America 250: 25 times Long Island changed the country

The first major post-Declaration of Independence skirmish of the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Long Island, also called the Battle of Brooklyn, began Aug. 27, 1776, in Brooklyn Heights. The Brits and Hessian mercenaries, 28,000 strong under Gen. William Howe, routed the vastly outnumbered Continental Army of Gen. George Washington. Britain secured the occupation of New York City and Long Island for the duration of the war. But in a move historians suggested might be the future president’s greatest military feat, Washington and his surviving troops slipped away across the East River under cover of darkness on Aug. 30 — and the defeated patriots later proved a force to be reckoned with.

Invisible ink, coded messages, a clandestine cabal of couriers. Organized at the behest of Revolutionary War commander Gen. George Washington, cavalry officer Maj. Benjamin Tallmadge, using the alias John Bolton, recruited men and women from Setauket and, primarily out of Roe Tavern in East Setauket, transformed them into America’s first spy ring — gathering information on British military activities during the occupation of Long Island. Facing arrest and execution if caught, locations, names and other information are relayed as coded numbers. Spy Abraham Woodhull became Samuel Culper Sr.; Robert Townsend, Samuel Culper Jr. Anna Smith Strong of Setauket is "Agent 355," one of the groundbreaking female spies in the Ring. The network helped foil a British plot to counterfeit American currency, prevented  an ambush of George Washington, uncovered Benedict Arnold’s treasonous plot to surrender West Point and enabled the Continental Army and the newly-allied French thwart a surprise 1780 attack in Newport, Rhode Island — all, leading to American independence in 1783. In 2026, Congressmen Nick LaLota and Tom Suozzi proposed creation of a 50-mile national Long Island trail to commemorate the Culper Ring.

Born into slavery at Lloyd Manor in Lloyd Harbor, Hammon became the first published African-American poet in North America with "An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries" in 1761. Clerk, bookkeeper, preacher and Christian evangelist, historians note Hammon used "biblical foundation" to launch criticisms of slavery, later publishing "An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York" — its printer noting, written "in a better Stile  than could be expected from a slave" ... New York Quakers support abolition in the wake of Hammon’s work, fostered ultimately by his many published pieces, among them "An Essay on Slavery," which includes the stanza: "Dark and dismal was the Day / When slavery began / All humble thoughts were put away / Then slaves were made by Man." Hammon died sometime in 1806 — to be buried in an unmarked grave on the Lloyd property.

Born in the West Hills section of Huntington to Quaker parents, Walt Whitman Jr., founded a newspaper, the Long-Islander, and in 1855 published his controversial poetry collection Leaves of Grass. Journalist, poet, author, Whitman wrote of taboo subjects, like sexuality and death, his work thought trashy and obscene by some, groundbreaking by others. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln inspired  "O Captain! My Captain!," verse later quoted by Robin Williams in a transcendent scene in "Dead Poets Society." Considered father of free verse and face of American poetry, Whitman broke "the boundaries of poetic form," chronicling nature, the outdoors, Long Island scenes and historic national events as Americana. Schools, roads, bridges, shopping malls — even a crater on Mercury — are named for him.

If you grew up on Long Island you almost certainly took a school trip to Sagamore Hill, home to Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States, from 1885 until his death in 1919. Called "The Summer White House," Roosevelt’s plans for the home were nearly derailed by the death of wife Alice just days after giving birth in 1884, but were soon resurrected. Roosevelt and second wife Edith raised six children on the 83-acre estate in Oyster Bay. Suffering from asthma as a child, Roosevelt crafted his image as outdoorsman, explorer and political bull, leading the Rough Riders in Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898, returning to be elected governor of New York. As vice president, Roosevelt told supporters: "Speak softly and carry a big stick — and you will go far." The assassination of President William McKinley propelled him to the presidency on Sept. 14, 1901; Roosevelt was reelected in 1904 and died at Sagamore Hill on Jan. 6, 1919, a big chunk of his life having called Long Island home.

Having lived for about 18 months in 1920s Great Neck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, inspired by Gold Coast Long Island, penned the 1925 tragedy, set in fictional East Egg and West Egg, narrator Nick Carraway recounting the story of Prohibition-era millionaire playboy Jay Gatsby. Exploring Jazz Age speakeasies, bootlegging, flapper culture and illicit sexual rendezvous, "The Great Gatsby" was published to mixed reviews, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dismissing it as "an inconsequential performance by a once-promising author." Fitzgerald, who died in 1940, believed at the time that he was a failure whose work would be forgotten. Free copies distributed to World War II soldiers by the Council on Books in Wartime reignited interest; soon Gatsby was entrenched in American pop culture. To date, the book has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, with adaptations brought to life on stage and screen — among them the 1974 classic starring Robert Redford, Mia Farrow and Sam Waterston and a 2013 remake with Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire.

Following countless failed attempts, some fatal, to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize as the first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic, Charles A. Lindbergh barely coaxed his fuel-laden single-engine monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis, from a rain-soaked grass airstrip at Roosevelt Field at dawn on May 20, 1927. Aged 25, Lindbergh is older than the history of manned, heavier-than-air flight, and though a little-known Air Mail pilot at the start, his 33 1/2-hour, 3,600-miles solo journey ended at Le Bourget Aerodrome in Paris — Lindbergh, overnight a world hero. One of many aviation firsts tied to Long Island airfields and aviators, the feat transformed the future of air travel.

The first of four so-called "planned communities," Levitt & Sons, headed by Abraham Levitt and sons William and Alfred, built 30 homes a day — more than 4,000 in all — to accommodate veterans back from World War II, beginning in 1947 and turning onion and potato fields in the Island Trees section of Hempstead Plains into the birthplace of modern American suburbia: Levittown. Inspired by the U.S. Navy’s wartime Seabees construction of military housing, pre-cut lumber and nails forever changed home-building. But Levittown came with a not-so-secret caveat — inclusion of an exclusion clause prohibiting sale or rental to anyone outside "members of the Caucasian race." A 1948 Supreme Court decision declared the deeds "unenforceable," but it was  the 2010s before census data revealed  significant population shifts reflecting South Asian, Hispanic and Black residents in Levittown.

Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi, electromagnetic fields and the invention of wireless radio — all have historic ties to Long Island. Wardenclyffe Tower, also known as Tesla Tower, was built between 1901-02 in Shoreham as Tesla experimented with transmitting messages across the Atlantic to England. Marconi first used  "wireless telegraphy" — radio waves — to transmit across the Atlantic, his Babylon Station, a 10 x 11 shack known as the Jacobs Cottage, located at the corner of Fire Island Avenue and Virginia Road. Used between 1902-07 to communicate with "ships at sea," its transmissions were at the forefront of world wireless communications we now daily take for granted. The shack? It can now be found in Rocky Point.

Hardly a global power at the dawn of World War II, America owed a debt of gratitude to aircraft and aviation advances grounded on Long Island. Grumman built an ever-evolving series of planes for the U.S. Navy, including the F4F Wildcat and F6F Hellcat fighters and the TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, flown in combat by future President George H.W. Bush. Republic built the near-indestructible P-47 Thunderbolt, which future Long Island Rail Road president Francis S. (Gabby) Gabreski flew becoming a leading ace. Sperry developed ground-breaking avionics. Ordinary Long Island men and women of all races and ethnicities manned factories, making it possible. 

English stallion Messenger came to America in 1788, standing in Philadelphia and upstate Goshen before being brought to Long Island. The Harness Racing Museum said almost all two-minute standardbred horses since can trace back to Messenger, among them great-grandson Hambletonian, while great American thoroughbreds in his lineage include American Eclipse, Whirlaway, Gallant Fox, Seattle Slew, the magnificent Man o’War, Seabiscuit and immortal 1973 Triple Crown champ Secretariat. Messenger was buried with full military honors, his remains marked by a bronze plaque on a memorial boulder on the grounds of the Piping Rock Club in Matinecock.

Jackie Robinson became the first Black player in Major League Baseball, taking the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. The first professional Black baseball team? That would be a squad organized by the waitstaff of the Argyle Hotel on Argyle Lake in Babylon in 1885. The team played — and, beat — white amateur teams and became the Cuban Giants, promoter Walter Cook hoping to pass his players off as Cubans. Changing forever the landscape of American sports, the barnstorming team toured the Northeast, played at the Polo Grounds and opened the door for the creation of the Negro National League in 1920.

Mary Mallon came  to New York from Ireland in 1897, an asymptomatic carrier of Salmonella Typhi bacteria. The maid infected dozens with typhoid fever through her careless cooking, causing three confirmed deaths, en route to living out her life in quarantine at Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island in the East River. Little-known is that Typhoid Mary, as she was dubbed by health officials and the press, worked early on in East Hampton (1900), then for a family in Sands Point (1904), followed by a summer attending to New York banker Charles Henry Warren and his family in Oyster Bay (1906) — a typhoid outbreak left each time in her wake. Inspiration for comic book and movie villains, her infamous life assured any future carrier of deadly disease is branded a Typhoid Mary. A 1909 article in the New York American featured  an indelible ink sketch of Mallon, stove-side, adding skulls to a frying pan.

Established as a U.S. Army embarkation camp for troops off to World War I, Yaphank-based Camp Upton also served as an induction camp in World War II — then, as an internment camp housing Italian, German and Japanese detainees, before becoming a rehabilitation hospital for wounded troops. Heavyweight champion boxer Joe Louis was a guard at Camp Upton. Time there inspired Irving Berlin to write "Yip, Yip, Yaphank," turned into the 1943 movie "This Is The Army" starring future President Ronald Reagan and featuring the comical "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning." Home to Brookhaven National Laboratory since 1947, first the Atomic Energy Commission, then the U.S. Department of Energy, conducted groundbreaking work in nuclear and accelerator physics, nanomaterials, radiation beams and environmental and climate research at Upton resulting in seven Nobel Prizes. One of the world’s first video games, "Tennis for Two," was created by scientists at Upton — in 1958. A decade later its scientists patented magnetic levitation technology. The site now also hosts a forecast office of the National Weather Service.

Today, the landscape for auto racing features a host of major organizations and races. In 1904? There was just one: The Vanderbilt Cup. Inheriting more than $50 million in 1885 — the equivalent of more than $2 billion today — Staten Island native William Kissam Vanderbilt, grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, co-founded The Jockey Club, won the America’s Cup yacht race, took control of P.T. Barnum’s Great Roman Hippodrome, renaming it Madison Square Garden, and from 1904-1910 hosted  his road race on the streets of Nassau County. The world’s first international road race, it fueled a national obsession. A 1906 spectator death on Jericho Turnpike in Mineola sparked Vanderbilt to build Vanderbilt Motor Parkway, also called Long Island Motor Parkway, ultimately connecting Fresh Meadows, Queens, to Lake Ronkonkoma. Part racecourse, part toll road, part playground for the rich and famous, the Vanderbilt Motor Parkway became the first limited-access highway in the world.

First called the Lunar Excursion Module, the contract for the Apollo Lunar Module is awarded in November 1962, with Long Island-based Grumman beating out eight competitors. President John F. Kennedy had declared: "We choose to go to the Moon ... [and] other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Engineers in Bethpage learned that firsthand, early lander versions plagued by development issues. With components built by dozens of suppliers, among them EDO Corporation of Whitestone, Queens, the LM proved one of the most-reliable platforms in the Apollo program. Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin landed a Long Island built LM on the Moon on July 20, 1969. A year later, the LM became a "lifeboat" that saved astronauts James A. Lovell Jr., John L. (Jack) Swigert Jr. and Fred W. Haise Jr. after their Odyssey service module was damaged by an oxygen tank explosion during the flight of Apollo 13.

Today, it seems unthinkable. But in the 1930s, growing Nazi sentiment saw the German-American Bund establish a Hitler youth-style camp in Yaphank called Camp Siegfried. Operated by the German-American Settlement League, campers aged 6-to-18 don Nazi-style uniforms, were indoctrinated in pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi themes — all under the guise of "family-oriented" summer fun. The Long Island Rail Road even ran train service to the site: "The Siegfried Special." The growing pro-Nazi movement in America saw the bund stage a massive 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden. Six members of the settlement league were eventually jailed and fined for failing to register the camp with the New York secretary of state in violation of the Civil Rights Law of 1923, first enacted to fight the Ku Klux Klan.

A dozen years after the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, ruling racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, the Malverne School District became the test case for integrating suburban schools in New York — third-grader and future civil rights attorney Frederick K. Brewington walked into Lindner Place Elementary on Feb. 23, 1966, a year after Martin Luther King Jr. protested in the village. The enrollment sparked a battle leading to integration in the district and throughout the state. Named for a local leader of the Ku Klux Klan, the school later was renamed the Maurice W. Downing School. And Lindner Place eventually was renamed Acorn Way — in 2022.

The New York State Board of Regents authorized a non-denominational 22-word prayer in 1962, to be recited daily with the Pledge of Allegiance. It read: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessing upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country." Nine parents of students at Herricks High School, with the New York Civil Liberties Union, sued Union Free School District No. 9, New Hyde Park, arguing a violation of constitutional Rights. In 1962, Engel v. Vitale made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where following a 6-1 vote, Justice Potter Stewart the lone dissent, the court banned prayer in schools. Justice Hugo L. Black wrote: “[T]he constitutional prohibition against laws respecting an establishment of religion must at least mean that, in this country, it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government."

Announced in 1965, the Long Island Lighting Company — LILCO — heralded the first commercial nuclear power plant on Long Island as a savior that would provide electricity for a half-million homes for 40 years. LILCO said Shoreham would be online by 1973 at a cost of $75 million. Turned out, it was 1984 — at $5.3 billion — before it was ready. Initial small anti-Shoreham protests grew to 15,000 strong in the wake of a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, with hundreds arrested in what became  a growing boondoggle and national news. The local Shoreham Opponents Coalition garnered  backing from organizations like the Audubon Society and Sierra Club and in 1983 Suffolk officials announced they didn't believe the county could be safely evacuated in case of a nuclear accident. The pushback got worse in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Three years later, Gov. Mario Cuomo and LILCO announced the plant would be decommissioned — all, without ever opening. A state takeover ensured a 3% surcharge was added to Long Island electric bills for three decades to pay off the final $6 billion total cost.

An evening flight to Paris became the second-deadliest aircraft crash in U.S. history at the time, when TWA Flight 800 exploded off Moriches Inlet on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 passengers and crew. Conspiracy theories abounded, from bomb blast to missile attack, leading to one of the most-extensive — and, controversial — accident investigations ever. The National Transportation Safety Board and FBI ultimately found no conclusive evidence of sabotage, the post-crash report citing an electrical short-circuit igniting vapors in a near-empty center fuel tank of the Boeing 747. The crash transformed airliner safety requirements, but helped put beleaguered TWA out of business, while cr1ash coverage earned Newsday the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Reporting. A memorial stands at Smith Point County Park in Shirley.

Roaring up the East Coast Category 3 Hurricane Sandy turned into a "Superstorm," hitting the New York-metro area at the worst possible time and tide on Oct. 29, 2012, causing utter devastation that surpassed all before her — 2011’s Hurricane Irene, 1991’s Hurricane Bob, 1985’s Hurricane Gloria, 1938’s Long Island Express. The storm surge inundated streets, train and subway stations, subterranean tunnels and structures, turned Breezy Point, Queens, into a firestorm and knocked out the Bay Park sewage treatment plant in East Rockaway. The South Shore of Long Island was devastated. About 100,000 Nassau and Suffolk homes and buildings were destroyed and 250,000 vehicles damaged. The 106th Rescue Wing of the Air National Guard rescued 200 people trapped in Lindenhurst after firefighters rescued more than 100. A record 933,000 of 1.1 million LIPA customers lost power — thousands, for weeks. Experts called it all "a once-in-a-lifetime" storm, a literal "Storm of the Century." The final toll  was $65 billion in damage with 48 dead in New York City and 13 dead on Long Island.

Inspired by a 1964 article about a Long Island fisherman and a 4,500-pound shark, Peter Benchley wrote a novel that became the 1975 megahit film of the same name: Jaws. Steven Spielberg directed the story of a Great White Shark stalking — and, eviscerating — swimmers off the beaches of fictional Amity, pursued by a cast of characters brought to life by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw. Benchley won’t admit it, but anyone who’s ever thrown a line in the water off Long Island knows Shaw’s Capt. Quint was legendary Montauk shark-hunter Frank Mundus. For generations that follow swimmers feared even dipping a toe into bathtubs, the film breaking box office records, inspiring an entire genre — not to mention Discovery Channel’s "Shark Week."

Sousa was enlisted in the U.S. Marine Band as an apprentice musician with the rank of "boy" by his father in 1868. Named leader of the band in 1880, he later pursued a civilian musical career, becoming co-inventor of the sousaphone, a takeoff on the more-traditional tuba. Sousa composed "The Stars and Stripes Forever" in 1896 and resided in the Sands Point mansion "Wildbank" — now, a National Historic Landmark — from 1915 until his death in 1932. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 125 marches, operettas and overtures and performed more than 15,600 concerts. Heralded as "The American March King," among his credits is the official Marine Corps march: "Semper Fidelis.''

Troubled 23-year-old Ronald (Butch) DeFeo Jr. shot his parents and four siblings to death in their Amityville home on Nov. 13, 1974, claiming they had been targeted by the Mafia before copping to the gruesome murders. The grisly storyline fueled a 1977 book based on tales told by subsequent owners George and Kathy Lutz, who said their family was terrorized by paranormal events during a one-month residence in the house at 112 Ocean Avenue. In 1979, it’s all made into "The Amityville Horror," an independent flick that became a worldwide sensation, defining horror films and spawning wild theories on the goings-on in the house for generations to come.