Autumn 2024 issue of The Hudson River Valley Review

You have to reach back fifteen years to find the last issue of The Hudson River Valley Review whose articles focused exclusively on our region’s recent past, and it was not nearly this diverse. The forgoing articles provide compelling insights into an extraordinary array of people and movements that nevertheless share common threads — community, politics, social action, the struggle for human rights. They prove that over the last century the Hudson River Valley has continued to maintain its reputation as a bulwark of progressiveness and a bellwether for national trends. Devin Lander and Paige Rozanski examine significant aspects of the artistic, social, and spiritual explorations that took place in the region in the 1960s, predating San Francisco’s vaunted “Summer of Love” and the Woodstock Festival and influencing many of the psychedelic aesthetics still prominent in fashion and advertising today. Looking across the 1970s into the 1990s in the City of Albany, Ashley Hopkins-Benton recounts the trials and victories of grassroots activists working for LGBTQ+ rights and the role their strategies played in state and national politics. While the 2017 controversy on the campus of SUNY New Paltz was neither the first nor the most famous instance of questioning the naming of school buildings, Reynolds Scott-Childress relates an innovative response on the part of the administration there to foster community engagement and dialogue around the issue.

Speaking of issues: the previous edition of The Hudson River Valley Review set exclusively in the twentieth century was dedicated entirely to Eleanor Roosevelt and her legacy. In this issue, the Regional History Forum celebrates her and the Val-Kill National Historic Site on the fortieth anniversary of its opening by tracing the evolution of “The First Lady of the World” in the place Eleanor Roosevelt felt most at home. Finally, the book reviews delve further back into the past, as far as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as do many of the titles in our New & Noteworthy section.

Read on, dig in, and enjoy!

The Hudson River Valley Review

Volume 41, Number 1, Autumn 2024

(Click here for PDF preview)

“The Communication of Experience is Art”: USCO, the Castalia Foundation, and Psychedelic Art in the Hudson River Valley, Devin R. Lander & Paige Rozanski

LGBTQ+ Politics and Organizing: The Fight for Legal Protections in Albany, New York, Ashley Hopkins-Benton

Personal Reflection

Telling Difficult Stories, Realizing DEI Values: The SUNY New Paltz Building Renaming Project, 2017–2018, Reynolds J. Scott-Childress

Regional History Forum

Crafting a Legacy at Val-Kill: The Emergence of Eleanor Roosevelt, Grace Naccarato

Book Reviews

Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York, Andrea Mosterman, reviewed by Evan Rothera

The Road to Ticonderoga: The Campaign of 1758 in the Champlain Valley, Michael G. Laramie, reviewed by Mark Edward Lender

Taking Our Water for the City: The Archaeology of New York City’s Watershed Communities, April M. Beisaw, reviewed by Marianna Boncek

The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History (Second Edition), Bruce W. Dearstyne, reviewed by P. Matthew DeLaMater

New & Noteworthy Books

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