Long Island history, close enough to visit.
The Long Island History Project treats local history as something close enough to visit, question, and preserve. Chris Kretz speaks with guests about the people and places that shaped Long Island.
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The Long Island History Project is a regional history show built around interviews, records, and the stubborn specificity of place. Chris Kretz presents Long Island as more than a backdrop. It becomes a battlefield, a library system, a school district, a shoreline, a political edge, and sometimes a cold case. The conversations are relaxed but document-minded, moving easily from a passing anecdote to a map, a case file, a grant, or a preserved building. Revolutionary history appears often, especially around 1776 and the long occupation that followed the Battle of Long Island. Those episodes look past patriotic shorthand. They make room for military routes, British strategy, loyalist punishment, women holding communities together, and enslaved Black people whose labor is too often omitted from classroom versions of the period. The show also has a strong preservation streak. A Carnegie library in Patchogue becomes a story about philanthropy, local votes, land, architecture, reuse, and rescue. A schoolhouse becomes evidence of how simple buildings survived by becoming chapels, homes, machine shops, or museum pieces. It is not only about old buildings. Episodes on historical fiction and true crime follow how writers turn real Long Island files into narrative without losing the grit of handwritten reports and door-to-door detective work. Maritime episodes add danger and scale, especially when Long Island Sound shifts from familiar ferry route to site of disaster. The guest list ranges from battlefield advocates and authors to teachers, historians, preservation workers, and journalists. Kretz keeps the framing plainspoken. He asks the practical questions: where the pass was, who paid the annual budget, why the building survived, what the file revealed, and how a community remembers. Short audio footnotes and references to earlier episodes give the archive a connected feel. The show rewards careful listening. It is best for people who enjoy history at ground level, where national events leave marks on villages, roads, schools, docks, libraries, and family stories.
Made for: For listeners who like regional history, public memory, preservation, and interviews that connect national events to local places. It especially suits Long Island residents, New York history readers, educators, and archive-minded history fans.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its scale: major American stories are traced through Long Island roads, buildings, records, and communities. It pairs accessible conversation with careful attention to overlooked people, preservation details, and physical places.
Interviews with historians, scholars, authors and anyone with a story to tell and a passion for this unique region of New York.
A schoolhouse becomes a machine shop, and you get a better survival story than most landmarks manage.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear battlefield account of how Jamaica Pass gave the Battle of Long Island its decisive turn.
The Battle of Long Island comes through as a campaign shaped by ground, movement, and one exposed route. Chris Kretz and Dan follow the American positions along Gowanus Heights, the unguarded Jamaica Pass in what is now East New York, and the British flank march that reached the…
A Carnegie library's local story turns paperwork into a grounded history of preservation.
The Carnegie Library of Patchogue comes through as a local history built from ambition, paperwork, and persistence. The episode follows the building from Andrew Carnegie's public-library ideal to the Patchogue effort that secured land, won approvals, and pushed through…
A grounded panel on occupation, overlooked labor, and Long Islanders living through the Revolution.
Long Island's Revolutionary story is framed here less as a march toward independence than as a history of occupation and endurance. The panel keeps attention on the people made to live inside the conflict: enslaved Black laborers folded into colonial work, Liss treated as a…
A local history episode about small schoolhouses and the surprising lives they found after classrooms closed.
Historic schoolhouses become living records here, with the episode asking what lingers in a place after the children, desks, and lessons are gone.
A 1955 cold case takes shape through carbon copies, local leads, and the slow grind of mid-century police work.
Valenti's look at a 1955 true-crime-inspired cold case lingers in the paper-heavy world of mid-century police work: typewriters, handwritten reports, carbon copies, operator-assisted address searches, and door-to-door follow-up.
Miller Beach chaos, served breakfast-style.
Pennsylvania by county, landmark, and stone.
Nebraska culture, live and close to home.
Chris Kretz and Dan Davis of the American Battlefield Trust use the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution to walk the Battle of Long Island, also called the Battle of Brooklyn.
The Carnegie Library of Patchogue moves from a storefront collection in 1883 to a permanent 1908 Andrew Carnegie building, then to a preservation project that physically relocated the structure 300 feet.
The Long Island History Project presents "Occupied Long Island Voices from the American Revolution," a panel tied to the 2026 semi-quincentennial and a LILRC-supported American Revolution program.
Chris Kretz talks with architectural historian Zach Studenroth about Historic Schoolhouses of Long Island, the Arcadia Press book he wrote with Kurt Kayhofer.
John A.
Peggy Wirgau traces her novel To Outwit Them All to the Culper code's 355, which also stood for “lady.” Wirgau bases her first-person agent on Betty Floyd, a 21-year-old Long Island woman considered a possible candidate for 355.
Christopher Verga's Nazis of Long Island connects Long Island's strategic ports and aviation plants to Nazi-era espionage.
Glenda Dickerson’s 1986–88 “Eel Catching in Setauket” gathered Christian Avenue memories and culminated in a 1988 play at Stony Brook.
At Culper Spy Day’s 11th annual gathering, Three Village Historical Society president Greg Phillips said student participation grew from about 600 to nearly 1,500.
Chris Kretz interviews former history teacher Cindy Schwartz about teaching history, social studies, and civics with a rock and roll twist.
Dr.
Bill Bleyer discusses his new book about the sinking of the steamboat Lexington, the worst maritime disaster in Long Island history.
Bill Bleyer discusses the history and historiography of the Culper Spy Ring on Long Island during the American Revolution.
Rob Walch of Libsyn shares his personal history growing up in Bayport, Long Island, exploring local landmarks and memories from the 70s and 80s.