Letter from the Editors

Letter from the Editors Robert Chiles, Devin R. Lander, Jennifer Lemak, and Aaron Noble Dear Readers, Before this issue went to print, we were saddened to hear of the passing of Dr. Wendell Tripp. Dr. Tripp was a legend within the New York State history community and was an accomplished educator, researcher, and author. He was also the prolific editor of this journal for decades, having served in that capacity for an amazing 148 issues. Our thoughts are with his family and with all the historians and authors who worked with him over the years. Among the treasures of state-level histories is the fact that they often uncover the idiosyncratic experiences and particular agendas of communities and individuals. These idiosyncrasies often complicate and humanize well-known historical events while providing new interpretations of old historical themes. This issue of New York History offers a panoply of studies in how regional scholarship adds nuance to well-known stories while also furnishing revised interpretations of the past. Articles by Amy M. Cools and Chris Fobare each reveal the relationship between activist strategies among African Americans in nineteenth-century New York and broader national controversies and trends. In "Association of Ladies," Cools explores the essential roles of Emeline Bastien and Fanny Tompkins among New York City activists to reveal the forms of community leadership available to African American women. In "A Full Measure of Citizenship," Fobare charts the evolving strategies of African Americans in Gilded Age Oneida County, analyzing how initial hopes for collaborative work toward social and political equality were replaced by an inward-facing pragmatism emphasizing economic uplift and social respectability once white Republicans abandoned the promises of Reconstruction. The contributions by Michael Haggerty, Mark A. Smith, and Colin Williams all demonstrate that exploring how individual motivations interfaced with broad national trends provides a space for revisionist interpretations of major historical problems. In "The Blackwell's Island Candidate," Haggerty engages the rhetoric and experiences of New York congressman Mike Walsh to argue that frustration with the sprawling carceral state was an essential component of northern working-class politics in the antebellum period. In "The Curious Case of Clancy Collins," Smith uses the Civil War service record of one Irish-immigrant New Yorker to explore the complex mix of financial and ideological concerns motivating both enlistments in and desertion from the Union army. In "Persuasion Politics," Williams reassesses the career of Governor George Clinton, portraying New York's first and longest-serving chief executive less as a factional partisan than as a builder of stability and prosperity. [End Page vii] Meanwhile, exciting revisionist articles complicate our views of famous pieces of Empire State History such as the 1918 influenza pandemic, the rise of Coney Island, and the status of New York State as nineteenth-century America's immigrant destination par excellence. In "The Supervisors Are Carrying the Bag," Eric C. Cimino provides an insightful microhistory of New York City's Nurses' Emergency Council (NEC)—an umbrella group of settlement houses and municipal organizations formed in response to the 1918 flu—to show how the institutional experiences of key figures like NEC chair Lillian Wald allowed the city to keep death rates among the lowest in the eastern United States. In "Coney Island Babies," Meggie Crnic and John Parascandola tell the story of Gilded Age Children's Aid Society health homes at Coney Island—elevating the perspectives of the largely impoverished and immigrant mothers, who preferred these institutions to hospitals, while adding a new dimension to memories of Coney Island as a site not only of spectacle and play but also of recuperation and rest. In "French-Canadian Settlement and Community Formation in Pre–Civil War New York State," Patrick Lacroix systematically demonstrates how mass-emigration from Quebec spurred significant institution-building and cultural development and shaped the economies of many upstate cities and towns. Lacroix's essay simultaneously reorients the story of immigrant New York northward from Gotham and that of French-Canadian America westward from New England. This issue is also an opportunity to announce both beginnings and endings. This volume is the last produced with our intern Zachary Deibel. Zac, who is pursuing his PhD at Binghamton, has been...

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