About Me & Introduction: Jacob Leisler Institute for Early New York History
Hey, my name is James O’Grady, and I’m a senior at SUNY New Paltz, and I am a history major, with a German minor. I’ve loved history as long as I can remember, and my range of interest spans from the Neolithic to the beginning of the 20th century, though I focus mostly on German early modern and industrial history. This semester has been exceptionally exciting for me so far, because I have been able to pursue this love in the most authentic and real-world way, through the Jacob Leisler Institute. The Institute is situated in Hudson, but luckily, I don’t mind the hour-long drive I make every Friday, it’s a good time to reflect, catch up on news, and just enjoy the open road.
The Jacob Leisler Institute focuses on New York History from the period of 1665 to 1775, with its sights set specifically on the 1680s, during Jacob Leisler’s time as governor of New York. My boss, Dr. David Voorhees, has worked on this period of colonial Dutch and English history for decades, and has done plenty of work translating and transcribing original texts as well as publishing his own work and research. The Institute acts as an archive and repository for information relating to early New York State, meaning that it is our job to organize, collect, and make sense of data so that historians and students can find this information easily and use it for their own studies. Every week, Dr. Voorhees tells me about another person that has made an appointment to view the archives, studying topics as varied as church architecture to native American culture.
Right now, Dr. Voorhees is concerned with learning how to further reach out to groups of people, not just researchers but ordinary New Yorkers, and trying to make information and learning more accessible. It is the belief of Dr. Voorhees and the Institute’s constituents that this period of New York history is extremely under-examined and is vital in understanding our own culture in the modern day. For how fascinating this time is, I wonder how it is so frequently glossed over in school, and so absent from common knowledge. Jacob Leisler is viewed as a hero of the common people, because colonial New York had always been ruled quite like a monarchy, and his reforms in the 1680s served to better distribute power and land to more of New York’s inhabitants.
So far, my job has been strictly archival. Though it is grinding and tough work, I feel very engaged in the process of “doing” history. I have been producing finding aids and organizing piles and piles of unsorted papers, documents, reviews, and journals into concise folders that make them very easy to find. Then, the finding aid acts as a sort of table of contents for each of these folders, within each box. Since I have just finished that task, I have moved on to transcribing and translating some German texts, as well as making sure all of the primary German documents that we should have are actually there. This is an amazing opportunity to learn some old German vocabulary, learn how to read very sloppy script and feel engaged in the field of history. I love the idea of being part of something larger than myself. Dr. Voorhees and I will later discuss ways to make this history more accessible to a greater number of people through social media, presentations, work advertisement, and maybe even podcasts. Exposure is one of our primary goals at the insititute.