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November 14th, 2019
A review of the period of school expansion and reform in Geneva during the late 1800s.
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June 21st, 2019
Find out more about beer brewing in early Geneva.
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May 31st, 2019
Join us for the 2019 Annual Dinner and Meeting.
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March 22nd, 2019
Join us to discuss the history and development of sports and athletics in Geneva in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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February 22nd, 2019
New exhibit explores 120 years of high school athletics in Geneva.
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February 1st, 2019
What was 19th-century schoolwork like?
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November 9th, 2018
What can you learn from a cemetery? Every autumn Geneva's second and fifth grade students get to find out.
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July 6th, 2018
1968, the year the Geneva Historical Society opened Rose Hill Mansion as a museum, was a year of momentous change.
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June 22nd, 2018
In conjunction with the exhibit opening of "Dove's Geneva, the Geneva Historical Society and the Arthur Dove Tribute Group are hosting a special event celebrating the importance of Dove and his work to Geneva.
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January 12th, 2018
The Historical Society will host two meetings in January to solicit community input on a facilities expansion project.
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December 1st, 2017
Where did the Christmas pudding come from and why don't Americans eat it?
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January 5th, 2018
Many Americans are familiar with the segregated schools of the Jim Crow South, however, officially segregated schools existed in most 19th-century communities in the North, including Geneva. It took the concerted efforts of Geneva's African-American community to advocate for improved education and eventual integrated schools for their children.
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August 4th, 2017
Geneva Middle School students create a mural recounting Geneva High School boycotts of the 1970s.
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March 3rd, 2017
Here is your chance to help us curate the exhibit Stuff: A Material History of Geneva, opening June 2017.
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January 20th, 2017
Free public schools appeared in Geneva in the mid-19th century.
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November 4th, 2016
The Geneva City School District can trace its birth to 1839, the year that the village’s Districts No. 1 and No. 19 merged to form the state’s first union school district. By the 1830s, the community had a College, dozens of private schools, and two public schools for the basic instruction of children of all classes. Yet schooling in the antebellum period here and throughout
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February 26th, 2016
As we at the Geneva Historical Society look back at the 1960s this year, we cannot ignore the protest movements that sprung out of that decade, particularly the Civil Rights Movement.
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November 6th, 2015
Like much of what happened in the decade, 1960s food spanned extremes from French haute cuisine to Spaghetti-Os and back again.
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July 2nd, 2015
The recent debates over Geneva’s school budget and national arguments about the Common Core curriculum have had me thinking and reading a lot about the history of education this past spring. Education and schooling have been part of life in Geneva from its early settlement, though not in a form most modern Genevans would recognize.
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April 16th, 2015
One hundred fifty years ago this week actor John Wilkes Booth changed American history when he stepped into the Lincolns' booth at Ford's Theater and shot the president in the back of the head, the first man to assassinate a U.S. president. The assassination was an awful event that shook the nation just a week after Lee’s surrender overjoyed the North.
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March 2nd, 2015
The Geneva USO Club helped the community do its part during World War II.
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December 5th, 2014
With World War II came the birth of the American teenager. While we tend to associate the flowering of teen culture with the baby boomers, it was actually their immediate predecessors, the so-called “Silent Generation” who were first referred to as teenagers. Then, as always, the older generation thought that the younger generation was at best misguided, at worst they were described as selfish, willful,
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October 3rd, 2014
As we saw in a previous post about the Herendeen family, World War I came about so suddenly and unexpectedly that few people were prepared for it. As mobilization for war began across Europe, there were over 100,000 Americans visiting or living abroad who were unable to leave easily.
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August 8th, 2014
By Anne Dealy, Director of Education and Public Information Banking in the early years of the American Republic was decentralized, inefficient and disorganized, leading to frequent panics and depressions. While attempts were made to resolve these problems, none were substantial or comprehensive enough to put the nation on a solid financial footing. As in many other areas of national development, it was the Civil War
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July 3rd, 2014
As we saw last month, the Swans at Rose Hill relied on female workers to do much of the housework and childcare. Running the farm operations required male workers.
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May 30th, 2014
At Rose Hill in the mid-19th century, the Swans hired laborers for agricultural and domestic work. This post examines the female domestic servants at the house
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February 5th, 2014
Overview of banking in early Geneva.
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December 23rd, 2013
A brief history of Christmas
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November 26th, 2013
The rise of the modern consumer culture as seen in Geneva.
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October 31st, 2013
During the 19th century, Genevans went from preserving food at home in order to be able to eat to purchasing luxury preserved foods in stores.
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September 27th, 2013
Chronicle of the 1878-1879 diphtheria epidemic.
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August 30th, 2013
Food preservation techniques of the Iroquois and European settlers.
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July 31st, 2013
Geneva's African-American community hosted a number of emancipation celebrations in the 19th century to celebrate their freedoms while protesting slavery and racial inequality.
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May 31st, 2013
Robert Swan's farming practice was what the modern observer could call sustainable.
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March 25th, 2013
Robert Swan's transition from city dweller to farmer at Rose Hill.
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February 25th, 2013
A little over one-hundred fifty years ago, on September 22, 1862, President Lincoln took a step he had planned for months and proclaimed that as of January 1, 1863 “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.…”
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January 28th, 2013
A comfortable house in winter was a rare thing in much of the United States prior to the late 19th century. According to one English visitor to Cayuga, NY in 1827, American houses were built “expressly for summer, without the slightest reference to the six months’ winter that they suffer.”