Adirondacker

A People’s History of the Adks

This project is a marriage of strange bedfellows, combining the radical historical approach of The American Social History Project, the public history perspective of the NYPL’s Community Oral History Project, the lexicographical format of Raymond Williams’ Keywords, and the participatory regional travel writing of the Adirondack 102 Club. It began as the “People’s History of Hamilton County” series under the auspices of a grant by the National Endowment of the Humanities in 2016 before branching out as the People’s History of the Adirondacks, maintaining the same basic ambition: to write a piecemeal history of the Adirondack region from the perspective of the people who built it. Each 44-page pamphlet focuses on a particular Adirondack town through the lens of a relevant term from the social sciences and humanities, in a bid to make both the obscure Adirondack region and obscure academic ideas legible to a broader audience, the better to illuminate both.