Wallkill Public Library Local History Collection   Tags: colonial_america, colonies, family_history, genealogical, historian, history, local authors, local_history  

In The Memory of All Ancient Customs, Tom Arne Midtrød examines the complex patterns of diplomatic, political, and social communication among the American Indian peoples of the Hudson Valley-including the Mahicans, Wappingers, and Esopus Indians-from the early seventeenth century through the American Revolutionary era. By focusing on how members of different Native groups interacted with one another, this book places Indians rather than Europeans on center stage. Midtrød uncovers a vast and multifaceted Native American world that was largely hidden from the eyes of the Dutch and English colonists who gradually displaced the indigenous peoples of the Hudson Valley. In The Memory of All Ancient Customs he establishes the surprising extent to which numerically small and militarily weak Indian groups continued to understand the world around them in their own terms, and as often engaged- sometimes violently, sometimes cooperatively-with neighboring peoples to the east (New England Indians) and west (the Iroquois ) as with the Dutch and English colonizers. Even as they fell more and more under the domination of powerful outsiders-Iroquois as well as Dutch and English-the Hudson Valley Indians were resilient, maintaining or adapting features of their traditional diplomatic ties until the moment of their final dispossession during the American Revolutionary War.

The book addresses the integral role that African Americans played in every aspect of Hudson Valley society, which historically is the embryo of New York history Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The 124th New York State Volunteers was one of the great fighting regiments of the Civil War. In this thorough history, the author has used letters, diary entries, and remembrances, many of them previously unpublished, to present a view of the war as the men in the ranks saw it. At Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, Petersburg, and many more battles, the Orange Blossoms earned a reputation for sacrifice and bravery, eloquently put into words by Private Henry Howell. As he lay wounded, he described the charge that broke the Confederate line at Spotsylvania--everyone was borne irresistibly forward. There was no such thing as fail. The book includes a roster of all who served in the regiment and numerous photos of individuals.