This is the last full week before Thanksgiving (on Nov. 26). Monday is the 250th anniversary of the fall of Fort Washington, the last Revolutionary War Patriot stronghold on Manhattan. Looking up, the Leonid meteor shower peaks Tuesday night into Wednesday, with the best viewing after midnight. Also Tuesday, three history programs, one online on New York’s coastal defenses, one in Albany on the Anti-Rent War, and the first of two Manhattan lectures on Benjamin Franklin’s relationship with Native nations. The week closes with the Southern Zone deer hunting season opening day on Saturday, and by Sunday New Yorkers will have lost about 12 minutes of daylight. It’s a good time to check out tamaracks and witch hazel. Full details and more below.
History: Monday marks 250 years since November 16, 1776, when British and Hessian troops took Fort Washington, the last American stronghold on Manhattan, and captured more than 2,700 men under Colonel Robert Magaw, many of whom would die in the city’s British prisons.
During the assault, Margaret Corbin took over her husband’s cannon after he was killed and kept firing until she was badly wounded. She later became the first woman to receive a military pension from Congress.
On November 20, Cornwallis crossed the Hudson River and marched into an abandoned Fort Lee, sending Washington’s army into its retreat across New Jersey.
Also on November 16, 1776, the American warship Andrew Doria received the first official salute to the American flag in a foreign port, at Dutch-held St. Eustatius.
Phenology: Weeks after leaf season, tamarack, the region’s only native deciduous conifer, turns yellow and then orange, standing out among the evergreens and brown hardwoods.
In forest understories, American witch hazel is still in bloom, with flowers that opened in October should last into December with the warmer fall we’ve been experiencing this year.
Night to Look Up: Tuesday into Wednesday, November 17 to 18, when the Leonid meteor shower peaks and the First Quarter Moon sets before the best viewing hours, after midnight to dawn. The shower is active from November 6 to 30.
Upcoming Events:
Tues., Nov. 17, 12:30 pm, online: Protecting the Coast. Retired Colonel Richard Comstock presents a virtual program on New York’s coastal defenses during the First and Second World Wars, presented by New York Archives magazine.
Tues., Nov. 17, 6:30 to 8:30 pm, Albany: New York’s Second Revolution: The Legal and Social Legacy of the Anti-Rent Wars. Albany Law School hosts a screening of the documentary Calico Rebellion (2024) and a panel on how the 1839 to 1845 Anti-Rent War between landlords and tenant farmers still shapes landlord-tenant law today.
Tues., Nov. 17 and Wed., Nov. 18, Manhattan: Native Nations, Benjamin Franklin, and the Coming of the American Revolution. Yale historian Ned Blackhawk gives the New York Public Library’s free two-part Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, on the Franklin family’s ties to the Wampanoag and how conflicts over Native affairs shaped Franklin’s politics before the Revolution.
Exhibits:
Through December 10, Queensbury: Lyme Disease: Portrait of an Epidemic. Artist Lynn Shanks’s figurative paintings exploring the experience of Lyme disease and its co-infections, at SUNY Adirondack’s Visual Arts Gallery in Dearlove Hall.
Through December 27, Albany: Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II. The New York State Museum tells the story of the top-secret Army unit that used inflatable tanks, sound effects and fake radio traffic to fool the enemy, with a full-size inflatable tank, original artifacts and artwork.
Through April 4, 2027, Manhattan: You Should Be Dancing: New York, 1976 and Beyond. The New York Historical traces the rise of punk, disco and hip hop in a city in financial crisis, with instruments, fashion, photographs, flyers and recreated club spaces.
Last Week’s Top Almanack Stories
Dr. Allen Ballard, Civil Rights Pioneer, Author & Scholar Dies. Ballard, who taught government at the CUNY from 1961 to 1986 and helped found its SEEK program, then taught history at the SUNY Albany, where he was professor emeritus, died November 5 at 98.
A Rash of Poaching As Hunting Seasons Begin. Environmental Conservation Officers charged hunters in Delaware, Suffolk, Washington and Franklin counties, including a man with a felony record who shot two deer out of season on posted land, and pheasant hunters who shot more than their limit at Carters Pond. Also, a trespasser with a crossbow was charged with petit larceny for taking a landowner’s tree stand.
Shovers & Swindlers: Corruption in Post-Revolutionary NY. Jaap Harskamp traces the counterfeiters and swindlers of early New York, including speculator William Duer, whose collapse led 24 brokers to sign the Buttonwood Agreement in 1792.
Episodes in the Life of Arent Van Curler. Winnifred Notman Prince’s 1931 paper, explains how the Rensselaerswyck colonist tried to ransom the Jesuit Isaac Jogues from the Mohawks in 1642 and helped him escape at Fort Orange in 1643.
New Yorkers At The Battle of Bennington. A 1905 essay by Nelson Gillespie, president of the Hoosac Valley Historical Society, makes the case that patriots from Hoosick, Cambridge and White Creek played an overlooked part in the 1777 battle, fought on the Walloomsac River in what is now North Hoosick.
New York’s Multi-City Trolley Strike of 1920. Upstate labor historian J.N. Cheney recounts how streetcar workers in Rochester struck over wages on May 1, 1920, and workers in Utica and Syracuse walked out in sympathy.
Historic Ocean Liner SS United States Sunk off Florida. The 990-foot liner, which sailed from Manhattan’s Pier 86 and set a speed record on it’s first Atlantic crossing that still stands, was sunk November 11 off Florida, to become the world’s largest artificial reef.
Butternut: A Hopeful Story Hiding in Plain Sight? Naturalist Sam Blair reports that butternut canker, first documented in 1967, has devastated the tree across its range, including New York. Zoologist Martin Kratt has since found 700 saplings and 150 mature trees on his land on Isle La Motte in Lake Champlain, and researchers are now searching the northern Champlain Valley for more.
Podcast: Occupied City: New York in the Revolution. In an episode of her Ben Franklin’s World podcast, historian Liz Covart talks with curator Sarah Henry and CUNY historian Blake McGready about the New York Campaign of 1776.
New Book: Siren of the Finger Lakes: A New Mythology. A new illustrated book of regional mythology for adult readers is told through Liv, a nine-year-old returning home to Livingston County.
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