Meet Angela E. Douglas, the biologist and author of Near the Forest, By the Lake, a collection of essays about the natural world, and the wonders of life in her little corner of Upstate New York. I am fortunate to live close to a natural world dominated by forests and woodlands, and by lakes and ponds. Being a writerly sort... Read more »

Kelly Hopkins is an Assistant Professor of early American history at the University of Houston. Her book, Iroquoia: Haudenosaunee Life and Culture, 1630-1783 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2025), highlights the innovative strategies of Haudenosaunee men and women to retain their culture, sovereignty, and control of their homelands through more than seven generations of unprecedented social and environmental change that followed... Read more »

  Join the Ballston Spa Committee on the Arts and SCHC at Brookside Museum for the Random Acts of Poetry Performance Reading. Jay Rogoff has published seven books of poetry, most recently Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems, from LSU Press. His essay collection, Becoming Poetry: Poets and Their Methods, also from LSU, won the Lewis P. Simpson Award... Read more »

For decades, the forests of Eastern North America have faced pathogen and insect pests that have functionally removed tree species from the landscape. This talk will discuss the ecological roles that trees play, the biology of the threats faced, and the approaches that may remediate the problems. Scott Meiners is a Plant Ecologist with a primary research focus on plant... Read more »

From sea serpents to seaweed, slimy things have long tended to lurk among the frontiers of natural knowledge, reflecting not only the anxieties of each age but also, in many cases, new possibilities. At once generative and destructive, mysterious and manifest, and masculine but sometimes feminine, slime flowed through oceanic understanding and welcomed new people to contribute to it, thereby... Read more »

Historian and author Sandra Weber presents a compelling talk about her newest book, John Brown in New York: The Man, His Family, and the Adirondack Landscape. Weber offers a fresh and intimate look at the famed abolitionist, focusing on the years of the Brown family’s connection with North Elba, Essex County (1848–1863). The intertwining story of sublime Adirondack scenery, farm... Read more »

Isaac Murphy won three Kentucky Derbys and every other major American stakes race of the nineteenth century. He was among the jockeys inducted into the National Museum of Racing's Hall of Fame in its inaugural class. He was also born enslaved in 1861, the son of a Civil War widow, and he lived through the violent conflicts of Reconstruction to... Read more »

Celebrate the opening of our new temporary exhibition at Saratoga County History Center   Saratoga County History Center at Brookside Museum invites you to celebrate the opening of our new exhibition, Luther Forest: A Family, A Woodland, focusing on the history and evolutions of the private forest in Malta and Stillwater. Come and enjoy light bites and sparkling water and... Read more »