Follow the River Lecture and Film Series
Upcoming Events
Ticket Information: $10 (General Public); $5 for HRMM Members
Location: Lectures are hosted at the Wooden Boat School on the Hudson River Maritime Museum's campus unless stated otherwise.
For more than a decade the Hudson River Maritime Museum's "Follow the River Lecture Series" has hosted historians, authors, and maritime experts covering a variety of subjects ranging from regional and maritime history to ecology and art inspired by the river. Past lectures that were able to be recorded are available to view on the museum's YouTube channel. Click here to view.
For more information about upcoming lectures, please see the descriptions below or click on the event image to be taken to the event information and registration page.
If you are interested in participating in our lecture series as a guest speaker, please contact the Museum's Education Department or call 845-338-0071 ext. 16.
For more information about upcoming lectures, please see the descriptions below or click on the event image to be taken to the event information and registration page.
If you are interested in participating in our lecture series as a guest speaker, please contact the Museum's Education Department or call 845-338-0071 ext. 16.
2025 Lecture Lineup
MAY
Still Standing: The Friends of Historic Kingston and the Local Preservation Movement
with Dean Engle
Wednesday, May 21st, 2025
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Join us for a presentation with Friends of Historic Kingston to learn more about the organization’s history and the legacy of our city’s preservation activists. The group’s decades of advocacy include purchasing and reselling several threatened buildings including 95 John Street (the Luke Kiersted House) and 292 Clinton Avenue (the Amelia Westbrook House). Our members were instrumental in saving Kingston City Hall and sponsoring the city’s historic districts: Clinton Avenue Historic District (1969), Kingston Stockade Historic District (1974), Rondout-West Strand Historic District (1978), and Chestnut Street Historic District (1984).
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Join us for a presentation with Friends of Historic Kingston to learn more about the organization’s history and the legacy of our city’s preservation activists. The group’s decades of advocacy include purchasing and reselling several threatened buildings including 95 John Street (the Luke Kiersted House) and 292 Clinton Avenue (the Amelia Westbrook House). Our members were instrumental in saving Kingston City Hall and sponsoring the city’s historic districts: Clinton Avenue Historic District (1969), Kingston Stockade Historic District (1974), Rondout-West Strand Historic District (1978), and Chestnut Street Historic District (1984).
Guest Speaker
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Dean Engle is the assistant director of The Friends of Historic Kingston. The Friends of Historic Kingston is a volunteer membership organization founded in 1965 to support the preservation of our community’s historic and architecturally significant places. FHK fulfills this mission through guided walking tours, educational programming, preservation advocacy, and annual exhibits. |
JUNE
Poetry of the Hudson
with Paul Kane
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Wednesday, June 4th, 2025
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM The Hudson is a storied river, celebrated in both prose and poetry, as well as in myths and legends handed down over generations. This illustrated talk focuses on poems about the Hudson but also considers the notion that there is something poetic about the river itself, the way it fascinates with its beauty, variety and constant presence in the valleys it has formed over aeons. In our exploration, we journey through time as well as along the shores of the river, from the Adirondacks to the broad bay of New York, looking at work from early American poets up to contemporary ones, traveling in our minds and imaginations, as we too celebrate the poetry of the Hudson. |
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Guest Speaker
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Paul Kane has published, as author or editor, twenty books and many essays, reviews and poems in literary and scholarly periodicals. His work includes eight collections of poems and a collaboration with the photographer William Clift: A Hudson Landscape. He has taught at Yale University, Monash University (Australia), the University of Bologna (Italy), and Vassar College, where he was Professor of English and Environmental Studies. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Bogliasco Foundation, and in 2022 he was awarded The Order of Australia.
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ONLINE LECTURE: The Slave Ship Gideon: A History of the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Slave Trade
with Andrea Mosterman
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2025
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM This lecture will take place via zoom. Click here to register. In August of 1664, the Dutch slave ship the Gideon arrived in New Amsterdam’s harbor with 290 enslaved Africans on board. These men and women were meant for the WIC colony of New Netherland and Amsterdam’s city colony of New Amstel, in what is now Delaware. Yet, the Gideon arrived in New Amsterdam at a fateful time: four English warships arrived in the harbor within weeks of the ship’s arrival, which would result in the English takeover of the region. In this presentation, I will explore the Gideon’s voyage, the experiences of the people forced on board, and what its voyage reveals about the seventeenth-century slave trade with New Netherland. |
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Guest Speaker
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Andrea Mosterman is a Professor in Early American History as well as Maritime and World History at the University of New Orleans. She studies slavery and the slave trade in the Dutch Atlantic world and in early New York. Over the years, her work has been published in various academic and public-facing publications. Her book Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (Cornell University Press, 2021), which won the 2020 NNI Hendricks Award, uses spatial analysis to examine enslavement and resistance in New York’s Dutch communities. She currently researches the voyage of the Dutch slave ship the Gideon and the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic slave trade with North America.
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JULY
A Freeman on the River: The Life, Work, and Journal of
James F. Brown
with Harv Hilowitz
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Wednesday, July 9th, 2025
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM A fugitive enslaved man from Maryland, James F. Brown made his way to New York and worked for the renowned Verplanck family in Beacon for nearly forty years. He started as a waiter, then a coachman, a ferryman on the Hudson, and then master gardener and property manager for the family. From 1829 to 1866, he kept a unique journal of daily life on the Hudson. Mr. Brown’s prime goal was full citizenship and gaining the right to vote, a highly restricted privilege for Black men at the time. Harv Hilowitz will tell the true story of Mr. Brown’s quest to vote in New York, including observations from Brown’s journal about working and living along the Hudson. |
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Guest Speaker
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Harv Hilowitz is a Contributing Scholar to the Hudson River Maritime Museum, as well as a researcher and docent at Mount Gulian Historic Site. Be sure to check out Harv’s lectures regarding the daily life of the Lenape people on the Manhicannituck on the Museum’s solar powered boat and floating classroom Solaris. |
Understanding New York’s Enslaving Past Through Intertwined Families
with Debra Bruno
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2025
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM When Debra Bruno was growing up in New York’s Hudson Valley, she had no idea that the state had once been a slave society. And when she discovered that her Dutch ancestors had been some of the fiercest advocates of holding onto slavery for as long as they could, she knew she had to learn more. Her connection and friendship with Eleanor Mire, who descends from people her family enslaved, further enriched the story, which she first described in a 2020 Washington Post Magazine article. Her book, A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family, is a combination of memoir, history, and many unanswered and unanswerable questions. The lecture will describe her discoveries, with special attention to the Black boatmen like Thomas Vanderzee. |
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Guest Speaker
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Debra Bruno is a longtime Washington journalist and teacher, with a career that has covered law, politics, the arts, music, dance, theater, books, culture, health, and international issues. She has worked at Moment Magazine, Legal Times, and Roll Call. A historian friend told her that if she had ancestors in New York’s Hudson Valley, especially if they were Dutch, they were likely enslavers. She was right. She hadn’t known about New York’s 200 years of enslavement and was stunned to realize that her small hometown of Athens held so many hidden stories. That story first appeared as a 2020 article in the Washington Post Magazine, and now a book. A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in my Dutch American Family, published by Cornell’s Three Hills imprint on Oct. 15.
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AUGUST
Familiar Faces, Forgotten
with Sara Russell
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Wednesday, August 13th, 2025
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM Mary Powell was a beloved day steamboat who cruised the Hudson between 1861 and 1917. HRMM holds many historic photographs of Mary Powell and the dozens, if not hundreds, of crew members who made her journeys possible. These photographs live in HRMM’s archive and on the walls of the museum. Their faces have gazed back at us for years, but who are they? Many faces remain unidentified. This lecture focuses on one particular 1908 photograph of Mary Powell crew members that currently hangs in the Mary Powell hallway at HRMM. A search for their identities using genealogical research methodology was undertaken and successfully identified multiple individuals. Join to learn about their lives, before and after Mary Powell, and how their lives were tied - in more ways than one - to the Hudson River. Tips on how to identify unknown individuals in photographs you may have in your attic will also be discussed. |
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Guest Speaker
Sara Russell is a Museum Educator at HRMM. New to the Hudson Valley, Sara previously worked as a history-focused Museum Educator in NYC. She is also a Genealogist who has been researching her own family tree and the trees of many others for the last 10 years. It was her love for genealogical research that inspired a pivot from a career in community health to public history. She is currently participating in ProGen, a rigorous, yearlong study group for professional genealogists, and is also a Case Administrator with the volunteer research group Unclaimed Persons, identifying next-of-kin for unclaimed, deceased persons in the care of coroners offices across the country.
SEPTEMBER
Hudson River Ecology
with Dr. Stuart Findlay
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September 24th, 2025
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM Both natural phenomena and human activities are putting stress on the Hudson River, which could impact its ability to stay resilient and meet our needs. Aquatic ecologist, Dr. Stuart Findlay reviews some of these pressures and how climate change, alongside the historical and ongoing human interactions, has negatively impacted the ecology of the river, creating a tangled web of competing interests and sometimes even contradictory solutions. Showcasing examples from his decades of research and monitoring, Findlay will discuss suitable solutions that balance ecological health with human needs to protect and restore the Hudson River. |
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Guest Speaker
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Dr. Stuart Findlay has worked on the Hudson River for over 30 years. His research on sensitive wetlands, shoreline restoration, and environmental monitoring is helping to guide the river’s recovery. Findlay works closely with the Hudson River Environmental Conditions Observing System (HRECOS) and directed the installation of a monitoring station that continually records the river’s salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH, turbidity, and water elevation. He has been an advisor to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for more than 25 years and works with several other private, state, and federal organizations. |
Past Events
With permission from our speakers we were able to film some of our lectures, so you can catch up on ones you missed! Due to restrictions, not all lectures may be available on video or in full. Watch via our Lecture Series playlist on YouTube or simply click on the graphics below to be taken to recordings of recent lectures.
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A Year in the Life of an Orchard
Kevin Clark, lead orchardist at Rose Hill Farm |
Vertical Divider
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Finding Joy in Color and Peace in Nature: Becoming a Coast Guard Artist with Fred Feiler
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Geology and History of the Rosendale Natural Cement Industry
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Ladies of the Valley |
Brick & Brick Ruins of Hudson Valley |
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Author Mary Mistler leads a talk on her novel 'Ladies of the Valley" Women of the Hudson Valley's Great Estates' highlighting several of these women and and offering insights and anecdotes from their lives, which largely reflect women’s changing roles over centuries.
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Thomas Rinaldi and Robert Yasinsac’s talk about brickyard ruins as well as notable ruins constructed from local bricks.
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The Land Doesn't Forget |
Manhattan Phoenix |
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All the land that makes up the United States was in its entirety Indigenous land. Learn about the policies used to remove Indigenous Nations from their homes and pushed them onto reservations. Heather Bruegl explains why the fight to regain this land is important.
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Based on his book, "Manhattan Phoenix: The Great Fire of 1835 and the Emergence of Modern New York", author Daniel S. Levy describes in detail the Great Fire of 1835 —which destroyed nearly 700 buildings in lower Manhattan—and the forces that transformed New York from a large unruly metropolis during the early years of the 19th century.
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Seasons of Life |
Marginalized Workers on the D&H Canal |
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Frank Beres, an aquatic ecologist and naturalist based out of Port Ewen, New York, examines the phenology of biodiversity as he travels through a year in our local area of the Hudson River watershed.
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The construction of the 108-mile-long Delaware and Hudson (D&H) Canal required about 5000 laborers working in hard and dangerous conditions. D&H Historian and Bill Merchant gives a presentation about the lives and experiences of the diverse group of people who worked on the Canal.
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