Jamaica, Queens, has long occupied a commanding position in the political, social, and industrial life of Queens County. Indigenous people created a trail, used by various tribes to trade furs and other goods, through the woods that later became Jamaica Avenue, the main street of the village. Jamaica was witness to the evolution of change, receiving a charter from Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant in 1656, becoming an English colony in 1664, and winning freedom in the American Revolution with the Jamaica Minutemen. The area is richly steeped in history: George Washington slept here; and Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, Rufus King, Jacob Riis, and many more have left their mark on Jamaica. Jamaica is an astounding visual journey documenting the unique history of this remarkable community over more than 350 years.

Includes its Report, 1896-19 .

Bibliographies of local history are essential research tools for historians, genealogists, and book collectors. This volume is an attempt to bring together citations to all the books and pamphlets dealing with New York State history at the local or community level, which were published between 1900 and 1987; also included are some of the more important local history publications published prior to 1900, as well as a few works published as recently as 1989. It is not an attempt to compile a complete bibliography of the state which would undoubtedly require several large volumes, but rather, is directed more specifically to the needs of the local history and genealogy researcher. Material pertaining to the history of the major cities of the state has generally been excluded. Periodical articles and manuscript materials have also been excluded. About 2,500 publications are described in the listings which are arranged by county and town. This revised and enlarged edition updates the 1988 work with numerous additional citations, well-annotated for informative and entertaining reading, covering the following new subjects: Hudson Valley, Indians, maps, northern and western New York, reference books which include a substantial amount of New York material, Revolutionary War, Shakers and books with statewide coverage.

The idea of covenant was at the heart of early New England society. In this singular book David Weir explores the origins and development of covenant thought in America by analyzing the town and church documents written and signed by seventeenth-century New Englanders. Unmatched in the breadth of its scope, this study takes into account all of the surviving covenants in all of the New England colonies. Weir's comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century covenants leads to a more complex picture of early New England than what emerges from looking at only a few famous civil covenants like the Mayflower Compact. His work shows covenant theology being transformed into a covenantal vision for society but also reveals the stress and strains on church-state relationships that eventually led to more secularized colonial governments in eighteenth-century New England. He concludes that New England colonial society was much more "English" and much less "American" than has often been thought, and that the New England colonies substantially mirrored religious and social change in Old England.

Updating the earlier, Genealogical Resources in the New York Metropolitan Area, this volume describes genealogical repositories in all of New York's five boroughs with an emphasis on Jewish sources.