Dashin' & Dancin' at the Cohoes Music Hall

The inaugural Dashin' & Dancin' concert featuring The Refrigerators was a hit Saturday, December 2 at the Cohoes Music Hall. It was a great fundraising effort for the museum - and for those who were affected by the fire on Remsen Street just a few days before. One of the band members even donated his entire cut of the performance to those rebuilding! These guys are a great group of people and we had such a good time that we hope to be able to make this a yearly thing.

There were the usual fan favorites that they performed as well as some holiday songs!

There was a Christmas Conga Line and we had our own rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas. Who do you think was the loudest group out of the twelve days of Christmas?

We even had Santa and his wife there to make sure we were nice...we were all nice this year, right?

Not even Santa could resist joining in on the fun with the band, showing off his moves with the saxophone!

Thank you to The Refrigerators for such a fantastic performance - they had us up and dancin' the night away!

It was a great way to support the museum and we wish everyone a happy holiday season 🎄🎄🎄🤶🎅📯🥁🎸🎙🎁🎁🎁

November 2017 Kickoff Lecture - Vampire Burials

Our kickoff lecture for this season's Winter Lecture Series was on November 14th at the Van Schaick Island Country Club. It's topic followed the Halloween mood with its focus on mortuary archaeology titled "Vampire Burials".

Presented by the museum's director, there was - of course - an issue with the microphone. Not sure what jinx I have regarding microphones, but this was the third talk I've given where I had to improvise. Our vice president picking it up at the end of the talk to poke around with it, only to have it work fine was just another clue that I may be jinxed...sigh....



But I want to thank everyone who came out to join us for the kickoff! You were great despite my technical difficulties.

Exploring some of the history and features of the vampire creature in various European cultures and mythologies, we focused on examples of deviant burials in the archaeological record that were strange enough to warrant the interpretation by the excavating archaeologists as having possibly belonged to individuals who were thought to be in danger of - or were already - these undead figures.

What is mortuary archaeology? As you can probably guess from the name, it's archaeology that focuses on the mortuary aspects of a culture, left behind in things like graves/tombs, funerary artifacts, and of course, the body itself. Studying how a society handled the treatment of their dead can tell you a lot about their culture.

But, as was stressed in the lecture, archaeology is an interpretation of findings. Yes, a lot of it has strong evidence to support it and forensic anthropology is a key feature in creating these interpretations of the past. But, then you have items where even the standard "it's ceremonial" is tossed out when archaeologists are left shrugging a bit.

There are a plethora of features associated with vampires and an accompanying variety of methods to deal with them. The majority of examples looked at in this lecture were from the early modern period (~1450 - 1690), but there are cases that suggest even ancient sites like the Iron Age example from Italy were on the lookout for potential vampires.

We looked at examples of these burials spanning from the British Isles, Scandinavian countries, eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and into America in the mid-1800s during an outbreak of consumption (aka tuberculosis).

An example from Poland of a "vampire burial"

Scandinavian examples from folklore include creatures like this image -
       although the features and definition of this particular "vampire" changed
                                       over time to be more of a drowned vengeance-seeking creature preying on the living rather than the typical blood-drinking image most commonly associated with the figure of the vampire

We couldn't not explore anything from the place everyone thinks of when you hear the word
vampire. Romania is one of the few places where the vampire is so closely linked to what outsiders view of their culture that I had to look to see if there were any other potential cases of people having been treated for vampirism post-mortem. You can click on this link from the PBS series, Secrets of the Dead where they document a case from 2004.

And so, in some places, the vampire hunt continues!

Just keep this in mind in case you find yourself in a situation with such a creature:

76th Anniversary of the Attack on Pearl Harbor

Today marks the anniversary of the event that acted as the trigger for the United States officially entering into World War II. The attack on the U.S. naval base on what was then still the U.S. territory of Hawaii by the Imperial Japanese spurred many into enlisting in the war.

You can learn more at this site

The attack lasted 110 minutes, from 7:55 a.m. until 9:45 a.m., as Japanese planes attacked on a Sunday in the belief that the Americans would be less alert on this day - many were still in their pajamas in the mess hall when the attack began. The United States aircraft carriers were the primary target of the attack, but the Japanese had their timing off and those carriers weren't at the base; due to this, the Japanese cancelled a second planned attack. Midget submarines were also used by the Japanese in this attack.

2,343 men were killed, 1,272 were wounded and 960 left missing.  A total of 2,335 U.S. servicemen were killed and 1,143 were wounded. 68 civilians were also killed and 35 were wounded. The Japanese also suffered casualties that day, although nowhere close in comparison: 65 men, with an additional soldier being captured - 28 Japanese planes were shot down and 5 midget submarines sunk.                                                                                                

Here's a video of the reporting that was put together last year for the 75th Anniversary that you can find on YouTube:

                                                 

The next day, on December 8, 1941,  the country declared war on the Empire of Japan.  Shortly afterward, Nazi Germany, and its ally Italy, followed with a declaration of war against the United States for what it felt was a breach of neutrality agreements by the U.S. given the increasing cooperation by the U.S. with the United Kingdom through the countries' special relationship.  The United States responded with their own declaration of war on December 11, 1941.

As the famous Infamy speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt conveys, this surprise attack left a lasting impression in the national psyche and contributed to the overwhelming sense of patriotism that was carried through the war by the country.

Here's an image of the WWII draft in Waterford, NY, taken July 22, 1942.

Members are listed on the back of the photo as:   Wally Rudebush, Jas A. Glavin,  Joe Hartnett,  Jack Harney, Molly Storm, Dr. Peckham, and Gordon Yaxley