This week, the press will be participating in both the Association of Public Historians of New York State’s annual convention as well as the Albany Book Festival. To celebrate both events, we’re showcasing some of our best and best loved New York State and regional books in a sale. Save 40% off all applicable titles with promo code 05CNTM26 at checkout and consider some of the below books.
A group of strangers risk death along the New York State Thruway to save a soldier from a burning truck. The true story, as told by football legend Jim Brown, of how the number 44 rose to prominence at Syracuse University. The beautiful yet tragic connection between Vice President Joseph Biden and Syracuse. The impossible account of how Eric Carle, one of the world’s great children’s authors, found his way to a childhood friend through a photograph taken in Syracuse more than eighty years ago. All these tales can be found in The Soul of Central New York, a collection of columns by Sean Kirst that spans almost a quarter-century. During his long career as a writer for the Syracuse Post-Standard, Kirst won some of the most prestigious honors in journalism, including the Ernie Pyle Award, given annually to one American writer who best captures the hopes and dreams of everyday Americans.
In 1851, two aspiring landscape artists, Jervis McEntee and Joseph Tubby, set out for the Adirondacks on a sketching expedition that would test not only their mettle as artists but as outdoorsmen. Heading into the still-rugged wilderness, not yet fully explored and sparsely inhabited, the two artists ventured across about one hundred seventy miles of terrain, sketching what they saw for future painting reference. In Sketching the Adirondacks, the artists’ unique journey is brought to life by author Edward Pitts, who drew on McEntee’s journal to reimagine the expedition as a series of letters home to friends and family. These fictionalized letters, all richly annotated with historical facts and context about the region, recount the pair’s real adventures and the artistic inspirations that inspired their work as Hudson River School artists.
From the 1890s to 1930s, stately mansions lined Syracuse’s James Street, their elegant gardens, architecture, and streetscapes a point of city-wide pride. The Gilded Age on Syracuse’s James Street combines newly published photographs with histories of the mansions and people that once occupied Syracuse’s most fashionable street. More than just beautiful facades, the mansions and people who inhabited them represented the cultural life, political leadership, industrial growth, and social reform that animated Syracuse and the nation during this period of opulence.
At least 162 species of fish are known to live or spawn in the freshwaters of the Northeast, representing twenty-eight families and sixteen orders. This diversity springs from an enormous variety of freshwater habitats, including some of the largest lakes in the world; vast and complex river systems; deep, clear lakes in Maine and the Adirondack Mountains; and myriad small lakes, bogs, marshes, and streams that dot the northeast. In Freshwater Fishes of the Northeastern United States: A Field Guide the most comprehensive book of its kind, Robert G. Werner offers a thorough survey and analysis, in accessible field guide form, of the region’s abundant freshwater fishes.