long island for a year

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.   Albert Einstein      Einstein must have been really besorgt when he said that.   Certainly, back in 1939, he was preoccupied with the situation in Europe, where - he knew - Germans were working on a new lethal device, the atomic bomb. In Cutchogue he wrote letters to the President Roosevelt who, taking Einstein's words seriously, decided to launch what is known as the Manhattan Project *. What was Einstein doing in Cutchogue though? He was on vacation, sailing on the Tinef; but he was a sailor who couldn't swim. You might read more in this article about Einstein in Cutchogue.       *I don't need to explain more about the Manhattan Project, but  today  (August 9th) I want to give a personal contribution: I have been to many places related to WWII: Hiroshima, some concentration camps in Europe, the lab (and now Muse...

The Old House in the Village Green After the little disappointment for not being able to see with my eyes  what's left of Fort Corchaug - now property of the Peconic Land Trust - I moved to the other historic spot of Cutchogue, where the English house stands. This house was built in Southold in 1640 - and is therefore the oldest English style house in the State of New York - to be moved to Cutchogue in 1660. I have written in a previous post about my fascination for the history of some of the villages in the North Fork.  Not only am I a big lover of things east, here in the little village of Cutchogue I found an incredible concentration of what is the history of Long Island, of the US but also a  little piece of world history: starting with the American Indians, to proceed with the English settlers, other immigrants from Eastern European countries, Italians...and one well known scientist who had - it seems we are never able to learn from our past! - to leave the Ol...

After writing a post about the beaches , I knew there was a part of me that wasn't completely satisfied. Truth is that I am a very curious person and my first time in Cutchogue was NOT driven by the search for a nice beach. That just happened. In fact, what I was looking for were the rests of an old ruin, namely that of Fort Corchaug: the gathering place for the Corchaug, one of the Algonquian tribes, which lived on Long Island before the English settlers set foot in the East End (in the mid 17th Century) and which was decimated either by weapons or disease. Even though I am not an expert, I find Native American history very fascinating. Sure it has been a succession of genocide and killings in the past. And in the present it is characterized by a difficult struggle in order to keep alive minorities with their traditions and laws, without creating a group of individuals isolated from a society that - in turn - doesn't recognize nor respect these traditions and ...