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Chapter One examines the ideological origins of New Deal conservation and the CCC. It begins by showing how the idea for the Corps originated both from Roosevelt's early experiences with the Progressive conservation movement, and, more surprisingly, from his lifelong involvement with the Boy Scouts. Similar to many progressive reform efforts such as the city beautiful, playground, and urban parks movements, the Boy Scouts promoted the notion that social behavior could be shaped by manipulating one's physical surroundings or environment. Chapter One illustrates how this philosophy not only influenced Roosevelt's decision to create the Corps, which like the Boy Scouts took young men from diseased urban settings and placed them in healthful environments in nature, but also greatly influenced early New Deal politics. The creation of work relief programs that put urban men to work in rural areas, Roosevelt knew from experiences as governor of New York, significantly raised his political capital. Creating the Corps, this chapter concludes, not only introduced the Boy Scout philosophy to the conservation movement but also helped the new president jump-start the New Deal.

This chapter examines the role of the local government in influencing economic development and diminishing civic power in city neighborhoods. It begins with an episode from a public forum on quality-of-life issues held for downtown residents. The vignette shows the open hostility that residents direct at the CEO of the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA), the government agency that they blame for the development of nightlife in the neighborhood in spite of their protests. The chapter proceeds by discussing the policies behind the growth of downtown Manhattan's nightlife scenes, especially the SLA's liquor licensing that facilitated the proliferation of bars. It shows how this policy, which represents “urban entrepreneurialism,” sparked local unrest and led neighborhood residents to organize and protest bars. Residents consider the SLA and bar owners as complicit perpetrators in the destruction of their neighborhood and sense of community, and view themselves as victims of these policies.

This chapter illustrates the nascent attempts of anti-suffragists to prevent their enfranchisement. The most prominent and effective anti-suffrage organizations that developed in New York State between 1895 and 1911 deliberately excluded men. Certainly, anti-suffragists were married to or related to some of the most politically powerful men in state and national government. However, a significant portion of college-educated, professional, and self-supporting women opposed suffrage. Once the antis established their organizations, they became a force powerful enough to help prolong the battle for woman suffrage in the state. The New York State organization provided speakers for lectures at clubs and social events in and outside the state, spreading their influence broadly. By the end of the period, New York antis had established a national organization.

Activities of the anti-suffrage movement ebbed and flowed with those of the suffrage movement, suggesting the responsive nature of both movements. This chapter focuses on this process. The leadership of Alice Hill Chittenden, elected in the fall of 1912 to serve as president of the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, accounts for the increased politicization of the anti-suffrage movement. Anti-suffragists won this battle, apparent in the results of the November 1915 referendum. However, it is also apparent by 1915 that anti-suffrage leaders faced serious challenges to their campaign to prevent enfranchisement, leading to a far different campaign for the 1917 referendum.

This chapter details the development of a woman suffrage movement in New York State as it positions the state in the broad historical context of the national woman suffrage movement. Some rural upstate New Yorkers demanded social and political reforms for women well before the Civil War. As a result of controversy sparked by the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted African American men the right to vote, women founded two national organizations and the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. State leaders dominated the movement in terms of strategy and tactics, and several of them rose to national prominence. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, suffragists had come to recognize the importance of fluidity and pliability in addressing their appeals to the broadest possible audiences. The divergent groups advocating for women's enfranchisement disagreed with each other over specific strategies, tactics, and whom to include, but they unfailingly agreed that women needed the vote.

The introduction begins by exploring the culture of ‘agricultural giants,’ enormous, precisely-measured animals and plants. These giants were products of a massive, transatlantic culture of knowledge-making: “agricultural improvement.” The introduction traces improvement’s origins in Great Britain and its adoption by wealthy landholders in the U.S. as well as by colonial officials throughout the British Empire. It asserts the centrality of New York State to U.S. improvement, and outlines New Yorkers’ experience of rapid agricultural change in the decades after the opening of the Erie Canal. It describes improvements’ shift from an instrument of landlords’ developmentalism to a much broader community and set of practices. It points to the role of new commercial networks in this expansion, and shows how improving science increasingly created knowledge about goods. Finally the chapter sketches the features of improving science—its focus on the futures that its adherents hoped to create and saw as natural, its dependence on financially-interested experts, its borrowing of forms of credibility from the broader U.S. economy, and its profound questions about the nature of value. In improvement, science did not provide stability, but rather fueled competing stories of the future and volatile and uncertain systems of value.

This chapter focuses on the second campaign for woman suffrage in New York State. Following the advent of the Great War, Alice Hill Chittenden, although continuing to serve as president of the state anti-suffrage association, focused her reform energy on war preparedness and the American Red Cross more than on suffrage. Historians have long posited that women won the right to vote as a reward for their war efforts. However, anti-suffragists, individually and as a group, committed their resources earlier and far more fully to the war effort than did suffragists. The Great War so distracted the anti-suffragists that they essentially dropped out of the battle, allowing the suffragists to win sooner than they otherwise would have. This subtle but important detail has been overshadowed by Tammany's famous reversal on the question in 1917. Once women won suffrage in New York State, the federal amendment would soon enfranchise all women in the United States.

This chapter focuses on men, the only empowered contingent of the suffrage movement. While some men had always voiced support for woman suffrage, no sustained men's organization existed in the state until 1908. That year, Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, encouraged the founding of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage, which then served as an affiliate of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. These elite white men, often raised or living in suffrage households, risked embarrassment and censure by publicly displaying their support for woman suffrage. As their participation became routine, the novelty of it wore off. These privileged male champions of woman suffrage inspired men of other classes—including urban immigrants and rural, upstate men—to reconsider their suffrage stance. This unique aspect of the suffrage coalition thereby played a lesser but crucial role in winning the vote for women.

This chapter discusses the fifteen convicts from Newgate Prison who made a “daring escape” across the Hudson River to New Jersey. New York State legislators responded by establishing an armed guard on call in the surrounding neighborhood. The prison's agent, a Quaker and advocate of nonviolence, objected. He told state officials that overseeing the guard required duties that those “who are of the people called Quakers, cannot with propriety discharge.” Legislators were unmoved. The armed guard remained, straining the prison's budget and vexing its Quaker administrators. During the prison's early years, the armed guard served on several occasions. Its ongoing presence clearly signaled that all was not well inside Newgate Prison. The controversy over the guard's necessity and morality proved to be the first of many conflicts between Friends administering the prison and state officials involved in governmental oversight.

This chapter focuses on the time when approximately 150 members of the Women's City Club met to discuss bills pending in the New York State legislature that would provide domestic workers with a sixty-hour week, minimum wage, and inclusion in workers' compensation laws. First, the would-be reformers made their pitch. Emily Sims Marconnier, chair of the Women's City Club's own Committee on Labor and Industry and associate general secretary of the National Consumers' League; Blanche Freedman, a New York Women's Trade Union League lobbyist; and Dora Jones, president of the newly formed American Federation of Labor-affiliated Domestic Workers Union, each rose to make a case for the legislation. The organizers could not have expected what came next. The room exploded in outrage. A journalist in the audience reported that the Women's City Club members “appeared unable to distinguish between legislation and unionization.”

In the midst of the Culture Wars, in which Congressional Republicans and the religious right attempted to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, Bang on a Can expanded and professionalized. Cuts to government funding throughout the 1980s and 1990s shaped how Bang on a Can and their peers navigated their relationship to the marketplace. Other controversies also emerged, as when the New York State Council on the Arts attempted to implement policy around multicultural programming and encourage institutions to seek out audiences, to the chagrin of composers Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbbitt as well as the Group for Contemporary Music. But Bang on a Can made the most of this moment, carving out new sources of income, diversifying their programming, reaching new audiences, and ultimately starting a new program, the People’s Commissioning Fund, in the wake of the devastating cuts to the NEA passed in the mid-1990s.

The avifauna of the study area is described and quantified, beginning with historical coverage since 1872. The Van Cortlandt Park cumulative and breeding avifaunas are dissected and contrasted with those of Central and Prospect Parks. Study area breeding species are treated quantitatively, followed by winter species, and migration phenomena; features and conclusions are amplified in 39 tables. The chapter concludes with extended discussion of past and current avian resource problems, particularly in Van Cortlandt Park and what park management is doing about them, with specific recommendations for needed research and management actions.

This chapter examines the ways in which Flo Kennedy brought her legal expertise and political knowledge to the campaign to repeal New York State’s restrictive abortion laws. She served as counsel for Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, the first class-action suit in which women themselves insisted on their right to be heard. Coupling speak-outs and demonstrations with constitutional arguments, the case helped to convince the legislature to amend the law before it was settled in court. The tactics from this case would be used in Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 federal case that legalized abortion nationally. Although by the late 1960s she was one of the country’s best-known black feminists, her role in helping to legalize abortion has long since been forgotten.

This chapter looks at the story of black women in the New York State woman suffrage movement, which is marked by strained racial relations and exclusionary practices. Black women, like white women, saw the vote as a panacea, able to solve their specific problems relating to racial violence, education, employment, and workers' rights. Although white women seldom invited black women to join in their suffrage activities, black women found ways to advance the cause and participate in the movement. Indeed, pervasive racism complicated black women's suffrage activism, but it cannot diminish their contributions to mainstream suffragism. Rarely separating women's political rights from other fundamental rights, black women's suffrage activism showed creativity and ingenuity and did not always mirror white women's activist strategies. Ultimately, black women's influence on black male voters helped secure women's political enfranchisement in New York State.

This concluding chapter explores the ways that suffragists used their enfranchisement to push the Nineteenth Amendment forward. The book's study places New York State at the forefront of the woman suffrage movement in the eastern United States. Its success had a profound effect on the national movement. As seems usual for suffragists, there is no one path activists followed. Some women, radicalized by their efforts in New York State, joined the militant National Woman's Party and picketed the White House. Others took their organizing skills, including canvassing and lobbying, to campaigns in non-suffrage states. Ultimately, the activism of the disparate groups that comprised the successful state suffrage movement infused the national campaign for woman suffrage with newfound energy.

This chapter discusses Cornell University's transformation into a research university after World War II. It examines the role played by two Cornell presidents, Edmund Ezra Day and Deane Waldo Malott, in Cornell's emergence as a university that privileged research over teaching. Day, president of Cornell from 1937 to 1949, brought to Cornell a deep commitment to linking academic excellence to public service and pressed the need for heightened social consciousness throughout the university. Malott, president of Cornell from 1951 to 1963, had to deal with two principal issues during his tenure: navigating Cold War passions on campus and responding to the new undergraduate culture, with students' demands for greater control over their private lives. The chapter also considers the establishment of a research library at Cornell, along with various colleges such as the School of Business and Public Administration. Finally, it assesses Cornell's relationship to New York State and some of the administrative changes at the university in the postwar period.

Members of the Seneca Nation of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy resided in a surprising variety of settlement forms during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Seneca communities in what is now western New York State lived in sequentially occupied sites that ranged from nucleated to fully dispersed, with and without defensive palisades. The regional Seneca settlement pattern also changed from one with two large core sites and surrounding satellites to a network of evenly spaced smaller sites arrayed across their territory. While earlier scholars viewed these transformations as decline away from a precontact cultural climax, the changes were non-linear and corresponded quite tightly to the dynamics of the regional political economy known in detail from documentary sources. This chapter reviews the details of 1669-1779 changes in Seneca community forms, and examines the lived experience of community relocation as a dynamic time for negotiation, reimagination, assessment of political-economic conditions, and the exercise of power.

This chapter describes Langdell's legal knowledge and diligence, which led attorneys to recruit him to work on prominent cases in the higher courts of New York State. Langdell also gained a reputation as a shrewd and effective attorney. By 1860 he had already built a flourishing practice and was nearly “driven to death” by the press of routine and complex litigation flowing into his office at 16 Wall Street. In 1869, when the founding president of the Erie Railroad and his family sought out “the highest legal ability in the country” to contest a will, they were referred by other attorneys to Langdell. Beyond serving as a prominent, effective, and busy lawyer, Langdell helped to establish a new role in litigation: crafting the extensive written brief that was beginning to displace the weight of oral argument in complicated cases arising from large and intricate commercial transactions.