Foundation News Archive 2025
Do you have an interest in Suffolk County History and looking for a full-time position where you can share that interest and knowledge with the public? The Parks Department has an opening for the position of Assistant Director of Historic Services.
An employee in this position would assist the Director of Historic Services in the administration of the Suffolk County Historic Trust Program and recording of Suffolk County history. Responsibilities would include researching records as well as preserving documents and artifacts.
Qualified candidates should have thorough knowledge of professional research techniques and resources; ability to interpret and analyze historical information; familiarity with the history of Suffolk County, some knowledge of established principles, practices and methods used to catalog, accession, preserve and protect historic documents and artifacts for posterity; ability to initiate effective historical exhibits and display; ability to effectively communicate with individuals and groups to promote Suffolk County history.
Target Salary: $54,392
Interested candidates need to submit their resume and cover letter no later than October 1, 2025 to Suzanne.Bivona@suffolkcountyny.gov
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS | OPEN COMPETITIVE
Graduation from a New York State or Regionally accredited college or university with a bachelor's degree, and one (1) year of experience performing historic research or project direction related to historic structure maintenance, historic preservation of buildings and sites, adaptive use of old buildings, landmark legislation or museum management.
Note: Additional graduate level education may be substituted for the above experience on a year-for-year basis, if the concentration is one of the above-described areas.
Rent or buy a traveling exhibition for your school, library, museum, or historic site. A limited number of rental slots are now available for the fall.
These informative, colorful pop-up displays provide a unique perspective on various topics in American history. They feature primary source documents, many from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, that reveal the public and private words of people living at the time.
The Institute provides set-up instructions and an exhibition guide featuring background information on each exhibition and its content.
About Becoming the United States: Colonial America to Reconstruction:
This exhibition is designed to introduce upper elementary-aged students to the beginnings of American history and the skills involved in primary source analysis. Using items from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, it explores individuals, groups, and documents that have contributed to who we are as a country and encourages students to think critically about the first-hand accounts of this era.
Logistics and Costs:
- Size: Seven freestanding retractable panels, each 33" x 81" (21 total running feet)
- Purchase: Institutions may buy a copy for permanent use for $1,950.
- Rental: Institutions may rent the exhibition for a four-week period for $495.
Rent or buy your copy of Becoming the United States
About Freedom: A History of US:
Since 1776, when the United States declared independence from Great Britain, the idea of freedom and our understanding of its implications have changed dramatically. Drawing on materials from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, this exhibition traces the evolving concept of freedom from the founding era to the election of Barack Obama.
Logistics and Costs:
- Size: Twelve freestanding retractable panels, each 33" x 81" (35 total running feet)
- Purchase: Institutions may buy a copy for permanent use for $2,950.
- Rental: Institutions may rent the exhibition for a four-week period for $995.
250th Anniversary Opportunity
The Suffolk County 250th Anniversary Committee has created a Revolutionary History Passport Book initiative for 2026.
All historic sites can be included as a location in the passport book for free.
The deadline to register for inclusion is August 30, 2025.
You don’t have to know the exact dates or plans for your events in order to register for inclusion.
To register click here
Inaugural World War I Symposium:
“The Generation that Changed the World: Voices from the Great War” at The National Press Club September 12
Six distinguished speakers will lecture on a variety of WWI topics at the Inaugural World War I Symposium at The National Press Club in Washington, DC on Friday, September 12, 2025. Digging into intriguing aspects of the American experience in World War I and showing how echoes of the Great War are still being heard in the United States a century later.
The event will include a full day of lectures on The Voices from the Great War from the award-winning authors and presenters:
- Jim Leeke - From the Dugouts to the Trenches is Leeke’s third book to be nominated for the Larry Ritter Award.
- Marvin W. Barrash - The Mysterious Disappearance of the U.S.S. Cyclops.
- Mitchell Yockelson - Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I.
- Dr. Frank A. Blazich Jr., PhD - Feathers of Honor: U.S. Army Signal Corps Pigeon Service, 1917-1918.
- Jari Villanueva, Executive Director of The Doughboy Foundation, will present: The Yanks are Coming – US Army Bands of World War I (1917 – 1919).
- Theo Mayer, Chief Technologist and Program Manager, US World War I Centennial Commission (2015-2024) will present and demonstrate how modern digital platforms unlock new avenues to interactive learning, bridging 1914 – 1918 to today for both classrooms and enthusiasts.
The Symposium will conclude with a wreath laying at the National World War I Memorial.
"Constructing the nation's new WWI Memorial in 2024 was a proud accomplishment -- but it was just the beginning of our commitment to sharing the stories of the brave Americans who won the Great War," said Denise Doring VanBuren, Chair, Board of Directors, The Doughboy Foundation. "Our inaugural World War I Symposium is designed to keep the effort going -- that is, to build on the foundation of our beautiful new monument to further increased awareness of what the Doughboy generation experienced. We're dedicated to staging educational resources and events that keep alive the stories of men and women who literally changed the world through their sacrifices -- stories that were left untold for too many generations."
The Symposium is presented by the Doughboy Foundation, and The MacArthur Memorial, which is a museum and research center dedicated to preserving and presenting the story of the life of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.
The Doughboy Foundation and its generous sponsors are offering the Symposium registration fee for only $25. Learn more about the Symposium, and get your tickets here.
Now for the first time: Individuals can subscribe to the Gilder Lehrman Collection!
Scholars, genealogists, journalists, curators, educators, students, and history enthusiasts can now view—and download—images from our entire Collection. Explore rare manuscripts, download Benjamin Franklin's signed copy of the Constitution, view Abraham Lincoln's handwritten notes—and much more.
About the Gilder Lehrman Collection:
One of the great archives in American history, the Gilder Lehrman Collection comprises more than 70,000 letters, diaries, maps, pamphlets, printed books, newspapers, photographs, and ephemera.
The Collection offers one-of-a-kind material—such as a letter from Columbus, an original printing of the Declaration of Independence, and rarely seen wartime letters from soldiers—that provides insight into American political, social, and economic history from 1493 through the twentieth century.
Explore the Gilder Lehrman Collection
Why subscribe to the Gilder Lehrman Collection?
- View and download unpublished manuscripts and diaries, maps, pamphlets, printed books, newspapers, and photographs spanning 500 years of American history
- Explore the lives of key historical figures such as George Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Eleanor Roosevelt in their own hand, through their letters, speeches, and official correspondence
- Read eyewitness accounts of the American Revolution, Civil War, and numerous other pivotal moments and eras in American history without leaving home
- Research at an affordable rate and on your preferred timeline—subscribe for a single month ($25) or full year ($100)
In preparation for the 250th anniversary of American Independence, six SUNY Potsdam students have been completing hands-on internships this summer around New York State—delving into local history projects to examine the founding of the country, while also helping local historians plan for upcoming semiquincentennial celebrations.
SUNY Potsdam students Sharonmarie Bartz ’26, Nicholas Cardenas ’24, Ryan Costin ’25, Teresa Dickson ’24, Logan Lavallee ’26 and Noah Schwartz ’24 joined a cohort of 50 students from seven SUNY campuses across the state for the historical research projects. As part of the Robert David Lion Gardiner Semiquincentennial Summer Fellowship Program, each student received $4,800 for completing 150 hours of work with town or county historical societies or with local historians as part of a $300,000 grant, with another $150,000 in matching funds from the SUNY schools involved.
“Before the students started, Dr. Sheila McIntyre and I did a crash course on the American Revolution, particularly in New York State, to prepare them for their experiences,” said Dr. Tom Baker, a SUNY Potsdam history professor overseeing the applied learning experiences with Dr. McIntyre, also a professor of history at the College.
Each of the students, spread out around the state from western New York to the Adirondacks, is examining the local history of the Revolutionary War, looking at written records from veterans, and supporting historians in preparation for events commemorating the 250th anniversary of American Independence.
For Ryan Costin, who is working at the Chenango County Historical Society, the fellowship has allowed him to drill into a rich history not far from his childhood home. The SUNY Potsdam senior has been collecting oral histories of Chenango residents and creating programs for the Chenango Historical Society’s Summer Series, including giving his own presentation about the bicentennial celebration that took place in the town back in 1976.
He has also been examining artifacts from the mid-18th century that are connected to the war. “My last project is creating an article for the New York History Journal under the artifact category, where I investigate how a local Revolutionary War powder horn made its way into Chenango County and why it is important. A powder horn can be best described as a storage method for gunpowder for soldiers. The horn was lightweight and had a strap so soldiers could always keep them attached to their person,” Costin explained.
In Montgomery County, Schwartz has been transcribing handwritten accounts from war veterans and searching local archives to uncover personal stories from the Revolution. “He’s learning a lot about local history and transcribing an account from Jacob Sammons,” Baker said.
“Montgomery County is one those places where a liberty pole was literally down the street. They would have a big party, where residents would whoop and holler and they would make a Tory [British loyalist] swear allegiance to the State of New York. When the Tory wouldn’t do it, they would tar and feather him, run him off, or worse,” Baker continued.
In Warren County and Queensbury, Dickson and Cardenas, two seniors at SUNY Potsdam, are both working on a census of Revolutionary War veterans’ burial sites, geotagging them, and creating short biographies of the veterans. They are also helping to prepare for an extensive celebration to reenact military activities during the war.
“The Warren County people have got a fairly extensive array of events that are going to happen starting in 2025,” Baker said. “That’s an area of the state where they dragged all the artillery from Fort Ticonderoga down to Boston in the middle of winter with sleds. They needed to get the British out of Boston, and the artillery they had was in Fort Ticonderoga, which they had just captured. So, I think they’re going to do some recreation of that and it’s going to go from Fort Ticonderoga down through Warren County, all the way to Boston.”
Dickson and Cardenas have been focusing on locating the unknown graves of Revolutionary War soldiers. Starting with the veterans’ dates of birth and death, locations where they lived, and information about their spouses. They have also been conducting searches on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.com, searching for their pension records, and writing biographies about each soldier.
“Once we have this information, we head to cemeteries to try to locate the graves. I love the research side, especially when you finally find information about someone you have been looking for, and you have that ‘Wow, I did it’ moment. I also really love going to the cemeteries to find the graves. The thought of honoring someone who fought for our freedom, who has more or less been forgotten for hundreds of years, is a wonderful experience,” Dickson said.
As students comb through the local archives looking at hand-written letters and pension records, they bring to life the personal accounts of everyday Americans during the founding of the country—learning about the lives of infantrymen, rather than just the stories from well-known, high-ranking officers.
“The pension records are interesting in the sense that they often tell you a lot about common peoples’ experience, because it’s not necessarily the generals or the colonels, it’s sometimes the privates who say, ‘I was called out eight times in the militia for a month here and there, and I was involved in hunting Torys,’” Baker said. “Our students are doing transcription from 18th-century cursive, which is hard for a lot of them, although a lot of these students have had some experience because of my Public History class. This is an opportunity for them to see what it means to be a public historian, and that might lure them into thinking about either archives, public history, or library work.”
Michael Oberg, a distinguished professor in SUNY Geneseo’s Department of History and the director of the Robert David Lion Gardiner Semiquincentennial Summer Fellowship Program, secured the grant for the project and has been busy this summer visiting all 50 students around the state, including Potsdam’s six representatives.
“I was impressed with each of Potsdam's students who we were able to hire as Gardiner Foundation Fellows. Each student was polite, professional, and extremely well-prepared by the faculty in Potsdam's Department of History for the work that their historians asked them to perform. These historians have been singing the praises of these six Potsdam students since they started work late in May—testifying to the excellence of Potsdam's students and, especially, to the outstanding teacher-scholars in the Department of History,” he said.
When the students arrive back on campus this fall, they will be making presentations at the Potsdam Public Library to discuss their applied learning experiences, and then during the Spring 2024 Semester, they will share their projects at the College’s Learning and Research Fair.
“Doing work like this is an excellent experience outside of the classroom and is so beneficial in the long run,” Dickson said. “Having field experience like this will not only better prepare me for future schooling, but also for my future career. I can add this to my resume, and going into future semesters in college I will already have such great research experience under my belt that not many other students probably have.”
YS Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation
Grant opportunities are currently available through the Consolidated Funding Application (CFA) located on the Regional Economic Development Councils website. In addition to the online application there is also an Application Manual, Resource Guide, pre-recorded webinars, and registration for Regional Workshops and Live Agency Webinars offered statewide.
Basic information for the Parks Programs:
- 50/50 match requirement
- Funding per application is capped at $675,000
- Applicant must have an ownership interest in the property
- NFP applicants need to be prequalified in the Statewide Financial System to apply and up-to-date with the -Charities Bureau to execute a contract
Additional information and resources for the programs administered through our agency are also available at NYS Parks - Environmental Protection Fund.
NYS Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation
Grants Bureau | PO Box 247, Babylon NY 11702-0247
(631) 321-3543 | traci.christian@parks.ny.gov
