In the early morning hours of March 29, 1911, a fire broke out in the New York State Capitol at Albany. By sunset, the entire western portion of the building had sustained extensive structural damage. Within lay the entire collection of the New York State Library, almost completely reduced to ashes. Founded in 1818, this had been one of the finest research libraries in the country and home to innumerable manuscript and printed rarities. In a particularly bitter irony, the fire struck as the overcrowded library was four months away from moving into new, spacious quarters under construction across the street. Miraculously there was only one fatality, an elderly watchman, Samuel Abbott, whose body was not recovered until several days later. Images of America: The New York State Capitol and the Great Fire of 1911 includes recently discovered photographs documenting the construction of the building, beginning in 1867, as well as eyewitness accounts of its destruction.

Uses recently discovered photographs and eyewitness accounts to document the destruction of the New York State Capital at Albany and the New York State Library in the a fire started in the early morning hours of March 29, 1911.

The New York State Capitol sits majestically at the head of Albany's State Street, a masterpiece of civic architecture and decorative design. Built between 1867 and 1899, it was the work of four architects—Thomas Fuller, Leopold Eidlitz, Henry Hobson Richardson, and Isaac Perry—who labored under geologically difficult, structurally challenging, and politically exasperating conditions. The building is also the product of hundreds of highly skilled masons and exceptional stone carvers. It is a feat of architectural design and engineering expertise, with superlatively executed interior features and finishes. First published in 1964 and reissued in 1982, C. R. Roseberry's Capitol Story tells the fascinating story of the Capitol's design and construction. This revised and expanded edition includes new information based on research done over the past twenty years, and brings the story up to date with a new chapter on the extensive interior and exterior restorations that were completed in 2013. The book also includes scores of new, specially commissioned, full-color photographs; notes; and an index. Capitol Story will appeal to a wide audience—young and old, New Yorkers and visitors, architecture and history buffs. More importantly, it will help build an educated constituency for the Capitol, one that will understand and be prepared to preserve the building in the years to come.

In America's collective unconscious, the Haudenosaunee, known to many as the Iroquois, are viewed as an indelible part of New York's modern and democratic culture. From the Iroquois confederacy serving as a model for the US Constitution, to the connections between the matrilineal Iroquois and the woman suffrage movement, to the living legacy of the famous "Sky Walkers," the steelworkers who built the Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge, the Iroquois are viewed as an exceptional people who helped make the state's history unique and forward-looking. John C. Winters contends that this vision was not manufactured by Anglo-Americans but was created and spread by an influential, multi-generational Seneca-Iroquois family. From the American Revolution to the Cold War, Red Jacket, Ely S. Parker, Harriet Maxwell Converse (adopted), and Arthur C. Parker used the tools of a colonial culture to shape aspects of contemporary New York culture in their own peoples' image. The result was the creation of "The Amazing Iroquois," an historical memory that entangled indigenous self-definition, colonial expectations about racial stereotypes and Native American politics, and the personalities of the people who cultivated and popularized that memory. Through the imperial politics of the eighteenth century to pioneering museum exhibitions of the twentieth, these four Seneca celebrities packaged and delivered Iroquoian stories to the broader public in defiance of the contemporary racial stereotypes and settler colonial politics that sought to bury them. Owing to their skill, fame, and the timely intervention of Iroquois leadership, this remarkable family showcases the lasting effects of indigenous agents who fashioned a popular and long-lasting historical memory that made the Iroquois an obvious and foundational part of New Yorkers' conception of their own exceptional state history and self-identity.

This interdisciplinary essay collection investigates the various interactions of people, feelings, and things throughout premodern Europe. It focuses on the period before mass production, when limited literacy often prioritised material methods of communication. The subject of materiality has been of increasing significance in recent historical inquiry, alongside growing emphasis on the relationships between objects, emotions, and affect in archaeological and sociological research. The historical intersections between materiality and emotions, however, have remained under-theorised, particularly with respect to artefacts that have continuing resonance over extended periods of time or across cultural and geographical space. Feeling Things addresses the need to develop an appropriate cross-disciplinary theoretical framework for the analysis of objects and emotions in European history, with special attention to the need to track the shifting emotional valencies of objects from the past to the present, and from one place and cultural context to another. The collection draws together an international group of historians, art historians, curators, and literary scholars working on a variety of cultural, literary, visual, and material sources. Objects considered include books, letters, prosthetics, religious relics, shoes, stone, and textiles. Many of these have been preserved in international galleries, museums, and archives, while others have remained in their original locations, even as their contexts have changed over time. The chapters consider the ways in which emotions such as despair, fear, grief, hope, love, and wonder become inscribed in and ascribed to these items, producing 'emotional objects' of significance and agency. Such objects can be harnessed to create, affirm, or express individual relationships, as, for example, in religious devotion and practice, or in the construction of cultural, communal, and national identities.

The life and work of a sculptor who pushed both aesthetic and social boundaries at the turn of the twentieth century is explored in this in-depth study. Working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Louisville-born sculptor Enid Yandell developed a distinctly physical and masculine style that challenged the gender norms of artistic practice. An award-winning sculptor with numerous commissions, she was also an activist for women's suffrage and other political movements. This study examines Yandell's evolution from a young, Southern dilettante into an internationally acclaimed artist and public figure. Yandell found early success as one of a select group of female sculptors at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. She was then commissioned to create a twenty-five foot figure of Pallas Athena for Nashville's Centennial Exposition in 1897. Yandell's command of classical subject matter was matched by her abilities with large-scale, figurative works such as the Daniel Boone statue in Cherokee Park, Louisville. Part of the art worlds of New York and Paris, Yandell associated with luminary sculptors like Frederick MacMonnies and Auguste Rodin. She became one of the first female members of the National Sculpture Society in 1898. This authoritative study explores the many ways in which Yandell was a pioneer.

In the early morning hours of March 29, 1911, a fire broke out in the New York State Capitol at Albany. By sunset, the entire western portion of the building had sustained extensive structural damage. Within lay the entire collection of the New York State Library, almost completely reduced to ashes. Founded in 1818, this had been one of the finest research libraries in the country and home to innumerable manuscript and printed rarities. In a particularly bitter irony, the fire struck as the overcrowded library was four months away from moving into new, spacious quarters under construction across the street. Miraculously there was only one fatality, an elderly watchman, Samuel Abbott, whose body was not recovered until several days later. Images of America: The New York State Capitol and the Great Fire of 1911 includes recently discovered photographs documenting the construction of the building, beginning in 1867, as well as eyewitness accounts of its destruction.