HistoryForge Brings Community Members Together

WICB Ithaca Now - March 3rd 2024 - by Caroline Grass

A conversation with Eve Snyder, director of the HistoryForge project, and volunteers from the Tompkins HistoryForge Transcription Sessions about the experiences of building the Tompkins HistoryForge platform.

Telling different stories about Tompkins County sports

ICTV - February 2024 - by Alliey Magistro

A conversation with Zoë Van Nostrand History Center Marketing & Community Engagement manager about the new exhibit 'A Sporting Chance: On and Off the Field' which opened in The History Center Exhibit Hall in February 2024. Learn more about the exhibit at thehistorycenter.net/sporting-chance. Visit W-Saturday 10am-6pm, on display February-December 2024.

Video Link

What's Hot Ithaca & Cortland - A Sporting Chance Exhibit

What's Hot Ithaca & Cortland - March 2024 -

New exhibit celebrates untold local sports history, from pucks to rutabagas

Ithaca Voice - February 12th 2024 - by Matt Butler

Interview with History Center staff Zoë Van Nostrand discussing the current exhibit A Sporting Chance: On and Off the Field - "“[The college sports] have their own recognition for what they bring and the power of their athletes,” Van Nostrand said. “We aren’t telling the story of Cornell. We are telling the story of the community, and we’re trying to bring in pieces that make the community feel connected to here.” "

Ithaca Voice Article

Making Sports History: New History Center Exhibit Salutes Sports

Ithaca Times - February 14th 2018 - by Steve Lawrence

Interview with History Center staff Zoë Van Nostrand discussing the current exhibit A Sporting Chance: On and Off the Field - "One of the first areas I perused – highlighting the International Rutabaga Curling Championships - had special meaning to me.  I covered the first event in 1997, and to thank me for that initial publicity, Steve Sierigik - the High Commissioner of the International Rutabaga Curling Championship - asked me to emcee the 10th anniversary of the curl, which is still going strong.  The History Center exhibit features a replica of the curling venue, a board featuring all the winners over the years, and while one cannot roll an actual rutabaga, the experience is adequately duplicated."

Ithaca Times Article

WRFI Human Rights Show interview with Zoë Van Nostrand 

March 2023 - by Ute Ritz-Deutch

Interview with History Center staff Zoë Van Nostrand discussing the current exhibit Knot Sew Fast: Patchwork of Tompkins County - the under-recognition of textile crafts and the lives of the female crafters behind them; and a broader exploration of women's history, stories, and collections held in the The History Center archives.

Interview with Archivist Donna Eschenbrenner

March 2023 - by Samuel MacQueen

Interview with archivist Donna Eschenbrenner by graduate student Samuel MacQueen as part of their MLIS program at Simmons University. Recorded March 2023. Donna discusses her work as The History Center archivist from the 2000's to the 2020's and the operations of running a local archive.

2022 Best of Ithaca Awards: Keeper of Local Knowledge

Ithaca Times - October 5th 2022 - by Mark Levine

"Zoë Van Nostrand, the organization’s Marketing & Visitor Experience Coordinator, hopes the award encourages more people to visit the museum on the Commons and engage with the archives and research library. “Our staff sometimes joke that we are the ‘attic for the community’ where everyone’s memories and materials come to be stored for future generations.” The History Center is working on expanding the online HistoryForge project and coming up with new ways to provide access to all that interesting stuff stored in Ithaca’s attic."

Ithaca Times Article     

The Faces Behind the Numbers

The Ithaca Voice - September 30th 2022 - by Madeline Maxwell

"“We were interested in highlighting the difficulties the census has had in recognizing and categorizing diversity and cultural ethnicity and origin,” said Van Nostrand.
The team then turned to their archival collections, pulling out artifacts and information to be featured in the exhibit. Each display tells a human story about the census, highlighting that there is more to an individual than a name and occupation recorded on paper."

IthacaWeek Article    

Between the Lines: History Center in TC - Ben Sandberg

ESPN Ithaca - June 23rd 2022 - Nick Karski

History Center exhibit this week amplifies survivor stories through art and activism

The Ithaca Voice - June 23rd 2022 - by Eva Salzman

"In addition to the Clothesline Project, the exhibit features artifacts from Tompkins County since the 1970s that document the history of victim and survivor support and prevention efforts in the area. What is now known as The Advocacy Center began as the Task Force for Battered Women in 1977 to support survivors of domestic abuse."

Ithaca Voice Article     Unfolding 

Students Honored for Local Community Impact

Cornell Chronicle - May 10th 2022

"Claire Deng ’22 (A&S) was nominated by her supervisor at the History Center, Zoë Van Nostrand. While working at the center, Deng collaborated with the Ithaca Asian American Association in research on early Asian residents of Tompkins County, in an effort to challenge the local myth that the community’s Asian population and history is limited to more recent student attendance on campus."

Cornell Chronicle Article       Award Ceremony Recording

reCOUNT: Facing our Census - Exhibit Opening

What's Hot CNY - Ithaca & Cortland - May 2022

"reCOUNT offers a new way to engage with the census. Instead of an overwhelming set of numbers and data aligned in tables and charts, the exhibit builds human connections to the people behind the statistics. The interplay of historical narratives from historian Eve Snyder, and exhibit design by Cindy Kjellander-Cantu, asks us to reflect critically and interactively on "WHO counts" and who does the counting. Audiences can explore the growth of Finnish, Hungarian, Syrian, and Chinese communities in Ithaca, or discover some of the local enumerators who did the counting and shaped our communities. Younger audiences will enjoy the opportunity to trace a colorful path through the museum, add their own pictures and comments on our chalkboard columns, or learn with the Exhibit Hall scavenger hunt. The reCOUNT exhibit successfully packages the complexities of the census for audiences of all ages, and mixes important and critical questions with light hearted local history excerpts."

Grab a free print copy anywhere in town or read online here.

The History Center's Inaugural CHAT Puts Deaf History into Focus

IthacaWeek - 4/19/2022 - by Jay Bradley

"For me, it was an absolute honor,” Kopa said about the experience. “For someone who is hard of hearing, I’ve noticed going into this, I really don’t know too much about, I guess you’d say my history[…]. It’s really a history that hasn’t been taught or told, and so by doing this, having an opportunity to give that history a voice again and bring it back to the forefront, that’s definitely something I’ve taken extremely seriously and have felt, you know, extreme honor and I hope that by doing this I can do the community right by it.”

Ithaca Week Article

Ithaca's Lost Connection to it's Ukrainian Sister City of Komsomolsk

The Ithaca Voice - 3/25/2022 - by Matt Butler 

"That relationship appears to have peaked in the 1990s under then-Mayor Alan Cohen, who started and maintained a relationship with Komsomolsk, Ukraine, that extended over several years during his administration from 1996–2002 and included seven in-person trips. Cohen’s trips to the city, a lakeside municipality which had a population of about 55,000 at the time and is now known as Horishni Plavni, would last about two weeks at a time and were packed with activity."

Ithaca Voice Article

WRFI Human Rights Radio Show with Zoë Van Nostrand for Women's History Month

WRFI Human Rights Radio Show - 3/4/2022 - interviewed by Ute Ritz-Deutch

Mainstream LGBT History Diminishes Underground Moments

2/17/2022 - by Mack Rovenolt

"While Ithaca has been important to the progression of the fight for LGBT rights in the United States, it also serves as a case study for the events and moments that mainstream, and LGBT, history have forgotten or deemed “smaller” than the moments that permeate popular culture. My question going forward is what do we do, as a community, to change the way LGBT history is taught and discussed so that it includes the “little” moments and not just the socially acceptable ones?"

Blog        IthacaWeek Article

Digital History Review: HistoryForge

New York History Journal - Winter 2021-2022 - by Maeve Kane

"HistoryForge is a model local history project, with vast potential as a public history research resource, teaching tool, and open source platform for use by other local history projects...HistoryForge is an exciting addition to the New York history landscape, both as a microhistory project providing a detailed window into early twentieth century upstate history, and as a potential platform for other projects broadly."

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