Director of Sci Journalism Program at Columbia Visits Today

One of the world's leading teachers and practitioners of science journalism will be visiting Albany today to talk about her new history of Manhattan's street grid.

Marguerite Holloway has been teaching at the Journalism School since 1997. She won a Presidential Teaching Award in 2009 and the Distinguished Teacher of the Year award in 2001. Holloway has been a long-time contributor to Scientific American, where she has covered many topics, particularly environmental issues, public health, neuroscience and women in science.

Holloway has a B.A. in comparative literature from Brown University and an M.S. from the Journalism School (class of 1988). Before she joined Scientific American in 1990, she worked as a reporter for the Medical Tribune and freelanced for publications including The Village Voice and Mother Jones. Her work has appeared in many other magazines and newspapers, among them Discover, The New York Times, Natural History and Wired. Her book, The Measure of Manhattan, has just been published by W.W. Norton.

More on her visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#holloway

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John Randel Exhibit at Museum of City of New York

John Randel's impact on New York City was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of the City The Greatest Grid-- The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011.
of New York:

You can still view much of the exhibit online:  http://www.mcny.org/exhibitions/past/The-Greatest-Grid.html

Randel is the subject of a new biography by Marguerite Holloway, who visits on Thursday.

More about her visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/holloway_marguerite13.html

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Disorderly Story of the Orderly NYC Street Grid

Marguerite Holloway, who will give a slide show presentation at the State Museum on Thursday, is the author of the new book, The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr.

Here's an excerpt from a review in Slate:

"Randel, who was born in Albany in 1787, grew up during “a surveying boom,” when a large portion of prominent American males—Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and later, Lincoln—served in the profession at some point. “His was the era of laying lines on the land,” Holloway declares. It was “a culture and a period in which reason and measured action were prized and dominion over the natural world—through exploration, experiment, science, cartography, and infrastructure—was celebrated.” Beginning in about 1804, Randel was hired to assist New York State surveyor-general Simeon Dewitt in his plan to grid upstate New York. Dewitt was influenced by the earlier plan to grid the entire United States, outlined in the 1785 “Ordinance for Ascertaining the Mode of Disposing of Lands in the Western Territory”—the reason why flyover country looks like a waffle iron."

Read more in Slate.

Read about Holloway's visit:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/holloway_marguerite13.html

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Marguerite Holloway Interviewed in the TU

Marguerite Holloway, who visits us on Thursday, is interviewed in the Times Union about her new book on Albany native and mad genius of the 19th century, John Randel, Jr. The book's title is The Measure of Manhattan.

"Randel's a window into an incredible era in American history.... He's also a fascinating character. He has this precise and careful mathematic rigor, but he's also mercurial and passionate, even irrational — getting involved in all sorts of lawsuits and losing tons of money."

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Manhattan-matrix-4410267.php#ixzz2PtXy0OcF

More about her visit this coming Thursday:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/holloway_marguerite13.html

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The Invasion of New York

Willard Sterne Randall, who visits today, writes of Alexander Hamilton's efforts to defend Manhattan against the British navy in the January 2003 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

"On August 8, Hamilton tore open orders from Washington: his company was to be on round-the-clock alert against an imminent invasion of Manhattan. “The movements of the enemy and intelligence by deserters give the utmost reason to believe that the great struggle in which we are contending for everything dear to us and our posterity, is near at hand,” Washington wrote.

"But early on the morning of August 27, 1776, Hamilton watched, helpless, as the British ferried 22,000 troops from Staten Island, not to Manhattan at all, but to the village of Brooklyn, on Long Island. Marching quickly inland from a British beachhead that stretched from Flatbush to Gravesend, they met little resistance. Of the 10,000 American troops on Long Island, only 2,750 were in Brooklyn, in four makeshift forts spread over four miles. At Flatbush, on the American east flank, Lord Charles Cornwallis quickly captured a mounted patrol of five young militia officers, including Hamilton’s college roommate, Robert Troup, enabling 10,000 redcoats to march stealthily behind the Americans. Cut off by an 80-yard-wide swamp, 312 Americans died in the ensuing rout; another 1,100 were wounded or captured. By rowboat, barge, sloop, skiff and canoe in a howling northeaster, a regiment of New England fishermen transported the survivors across the East River to Manhattan. More.

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