Memory in the Disciplines at Stony Brook Presents: 

This talk explores how various kinds of history practitioners – from genealogists to archivists, local historians to history buffs, parks workers to artists – interact to produce history. In particular, how do these practitioners, individually and collectively, decide what is true about the past?

Theodore Kazimiroff was a beloved dentist and active amateur archaeologist who founded the Bronx County Historical Society in 1955. After he died in 1982, his son wrote a book – The Last Algonquin – about Kazimiroff’s encounters with Joe Two Trees, a Lenape man who supposedly lived a traditional life in the forests of a Bronx park until his death in 1924. While historical research makes it clear that this story could not be literally true, it was widely accepted as such and continues to be treated as true, or maybe true, or “wouldn’t it be nice if it was true” both in the Bronx and beyond, by Native and non-Native people.

In this presentation, Amy Starecheski will share her ongoing research into the roots of this story – in the embodied play of Boy Scouts, in Bronx immigrant cultures, and in the capacious practices of local history –  as well as the sources of its lasting power.

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Amy Starecheski is an oral historian and cultural anthropologist who directs the Oral History Master of Arts Program at Columbia University, where she is a Senior Lecturer.

Memory in the Disciplines is an initiative of the Departments of Sociology and English, with support from the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.