Immigration has defined American political life for decades — and today's debates may feel unprecedented, but they are not. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Immigration Act of 1924, the United States has been here before: moments when anti-immigrant sentiment hardened into law, when nativist arguments drowned out other voices, and when the question […]
Immigrant labor built America — and nowhere is that story more visible, or more local, than the Ashokan Reservoir, which still supplies roughly 40 percent of New York City's drinking water more than a century after its construction. Join local historian Steven Caselli for a presentation and conversation about the Southern Italian laborers who built […]
They are names carved into the landscape of the Hudson Valley — DuBois, Bevier, Crispell, Hasbrouck — familiar to us as founders, landholders, and pillars of colonial life. But before they were patentees, they were refugees. Driven from their homelands by war, religious persecution, and political upheaval in seventeenth-century Europe, the French-speaking Walloon and Huguenot […]
