Almanack Contributor Amy Godine

Independent scholar and Adirondack Life contributor Amy Godine has published scores of articles about Adirondack ethnic and social history. She has curated several exhibitions, including the John Brown Lives!-produced traveling exhibition, Dreaming of Timbuctoo, about an abolitionist-founded black settlement near North Elba. Amy has lectured widely in the region on migratory laborers, immigrants, ethnic neighborhoods and enclaves, peddlers, paupers, strikers, and other Adirondack "non-elites."


Monday, October 26, 2020

Grange talk about John Brown memorial

From the Whallonsburg Grange Virtual Lyceum Series:

Statues and memorials on public land are being debated across the country. Amy Godine, historian and author, will plumb the lost history and meanings of an Adirondack icon, the statue of John Brown at his farm in North Elba. Whether you love it, hate it, or are not sure of its place today, this 85-year-old landmark memorial to the renowned abolitionist invites fresh consideration.

The Virtual Lyceum series is made possible through the generous support of the Glenn and Carol Pearsall Adirondack Foundation.

This talk is taking place from 7-8:30 p.m., presented via Zoom.

You must register IN ADVANCE so we can email you the Zoom link. You can register for the entire series or for an individual lecture. We will record the lectures and make them available later if you can’t watch them live.

Click here to register for the Virtual Lyceums.


Saturday, April 15, 2017

Fact, Fiction On Chester’s Underground Railroad

Underground Railroad in the town of chester by donna lagoyThe publication of a new book about the Underground Railroad in the Adirondacks, focusing on its supporters and their good work in the Town of Chester in Warren County, rides a high wave of public interest in this dramatic chapter of our history. No bookstore lacks a full-frontal display of Colson Whitehead’s explosive novel The Underground Railroad, with Oprah’s golden imprimatur on the front jacket.

Regional scholarship is booming: in just the last decade, books and articles have documented Underground Railroad activity in Indiana, Buffalo, Detroit, Vermont, New York City, Pennsylvania, and the long flanks of Lake Champlain. Tom Calarco’s The Underground Railroad in the Adirondack Region (2004) is still the most inclusive, best synthesized, and detailed account of goings-on inside and all around the Blue Line. And cultural tourism in the region has gained immeasurably from the opening of the North Star Underground Railroad Museum at Ausable Chasm — the work, in great part, of two independent researchers, Don and Vivian Papson of Plattsburgh. » Continue Reading.


Saturday, November 15, 2014

Amy Godine On Black History in the Adirondacks

TMDA LogoBlack history in the Adirondacks has an anecdotal quality, maybe because the numbers of black Adirondackers have been so few. Here’s a story of a black homesteader who was good friends with John Brown. There’s a barn that may have sheltered fugitives on the Underground Railroad.  Outside Warrensburg is a place in the woods where a black hermit lived. And so on.

The temptation – and I should know; I’ve been a lead offender – is to make a sort of nosegay out of these scattered stories, pack them all into a story by its lonesome, a chunky little sidebar, and let this stand for the black experience.

It makes a good read, and it’s efficient. And it’s wrong. It reinforces the idea that the black experience in this region was something isolated, inessential. It ghettoizes black Adirondack history, and this wasn’t how it was. » Continue Reading.



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