This virtual program is part of our Winter Speaker Series, and will be presented on Zoom. A Zoom link will be emailed to all SCHS members before the program.  In her recently published work from Cornell University Press, Professor Nicole Maskiell connects developing Northern networks of merit to the invidious institution of slavery. During the first generations of European settlement in North America, a number of interconnected Northeastern families carved out private empires. Maskiell argues that slavery was a crucial component to the rise and enduring influence of this emergent aristocracy. Professor Maskiell is associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina. She specializes in early American history, with a focus on overlapping networks of slavery in the Dutch and British Atlantic worlds. Her current book project entitled "Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry" compares the ways that slavery shaped the development of elite Northern culture by examining the social and kinship networks that intertwined enslavers with those they enslaved. Professor Maskiell is a recipient the John Carter Brown, Gilder Lehrman, and Huntington Mayers research fellowships, and her dissertation was nominated for the 2014 Allan Nevins Prize

This program will be presented by SCHS Historian, Michael Diana, at SUNY Schenectady in honor of Black History Month. It is free and open to the public, and will be held in room Stockade 101. In 1827 slavery was abolished in the state of New York granting freedom to a whole segment of Schenectady's population. Newly freed, Schenectady's black residents would still face many obstacles as they sought to establish a new place for themselves. Over the following decades, much of this community would vanish from our records and from the city altogether. This presentation seeks to shed light on this little known chapter of local history.

This virtual program is part of our Winter Speaker Series, and will be presented on Zoom. A Zoom link will be emailed to all SCHS members before the program.  Discover the stories of long-overlooked American women who, at a time when women rarely worked outside the home, became commercial photographers and shaped the new, challenging medium. Professor Katherine Manthorne will fill in the gaps in photographic, American, and women's history and discuss the parallels between the growth of photography and the late-19th-century women's movement. Katherine Manthorne is an art historian at the Graduate Center, City University of New York committed to the study of the art of the Americas (1800-1940) in its hemispheric dimensions. Landscape imagery is a special passion, embodied in publications from Tropical Renaissance. North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879 (1989) and Traveler Artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (2015) to California Mexicana: Missions to Murals, 1820 to 1930 (2017) and The Rockies and the Alps: Bierstadt, Calame and the Romance of the Mountains (2017). The Caribbean figures in Fern Hunting Among These Picturesque Mountains. Frederic Edwin Church in Jamaica (2010); Nueva York (2010); and Caribbean Crossroads (2012). Working toward the internationalization of American art, she taught courses at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, Italy; and the Freie Universität, Berlin; and co-organized transnational conferences including Landscape Art of the Americas: Sites of Human Intervention Across the Nineteenth Century at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia (2021). Women’s contributions to visual culture constitutes another theme in her work featured in two books: Women in the Dark: American Female Photographers 1850-1900 (2020) and Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex (2020). Intermediality is another interest explored in Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue Between Cinema and Painting (2019). She received fellowships from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Fulbright and Smithsonian Institution. Currently projects include Sweet Fortunes: Sugar Plantations, Art Collecting and Enslaved Labor; and Fidelia Bridges: Between Fine Art & Popular Culture.

Join us for curated wine tastings by and for local wine lovers. Wine connoisseur Buffy Leonard and city historian Chris Leonard will lead us on a tasting and history tour of their favorite wines for the season. $33; pre-registration required. Must be 21+ with valid ID. All ticket sales are final.

Not everyone at the Mabee Farm was free to live and pass down their stories for posterity. The Farm was also home to generations of enslaved people like Sam, Bate and Cato whose voices have been lost to history. In this tour, we try to see the Mabee Farm as they would have known it- we hope to understand the experiences of hundreds of other enslaved people in Schenectady’s history. This program is offered as part of Black History Month. Admission is $10 or $5 for members.  

Unfortunately, this event has been CANCELED due to the threat of winter storms.   The Museum will be open late for date-night! Join us as we delve into our archives of historic love letters to tease out the passion penned on the pages. So inspired, guests will be invited to hand craft a valentine of their own. Of course, we’ll have chocolate and wine on hand to celebrate Valentine's Day  appropriately. $12/$5 for SCHS members

This program is part of our Winter Speaker Series, and will be presented in-person at 32 Washington Ave. No advance tickets. Preserving your family’s papers and photographs is vital to tracing and understanding your family’s history and connections to local and community history. Digitization and digital tools can be enormously helpful, but how do you know where to start? Marietta Carr, librarian and archivist at the Schenectady County Historical Society, will introduce you to digital preservation tools and techniques you can use for your family’s archives.

This virtual program is part of our Winter Speaker Series, and will be presented on Zoom. A Zoom link will be emailed to all SCHS members before the program.  Stephen Staggs, PhD is the author of the forthcoming book Calvinists and Indians in the Northeastern Woodlands. He will discuss intercultural relations between the two groups in the 1600s: Native Americans and New Netherlanders hunting, eating, drinking, smoking, and fighting with each other, sharing their faith while traveling in canoes, and sleeping in each other’s bedrooms. Such details emerge in documents written by New Netherlanders like Megapolensis, whose work provides a window into the influence and limits of the Dutch Reformation upon the dynamic, multifaceted relationships that developed in the early modern Northeastern Woodlands. Megapolensis came of age when Dutch Reformed theologians looked to the Bible to incorporate Indians into a Reformed worldview. In so doing, they characterized Indians as “blind Gentiles.” This characterization ultimately informed the instructions given to those heading to New Netherland, raised expectations among the clergy and lay chaplains who served in the colony, and prefigured the reciprocal, intimate relationships that developed between Indians and New Netherlanders. Stephen Staggs is an independent historian who holds a PhD and graduate certificate in Ethnohistory from Western Michigan University. His research focuses on the impact of the interactions and interrelations between Indigenous, African, and European peoples in early modern Europe, colonial North America, and the Atlantic World. His recently published book is Calvinists & Indians in the Northeastern Woodlands.

Spend the winter break with us! Today the Mabee Farm will host special winter educational activities. Baking on the hearth, colonial crafts and even a behind-the-scenes tour of our artifact collections. Tickets are $10 for everyone 5 and up; free for SCHS members at Family+ levels, but RSVP required.

Join us this night of the full Snow Moon for a candlelight walk through the woods of the Woestyne. Afterwards, we'll make a fire in the Inn's historic fireplace, and storytellers will share colorful tales from our area. Warm drinks will be served to fight off the night’s chill. Admission is $10 for non-members, and $5 for members.

This virtual program is part of our Winter Speaker Series, and will be presented on Zoom. A Zoom link will be emailed to all SCHS members before the program.  Using research from over 500 primary accounts of patrons of  upstate inns and taverns, Gerald Baum will dig into the valuable contribution the inn made to the development of upstate New York. He will also discuss what a 19th century patron might have experienced staying the night at a roadside inn.

This is an in-person program at Mabee Farm.  As winter cold begins to recede, the ground unfreezes and the sap starts to run. On a New York farm, the first harvest of the year was always maple syrup. In this family-friendly program, you’ll learn the process for yourself from colonial techniques to later innovations. And of course, we’ll be able to taste the results! This is an outdoor event in so be prepared for winter temperatures! Tickets are $5 for members / $10 for non-members. Under 5 is free.