THE IMPORTANCE OF (LOCAL) HISTORY
A MOMENT FROZEN IN TIME
All our lives we have been inundated with moving images: television, film, social media. We are so inured to the constancy of the motion, color, and sound, that when an image holds still, it causes a momentary catch – the need to register what we are seeing.
It was a moment like that that captured the attention of Garth Kobal, inveterate […]
TREASURES ACROSS TIME AT THE DCHS
Historians understand better than the rest of us that there is nothing in the present that hasn’t been in the past. For the Dutchess County Historical Society, that goes back to the inquisitive nature of Helen Wilkinson Reynolds (1875-1943).
Born and raised in Poughkeepsie, NY, from a young age she developed a deep love of the history of Dutchess County. […]
ALONG CAME ST. NICHOLAS
In 1823, a dismayed Clement Clarke Moore would learn that his poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, nowadays popularly known as ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, had been published in the Troy (NY) Sentinel, albeit lacking attribution.
The poem has since been published in the neighborhood of 2,500 times and illustrated by such luminaries as Jessie Wilcox Smith, W.W. Denslow, […]
WINTER SOLSTICE: A LONG-CELEBRATED ANNUAL MILESTONE
Most of us in the Northeast know the winter solstice as the shortest day of the year. This is because the Earth’s poles reach their maximum tilt away from the sun, which results in the shortest period of daylight and the longest night of the year. In the northern hemisphere, it takes place in December, and in the southern […]
