Heritage Moments

Rick James belongs to the world: the hit funk anthems, infectious grooves, lyrics celebrating sex and drugs, wildly entertaining videos and stage act,…

On Oct. 5, 1960, an enormous explosion and fire broke out in the Maple Leaf Mills grain elevator, the largest in Canada, at the entrance to the Welland…

When we hear about the founding of Buffalo, we usually hear about Joseph "Black Joe" Hodge, Cornelius Winney, Captain William Johnston, Martin Middaugh or Ezekiel Lane---all fascinating men who settled here in the late 1780s or early 1790s. But they were all settlers or “Indian traders”---i.e., non-Indigenous merchants living among the Senecas already inhabiting the banks of Buffalo Creek.

Niagara Falls in the 1800s was an industrialist’s dreamland and a huckster’s paradise. Cheap waterpower abounded — all you had to do was build a channel…

The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 is one of the most disturbing episodes in the history of New York State and, indeed, the nation as a whole. It lasted…

Buffalo has produced a number of prominent poets. But when Langston Hughes chose the work of Lucille Clifton, a then little-known poet from the East Side, for inclusion in his influential 1970 anthology “The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1970”, it kicked off Clifton’s long career as one of America’s most beloved bards.

The first atomic bombs exploded more than 80 years ago, and their destructive impact has been receding from the world’s collective memory for decades now. But not in Niagara County, where the aftereffects of building the first atomic bomb still fester today. It all began with the Manhattan Project, the massive, top-secret World War II effort to beat the Germans, and later the Russians, in the race to create the first atomic weapons.

The first bridge across the Niagara River was begun by a boy who won five dollars in 1847 by coaxing a kite he flew on the Canadian side of the gorge to land on the American side.

The sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in the early morning hours of July 30, 1945, is the worst disaster to befall a single ship in the history of the US Navy. One of the men in the water was Father Thomas Conway. But his compassion and bravery during those last, nightmarish nights and days stand as a testament to the human spirit in the midst of absolute horror.

When John Lewis, the last of the great figures of the Civil Rights era, died at age 80 in 2020, Americans reflected with near-universal admiration on a life well lived. And, thanks to Lewis himself, they knew of the pivotal role that Buffalo played in molding this national icon.