speakers assert a public voice at a time when the power and livelihood of Indian nations was under increasing threat? What kinds of collaborations and deal-making went into these diplomatic scenes, and how did those shape the meaning of Indigenous texts? And what are the archival, historical, and interpretative problems that these writings pose for us as present-day readers? To explore these questions, this lecture will showcase a range of visual and written artifacts from different archives. Focusing on Native writers and speakers from the Great Lakes to the Missouri River Valley, it will show how the practice of Indigenous diplomacy gave rise to an unexpected and often misunderstood tradition of Native American writing. 

Frank Kelderman is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Authorized Agents: Publication and Diplomacy in the Era of Indian Removal (SUNY Press, 2019). His articles on Native American literature and culture have also appeared or are forthcoming in journals including American Studies, Studies in American Indian Literatures, Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and American Quarterly. At the University of Louisville, Dr. Kelderman teaches courses on U.S., Native American, and global Indigenous literature.  

The Pioneer of her own Fortune”: Nineteenth-Century Businesswomen in Albany and Across the United States (webinar)

Date: Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm

To register for this webinar, go to: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_L64k85D1RAuKvea0dBAu1g 

When Dr. Susan Ingalls Lewis started research on Albany’s mid-nineteenth-century milliners thirty years ago, she expected to identify a few exceptional women willing to brave the male marketplace in search of commercial success.  What she discovered instead were thousands of small businesswomen engaged in a wide range of fields – not just milliners and dressmakers, but grocers, shop owners, boardinghouse keepers, laundresses, saloonkeepers, and small manufacturers.  Even more surprising than the number of female proprietors and the variety of their trades was the fact the vast majority of these women were well known and even notable members of their own communities.  Where previous historians of working women had insisted that respectable women could not or would not engage in business activities, Dr. Lewis found an almost overwhelming mass of evidence using such obvious sources as city directories, the census, and credit records.  Eventually, she was able to name more businesswomen in Albany’s credit reports than were recorded for the entire state of North Carolina in the same period (1840-1885).   This talk will summarize Dr. Lewis’s research on Albany, then expand the discussion to other mid-nineteenth-century U.S. cities, and finally place this material in a global context, based on the first international study of businesswomen in the “long” nineteenth century (published in 2020). 

Susan Ingalls Lewis is Professor Emerita in History at the State University of New York College at New Paltz where she continues to teach courses in women’s history and New York State history. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. from Binghamton University. Her monograph, Unexceptional Women: Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Albany, New York, 1830-1885 (Ohio State University Press, 2009) was awarded the Hagley Prize for the best book in business history. Dr. Lewis’s essay “More Than Just Penny Capitalists: The Range of Female Entrepreneurship in Mid-Nineteenth-Century US Cities,” recently appeared in Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: toward a Global Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).  She is also the co-author of Girls to the Rescue: the Impact of World War I on Girls’ Series Fiction (McFarland & Company, 2020), as well as co-editor and contributor to Suffrage and its Limits: The New York Story (SUNY Press, 2020).   

Made to Trade: The Centrality of Trade in the Origin Story of the United States

Date: Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm

To register for this program, go to: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_P-PEOBskST6V-ucLkeZuvA

Coinciding with publication of his latest book, The Overseas Trade of British America: A Narrative History, historian Thomas M. Truxes will discuss how Atlantic trade allowed the initial survival, economic expansion, and later prosperity of British America, and brought vastly different geographical regions, each with a distinctive identity and economic structure, into a single fabric. Truxes will show how colonial American prosperity was only possible because of the labor of enslaved Africans, how the colonial economy became dependent on free and open markets, and how the young United States owed its survival in the struggle of the American Revolution to Atlantic trade.

Thomas M. Truxes, Clinical Professor of Irish Studies and History at New York University, has written extensively on colonial trade and the early modern Atlantic economy.  He is the author of six books, including Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (Yale University Press, 2008).

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New Hartford Public Library and the Mid York System announces a partnership with Driving-Tests.org, a company dedicated to driver safety and education, to offer free Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) practice tests to library patrons. The new service includes free tests specifically based on the state’s DMV materials. It is the only site of its kind to include accessibility tools that let users hear selections read aloud, make them into MP3s, translate pages into other languages, magnify text, and mask portions of the screen for greater visibility on the practice tests.

This partnership allows the New Hartford Public Library to harness the power of Driving-Tests.org’s specialized practice exams to turn new drivers into safer drivers. The new program will work as an outreach to several valued groups of patrons, including teens, those with disabilities, and seniors who need to take a renewal exam, as well as patrons at every other stage of life.

Driving-Tests.org is a part of Elegant E-Learning, Inc., an eight-year-old company with a proven track record of revolutionizing online resources for learner drivers. Driving-Tests.org is part of a plan to improve global driver safety by providing free practice tests written by experts to anyone who wants to study, along with online copies of official study guides. To help achieve this goal, the company has also created driving practice sites for the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India.

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