Blog

Recently, the Southampton History Museum acquired two remarkable scrapbooks in which a Southampton summer resident recorded the activities—in Southampton and beyond--of participants in one of the most fashionable sports of the Gilded Age. The photos and yellowed newspaper clippings filling the pages of this generous donation—for which we have Richard (Dick) Nilsson to thank—are not devoted to tennis, golfing or polo contests as you might expect. They are rather devoted to “co

Although July 4, 1776, is the date most commonly associated with the American Revolution, open conflict began more than a year before in the colonies of Massachusetts and New York.

Photos by Richard Lewin

DeWitt Clinton mingling the waters of Lake Erie with the Atlantic by Philip Meeder (1826) ( New York Public Library via flickr.com ) Two hundred years ago, the Erie Canal was completed. It was a project so ambitious that many thought it foolhardy: building an massive artificial waterway some 363 miles across New York State that would connect the Hudson River at Albany and Lake Erie at Buffalo. The concept of the canal first emerged before the American Revolution , finally c