The Long Island History Project

Edward Lange was a German artist who started his career on Long Island in the late 19th century. He meticulously captured the landscape and built environment across the island from Flushing to Sag Harbor in water color paintings rich in detail and charm. Preservation Long Island has just published  Promoting Long Island: The Art of Edward Lange, 1870-1889  by chief curator and director of collecti...

The Association of Public Historians of New York State held their annual conference at Danford's in Port Jefferson this year, gathering public historians from all corners of the state to discuss resources, projects, and to provide a great opportunity for people to talk history. The Long Island History Project was there to hold a workshop, "How to Be a Podcast Guest." Today's episode features the b...

Robert Moses had a vision for Jones Beach in the 1920s that included a theater to bring high quality entertainment to the people. That theater on Zachs Bay went through a number of iterations but reached its height from 1954-1977 when it was under the direction of Guy Lombardo. Along with his brothers Carmen and Lebert, the Canadian-born band leader/impresario brought Broadway shows and original p...

An obscure bit of early 20th century technology embroiled Dr. Woody Register in a murder mystery. Register, a professor of history at the University of the South (Sewanee), became intrigued by the detective dictograph and followed its trail to the 1914 murder of Louise Bailey in Freeport. Mrs. Bailey was shot in the Merrick Road office of Dr. Edward Carman. Dr. Carman's wife, Florence, had secretl...

Librarian and baseball historian Fabio Montella returns to the podcast to bring us the story of Ralph "Sammy" Bunn. Bunn was a Setauket native who excelled at baseball all his life. A star athlete in high school in the 1930s, he went on to play for decades on a number of teams and leagues in the makeshift world of community baseball in Suffolk County. His short stint pitching for the Brookhaven Hi...

Greig Stewart "Chubby" Jackson was a swinging sensation in his day. A child of vaudevillians, he was raised in an enclave of actors, musicians, and performers in Freeport, Long Island against the backdrop of Prohibition and a burgeoning club scene. Exposed to music at an early age, he jumped from high school to playing bass in swing bands in New York City and on the road, most notably with bandlea...

The Long Island-born, Yale-educated Benjamin Tallmadge seized his moment to shine in the American Revolution. Whether fighting the British on horseback with the 2nd Continental Dragoons or uncovering their secrets through his agents in the Culper Spy Ring, Tallmadge kept up a hectic pace. You can also throw in maritime battles on the Long Island Sound and daring raids behind enemy lines. Historian...

Dr. Tammy C. Owens of Skidmore College joins us to discuss her 2019 article "Fugitive Literati: Black Girls' Writing as a Tool of Kinship and Power at the Howard School." Having discovered a treasure trove of letters written in the early 1900s by girls at the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School, Owens was off on a journey to learn more. The research took her from the Schomburg Center in Harlem...

While Long Island developed a reputation for affluence throughout the 20th Century, there has always been a parallel history of the everyday workers and servants who toiled in the shadow of that reputation. The economic boom of the war years and the subsequent population boom in the 1950s did not change that. Tim Keogh , assistant professor of history at Queensborough Community College, delves int...

No one sheds a tear for the British Loyalists of Long Island, those inhabitants who remained loyal to the crown during the American Revolution. But genealogist Brendon Burns has spent a tremendous amount of effort tracking them down through libraries and archives across the world. The result is his 5-volume series The Loyal and Doubtful: Index to the Acts of British Loyalism in the Greater New Yor...

Every other year, Preservation Long Island compiles a list of historic places on Long Island that are endangered. Each list is a mix of structures from different periods of time, each with its own history and own preservation challenges yet all worthy of preserving for future generations. On today's episode, Preservation Long Island's Preservation Director Tara Cubie joins us to discuss the 2023 l...

There is a Long Island just below the Kansas border with Nebraska, between the Elk and Prairie Dog Creeks. It's apparently the creeks that gave the area its name. When swollen with rain, they cut off the land in between until it appeared to be an island rising from the surrounding plains.  Long Island is also the home town of Carrie Cox and on today's episode she describes what it was like growing...

Cindy Schwartz grew up on Long Island and followed her love of history into a long career as a social studies teacher at the Wheatley School in Old Westbury. She has since turned to a new type of classroom - reaching a wider audience through radio and podcasting at WCWP, Long Island University. Her podcast Civics is Dead explored the lack of focus on civics education in schools and ways it can be...

Your idea of the Hamptons on the East End of Long Island may include images of supersized mansions and extravagant parties but there is an older, richer Hamptons history beneath and beyond that glitzy surface. Irwin Levy and Esperanza León bring that history to life in their podcast,  Our Hamptons . Their Hamptons is a decidedly personal place, rooted in their love of the people, the landscape, an...

Larry Samuel is an author and historian whose latest book looks at the development of Long Island throughout the 20th Century. It was a time of land speculation and rapid growth as real estate developers and their syndicates turned the fields and farms of Nassau and Suffolk Counties into residential neighborhoods. We discuss the role of Robert Moses in abetting this transformation as well as the h...

Yes, Edward Lieberman is a former assistant district attorney and mayor of Seacliff but just as importantly, he is a long-time listener of the Long Island History Project. So when he reached out to talk about his own forays into Long Island history, we were all ears. On today's episode you'll hear about his work conducting historic bus tours around the Island, focusing on the Oyster Bay area but a...

In 1949 the nine women of the Arthur Murray Girls baseball team took the field against the all-male squad from the Patchogue Athletics. By that year, the Murrays had been together as a semi-pro outfit for some time. Formed out of the sandlots and playgrounds of Queens, they grew under the tutelage of New York Times sportswriter Mike Strauss to become the nucleus of a league that by the late 1940s...

The Gold Coast along Long Island's north shore is most often celebrated as a showcase for the rich and famous in the early 20th Century. A decidedly different aspect of that reputation comes into view when you consider the years leading up to America's entry into World War I. The Morgan Bank, headed by J.P. Morgan, Jr. with his estate in Glen Cove, played a pivotal role in financing and finding su...

Today we team up with Stephanie Eberhard-Holgerson's journalism class at Bayport Blue Point (BBP) High School to try to solve a mystery. At the suggestion of BBP's librarian Pam Gustafson, the class has spent the last year looking into the school's mascot, The Phantoms. The takeaway is that the straightforward question "where did the name come from" has yielded a very convoluted answer. Digging in...

We're returning to Revolutionary War era Long Island on this episode. And while the Culper Spy Ring does play a part, we are turning the focus to a woman whose story and connections to the Ring were ignored and misrepresented across time until reconstructed by Claire Bellerjeau. Her book with Tiffany Yecke Brooks,  Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution , brought to life the meticulous resear...

Al Smith was many things during his political career: reform champion after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, four-time governor of New York State, the first Catholic presidential candidate. But he was always a New York City boy at heart.  On this episode we talk with another New York City native, Dr. Robert A. Slayton. His book, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (Free Press 2001),...

From time to time on the podcast we like to explore the histories of other Long Islands, those far from New York. Today we focus on the story of Long Island Mill and the Long Island Mill Village in North Carolina. We have a number of guests to help us tell the story. Jennifer Marquardt, site manager of Murray's Mill in Catawba County, has researched the Long Island Mill and its 19th century past....

On a frigid night in January 1840, the luxury steamboat Lexington burned and sank in the middle of the Long Island Sound with over 140 people on board. What followed were harrowing tales of survival, tragic deaths, and a media sensation that dominated the headlines for months. Historian and journalist Bill Bleyer compiled all of the details in his book The Sinking of the Steamboat Lexington on Lon...

Jet fighters once roamed the skies above Long Island. Grumman, the aviation powerhouse behind such planes as the Hellcat and the Avenger, turned its attention to jets by the end of World War II. And to test those jets, they turned to men like Bruce Tuttle. Tuttle dreamed of flying from an early age. From his family's farm on the north shore he witnessed Charles Lindbergh passing overhead on the fi...

Today we welcome back former Newsday reporter Bill Bleyer. Bill is an author and historian with a number of Long Island-related history books to his credit and today we dive into his work on the Culper Spy Ring. Published in 2021, George Washington's Long Island Spy Ring: A History and Tour Guide is an analysis of the Culper Spy Ring. In it, Bleyer synthesizes what is known and has been written ab...