Love and Financial Services
Before most of us had ever heard of credit default swaps and other financial services, products, and derivatives, there were changes afoot in the banking industry as local savings banks, also known as thrifts, got involved in other kinds of investment banking following federal deregulations in the 1990s. Many of the smaller banks were eventually bought out by larger banks, which is what happened to Brooklyn-based Independence Community Bank in 2006 when Sovereign Bancorp (which is itself owned by Banco Santander, based in Spain) took it over. An integral part of Brooklyn’s economic and…
Park Lit TONIGHT Coney Island ALWAYS
Two of BHS's Interpreting Brooklyn artists, novelist Elizabeth Gaffney and Coney Island playwright Michael Schwartz, will be reading tonight in Fort Greene Park with L.J. Davis, a fellow contributor to the magazine A Public Space. Another friend of BHS and Coney Island, Charles Denson, founder of the Coney Island History Project, is hosting an online conversation at The New York Times City Room Blog this week. If you haven't been following the debates about revitalizing Coney Island, the City Council is about to vote on a rezoning plan and the Municipal Art Society has suggested improvements…
MMNY at BHS
Photos from the Make Music New Y0rk show at BHS yesterday And a review of the show in Girls Rock & Girls Rule!
Women Make Movies @ BHS
Join BHS and the New York Chapter of COLAGE, a national movement of children, youth, and adults with one or more LGBTQ parents, as we celebrate Brooklyn PRIDE with a screening of films on same-sex marriage from Women Make Movies: My Sister, My Bride directed by Bonnie Burt (26 min) As the issue of gay marriage grips the country, this touching documentary follows the heartwarming and historic journey of two Jewish lesbians as they seek to celebrate their commitment to one another. In Sickness and In Health directed by Pilar Prissas (56 min) A battle to legalize same-sex marriage turns…
ExLab Students on WNYC!
Listen to the Ex Lab student curators of Pages of the Past: The Breukelen Adventures of Jasper Dankaerts on WNYC: And here they are giving a virtual tour of the exhibit which is on view now: AND the students have a blog where they wrote about foot-long oysters and much more...
Admirals Row
BHS is collaborating with the Brooklyn Navy Yard to interview people who worked in the Yard during WWII for our oral history collection. It's a fascinating project and I felt really lucky the first time I got to snoop around inside the gates of the Navy Yard (after spending years riding my bike past it and wondering what goes on in there). It seems like a lot of other people share this curiosity since BHS's new tours of the Navy Yard always fill up fast (the next one is June 21 at 1:30pm)! One part of the Brooklyn Navy Yard is still owned by the federal government and there is a lot of…
Sunset Park Oral Histories
The current Public Perspectives exhibit, Living and Learning: Chinese Immigration, Restriction, and Community in Brooklyn, 1850 to Present curated by Andy Urban, features audio clips from BHS's oral history collections - you can listen online or download the BHS podcast from iTunes (search the Store for Brooklyn Historical Society). In 1993 - 1994, BHS and the Museum of Chinese in America, then known as the Chinatown History Museum, collected interviews regarding Brooklyn's Chinese Community in Sunset Park. The resulting oral history collection, 8th Avenue - Sunset Park Oral History Project…
Change in Brooklyn
Nelson George and Rosie Perez were on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC last week talking about Change in Brooklyn neighborhoods - it's a great segment, good callers, and it's not just about gentrification, have a listen: AND THEN join us TONIGHT at BHS @ 6:30 – 9:00 pm when Nelson George, esteemed cultural critic, author of Hip Hop America, screenwriter and lifelong Brooklyn resident will launch his memoir City Kid: A Writer's Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success.Nelson George will read from his memoir and discuss growing up in Brownsville and living in Fort Greene. He'll be joined…
Brooklynite Marilyn French 1929 - 2009
Oral History and Environmental Justice
Memoirs
I just finished reading Nelson George's new memoir City Kid: A Writer's Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success. George's personal reflections on Brownsville, East New York, and Fort Greene; his open discussions of race and class; plus his impassioned knowledge of the complex relationships between the media, music & film industries, and popular culture, make for an inspiring read. I'm looking forward to the City Kid launch party and reading here at BHS on May 13th. Students in the BHS oral history seminar I'm teaching are choosing books of oral histories (or memoirs) to read and…
Brooklyn Dodgers on WNYC
If you missed the Forever Blue event at BHS on March 21st, you can listen to it here on WNYC: Join Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael D'Antonio with Peter O'Malley, president of the Los Angeles Dodgers 1970 - 1998, and Richard Sandomir, Sports Broadcasting Reporter for the New York Times, as they discuss the true story of Walter O'Malley and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles on the occasion of the launch of Mr. D'Antonio's new book Forever Blue.
5 1/2 Things About Ft. Greene
A tour of 5 1/2 black culture spots in Fort Greene by Nelson George: 5 1/2 Things About Ft. Greene By Nelson George from Nelson George on Vimeo.
Brooklyn Beekeepers
I'm loving this new blog about raising bees in Brooklyn: BQE KEEPER And it's really neat that City Councilmember David Yassky (D - Brooklyn Heights) is Pro-Honey: Legalized beekeeping would 'stimulate just the kind of niche manufacturing sectors that will be critical to an economic turnaround'.
Surfing Oral History
Despite yesterday's snow, soon it will be warm enough to go to the beach. In honor of impending summer, here's a clip from the Surfing Heritage Foundation's oral history collections:
Nelson George's Fort Greene
Great essay on in the New York Times on Fort Greene by Nelson George. He'll be here at BHS on May 13th to launch his book City Kid: A Writer's Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success. I had always viewed the area as a crucial black artistic enclave. It had nurtured some of the most important African-American talents of the past two decades, from Wynton Marsalis and Chris Rock to Erykah Badu. And the neighborhood became the centerpiece of this black alternative vision precisely because it was a place where many whites were afraid to go. While Harlem carried the weight and burden of its…
Oral History of the Zombie War
Important primary source documentation: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It's good background reading for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
Student Oral History Projects
Today I spoke to a class of high school seniors at Packer Collegiate Institute. They are planning to conduct oral history interviews regarding the current financial crisis. The students had insightful questions about how to handle the subject of Money which stirs up all kinds of emotions in people no matter how the global economy is faring. Some students plan to interview their parents who work in the financial field and so, we talked about how intimacy can sometimes add to an oral history interview and sometimes it can make certain things more difficult to talk about. I think it's a great…
More History Than We Can Handle?
This is an interesting discussion from the National Council on Public History conference blog. I've mentioned before that we need a new term to describe this wonderful phenomenon of more and more people documenting their lives publicly, and projects like StoryCorps, that fall somewhere between journalism and oral history. Opening keynote speaker Jill Lepore, keying on a New York times article that talked about an "unprecedented pileup of historic news," bemoaned the lack of depth or analysis in most of the discussions of historic candidacies, elections, meltdowns, and what have you, and…
Brooklyn Bridge Saves Engagement Ring
Good Brooklyn story on MSNBC: While proposing to his ladyfriend, Gina Pellicani, on the pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge, Don Walling dropped the engagement ring and it fell through the wooden slats to the roadway below! He recovered the ring from the roadway, the band was bent but the diamonds were intact. Happy ending!