While perhaps not at first apparent, the articles in this issue share a common theme—struggle. The Dutch colonists had to carve a home out of the New World wilderness. Two centuries later, descendants of the original inhabitants of a part of that world (which wasn’t entirely wilderness after all) tried to reclaim their sovereignty. Just fifty years after that, women undertook a march from New York City to Albany to assert their right to vote and gain adherents for their cause. Finally, while the rise and fall of Albany’s lumber district perhaps doesn’t readily seem to fit the theme, here, too, a struggle took place to establish and maintain a community on and around it.

This latter essay underscores the essential role of technological innovation, a concept that leads us to a second underlying theme of this issue—progress. Sometimes welcome, sometimes not, for better or worse it is always unstoppable.

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