When you think of amusement parks, you think of Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York.  Discovered in 1609 by Dutch explorer Henry Hudson, Coney Island eventually became an amusement resort at the beach.  During the 1870s and 1880s, several luxury hotels were built there and a railroad was extended to the resort.  Coney Island was described as “Heaven at the end of a subway ride.”  Coney Island was home to Sea Lion Park, the first enclosed amusement park, which opened in 1895.  There was Steeplechase Park, Luna Park and Dreamland.  In addition, a person or group of persons would lease space for single attractions.  Coney Island was described as the “Poor Man’s Paradise.”  It also became the “Nickel Empire”, where for a nickel, you could get a hot dog or a knish (deep-fried baked potato cake), or ride on any of the thrilling amusements.  Read more and see graphics at http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/coney_island.html

Today, Coney Island is a stretch of land approximately half a mile wide and five miles long that lies at the southernmost end of Brooklyn.  When the Dutch first arrived, however, Coney Island's geography was quite different.  Three ocean inlets separated the area that today comprises Coney Island into several loosely-connected islands consisting only of sand dunes and marshes.  By the early 1800s, powerful ocean cuurents had shifted enough sand into these inlets to make them shallow enough for residents to fill in completely.  During the 1900s, landfill was used to fill in various other creeks, giving present-day Coney Island its current form.  The original "Conyne Eylandt" (also written "Conijnen Eylandt") was an actual island.  The island was filled with rabbits and so the Dutch named it "Conyne Eylandt" meaning "Rabbit Island" in old Dutch.  When the Dutch ceded New Amsterdam to the English in exchange for some lands in the West Indies in 1667, the English adapted the name to "Coney Island."  http://www.heartofconeyisland.com/early-coney-island-history.html

Fire Island is a barrier island located off the south shore of Long Island in New York.  It measures approximately 30 miles, from Fire Island Inlet to the west and Moriches Inlet to the east.  It is 1/2 mile wide at its widest point.  Perhaps the most interesting history surrounding Fire Island is that which has to do with the origin of its name.  “ Fire Island” was first used on a deed belonging to Henry Smith dated September 15, 1789.  There are many theories surrounding the origin of the name but no definite answer.  Here are several theories for you to mull over:  1.  One possibility is that “Fire” comes from a misreading of “Five” on early maps.  In 1688 there were five islands in the bay, although over the years these islands have varied in number and shape.  2.  According to Madeleine C. Johnson in her book Fire Island: 1650’s-1980’s, “Some scholars believe that a misspelling of the Dutch word ‘vier,’ meaning four, as ‘fier’ was corrupted to ‘fire.’”  3.  Some believe that actual fires led to the name.  During its history, Fire Island was home to fires built by Native Americans, whaling crews, and fishing crews to signal the mainland for supplies, to guide colleagues into the bay, and to light their camps.  The largest fires of all were built by whalers who would “try out” their catches (through this process they would boil down blubber into whale oil).  Fires were also built by “wreckers” in an attempt to lure unsuspecting ships to shore, where they would crash and could later be plundered.  4.  The final theory is that Native Americans awarded the island its name as a reference to the burning rash that they developed after coming in contact with poison ivy.  http://www.villageofoceanbeach.org/obhist02.htm

David Berry, whose play The Whales Of August, about two elderly sisters living on the coast of Maine became a 1987 film vehicle for Lillian Gish and Bette Davis, died December 16, 2016 at his home in Brooklyn.  He was 73.  Berry, a Vietnam War veteran, also was the author of G.R. Point, a somber drama about soldiers working at a graves registration center in the war zone, where they placed the remains of dead combatants in body bags for return home.  The short-lived 1979 Broadway production starred Michael Moriarty and Howard Rollins Jr., and was staged by William Devane.  Both works were inspired by scenes from Berry’s own life.  The Whales Of August recalled his time as a boy spending summers with two aunts who lived together in a coastal cottage.  The play was developed at resident theaters in Baltimore and Providence, Rhode Island, and at the off-Broadway WPA Theater.  The film, for which Berry wrote the screenplay, was directed by Lindsay Anderson and also featured Vincent Price and Ann Sothern.  It would be Gish’s last film.  “With its two beautiful, very different, very characteristic performances by Miss Gish and Miss Davis, who, together, exemplify American films from 1914 to the present, Lindsay Anderson’s Whales of August is a cinema event, though small in scale and commonplace in detail,” wrote Vincent Canby in his New York Times review of the film.  Jeremy Gerard  http://deadline.com/2016/12/david-berry-whales-of-august-author-dies-at-73-1201875381/

The Library of Congress has put the papers of Alexander Hamilton online for the first time in their original format.  The Library holds the world’s largest collection of Hamilton papers—approximately 12,000 items concentrated from 1777 until Hamilton’s death in 1804, including letters, legal papers and drafts of speeches and writings, among other items.  Now, for the first time, these original documents—many in Hamilton’s own hand—will be available for researchers, students or the generally curious anywhere in the world to explore, zoom in and read at loc.gov/collections/alexander-hamilton-papers/.  In addition, the Library recently acquired 55 items, previously privately held—mostly letters from Hamilton’s powerful father-in-law, General Philip Schuyler, to him and his wife—that have also been digitized and made available for the first time.  Most of these have never been published.  Congress appropriated $20,000 in 1848 to buy the papers of Alexander Hamilton from his family, including his widow, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton.  The papers were originally housed at the U.S. Department of State and came to the Library in 1904, along with all the department’s historical papers, at the direction of President Theodore Roosevelt.  The Library supplemented the collection over time with additional gifts and purchases.  The papers cover almost every aspect of Hamilton’s career and private life: growing up in St. Croix, as George Washington’s aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War, New York delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the first U.S. treasury secretary, New York lawyer, and more.  The papers also include correspondence with and among members of his family, including his wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, his sister-in-law Angelica Schuyler Church, and his father-in-law Philip Schuyler.  The Hamilton Papers are among collections newly available online during 2017.  Others include the papers of U.S. Presidents Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and William Henry Harrison; the papers of Sigmund Freud; a collection of more than 4,600 newspapers from Japanese-American internment camps; a collection of web-based comic books; and 25,000 fire insurance maps from communities across America, the first installment of 500,000 that will be accessible online.  The Library of Congress is the world's largest library.  https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-17-119/alexander-hamilton-papers-now-online/2017-08-28/

Why doesn’t everyone love reading e-books? by Caroline Myrberg   Why do many students still prefer paper books to e-books?  This article summarizes a number of problems with e-books mentioned in different studies by students of higher education, but it also discusses some of the unexploited possibilities with e-books.  Read article at https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.386/

Anyone who views college as an inoculation against fake news will find a new study from the Stanford History Education Group pretty disheartening.  The study, by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew, builds on the group’s previous work, which found that students in middle school, high school, and college were “easily duped” online.  The new study tested three kinds of “experts”:  historians, professional fact-checkers, and Stanford undergraduates.  The fact-checkers performed well, but the students and the historians “often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as official-looking logos and domain names,” the report says.  One test required the experts to evaluate information about bullying from two websites, those of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has 64,000 members and publishes the field’s main journal, and of the American College of Pediatricians, a much smaller organization that has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its positions on LGBTQ rights.  All of the fact-checkers determined—correctly—that the American Academy of Pediatrics was the more reliable source.  But only half of the historians and 20 percent of the students did, with the rest finding the American College of Pediatricians more reliable, or the two groups equally so.  Why did the fact-checkers prevail where students at a top college and historians—who, as the report notes, “evaluate sources for a living—stumbled?  They read differently.  The students and historians tended to read “vertically,” the report notes, delving deeply into a website in their efforts to determine its credibility.  That, the researchers point out, is more or less the approach laid out in many checklists designed to help students use the internet well, which tend to suggest looking at particular features of a website to evaluate its trustworthiness.  The fact checkers, in contrast, read “laterally,” turning to sources beyond the website in question—and not treating them all as being equally reliable, either.  They succeeded, the report says, “not because they followed the advice we give to students.  They succeeded because they didn’t.”  The researchers add that the fact checkers brought skepticism to their task—including skepticism of their own knowledge.  Perhaps, then, what students need to navigate the internet successfully is an orientation, not a checklist.  One place that orientation might be cultivated:  freshman composition courses.  Read more at http://www.chronicle.com/article/One-Way-to-Fight-Fake-News/241726

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1801  November 20, 2017  on this date in 1789, New Jersey became the first U.S. state to ratify the Bill of Rights.  On this date in 1805, Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio, premiered in Vienna.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_20