The Long Island History Project

Are you curious about the past and love talking to people? Do you have a keen eye for detail and a persistent yet welcoming demeanor? Then oral history may just be right for you! Today we're talking with Erica Fugger, oral historian and PhD candidate at Rutgers, about the art and craft of oral history.

We'll be discussing the development of oral history as a practice since the mid 20th century, detailing how to plan an oral history...

Chances are that your local public library has a local history librarian who oversees a rich collection of images, artifacts, and information about your community. Today we highlight and celebrate one of this unique group - Natalie Korsavidis. She is the local history librarian at Farmingdale Public Library in Nassau (and a little bit of Suffolk) County.

Natalie walks us through how she became a local history librarian and the coll...

We continue our tour of Long Island-based oral history collections. This time out, Robert Anen (LILRC Project Archivist) and I sat down with the Long Beach Historical & Preservation Society. Robert helped digitize their extensive oral history collection. The recordings cover a wide range of memories and experiences from residents of the City by The Sea. You'll hear about the father of Long Beach, developer, politician, and consumma...

Robert Beattie was many things: an architect, a designer of iconic public buildings on Long Island, and a decorated World War II veteran. But most importantly, he was the father of today's guest, Richard Beattie. So we're celebrating Father's Day by celebrating the life and work of Robert Beattie.

As an architect, Beattie's specialty was mid-century modern architecture. Working with clean lines, natural light, and an appreciation o...

There's a rough stretch of water between Australia and Tasmania called the Bass Strait. Within the strait there's a group of islands called the Furneaux Group. Within the group lies Long Island, a small, mostly-uninhabited stretch of grass and trees that attracted the attention of Madeleine Bessel-Koprek and her colleagues.

We're traveling far afield on today's episode, discussing paleoecology with Madeine, a Ph.D. student at Austr...

The voices of the past are all around us, if you know how to listen. And sometimes those voices are trapped on small thin strips of tape wrapped in cheap plastic. That's where Robert Anen comes in. As project archivist for the Long Island Library Resources Council, he works with historical collections across Nassau and Suffolk counties. Specializing in audio preservation and digitization, he's rescued a number of collections – copy...

Isle of Ever is Jen Calonita's newest middle grade novel, a story grounded in the history of Long Island's North Fork. On today's episode, Jen discusses growing up on Long Island and spending many summers at her grandparents' house in Mattituck. It was here, in between trips to Greenport, that she first heard tell of Captain Kidd's lost treasure. She tried digging up the local beach, came up empty, but the idea buried itself in Jen...

Tom McKeown lived and breathed basketball throughout junior and senior high school in Babylon. As an eighth grader in 1974-1975, he got to experience the thrill of watching the varsity team win their league and the Suffolk County championships. As fate would have it, this was also the first year that New York State allowed county champions to play each other, setting up a showdown between Babylon's Panthers and Nassau County's cham...

When Jessie Pierson and Lodowick Post argued over a fox in early 19th century Southampton, they probably didn't think the resulting court case would echo down the ages. Yet here we are 220 years later talking with legal historian Angela Fernandez about the odd, improbable history of Pierson v Post.

A professor of law and history at the University of Toronto, Fernandez has delved deep into the case. Her "legal archaeology" uncovered...

The science of genetics took a wrong turn in the early 20th century and it ran through Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Here overlooking a former whaling port, Dr. Charles Benedict Davenport created the Eugenics Record Office and served as director of the Carnegie Institution's Station for Experimental Evolution. From these posts he promoted and pushed the Eugenics Movement in the US and throughout the world.

Historian and attorney...

Memorial Day 1949 was an auspicious day in Riverhead as it saw the inaugural game at the brand new Wivchar Stadium on Harrison Ave. The brainchild of Tony Wivchar, a local entrepreneur and owner of an earth-moving company, the venue soon came to be known as Riverhead Stadium.

Although it only existed for a few brief years, the stadium was alive with excitement. To help drum up interest, Wivchar formed the Riverhead Falcons baseball...

The Dutch held on to their New Netherland colony for some forty years. They lost it to the English twice, at gunpoint in 1664 and by treaty in 1674. But although officially gone, the Dutch were not forgotten. In addition to their cultural legacy, the Dutch language held on stubbornly across the region for a long time.

How long? That's the question Dr. Kieran O'Keefe answers in "When Did New York Stop Speaking Dutch? The Persistence...

The science of the brain was changing throughout the 19th century. Medical researchers were peering ever deeper into cerebral mysteries and one question piqued their interest more than any other: who has the biggest brain?

On today's episode we turn for answers to Dr. James R. Wright, medical historian and retired professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Calgary. He introduces us to brain clubs, mutual au...