Posts By: Heather Iannucci

The family story this month revolves around Prudence Crandell, a schoolteacher in Canterbury, Connecticut. Crandell, a white woman, was arrested for allowing black students to attend the female boarding school she operated. William Jay, a prominent member in the American abolitionist movement, took an interest in Crandell’s plight and eventual court case, becoming an advisor…

Rockefeller, Morgan, Livingston, Astor. Names that will forever be associated with Gilded Age opulence. However, one cannot begin to think about the late 19th century without the name that would become synonymous with New York high society: Vanderbilt. Alva Smith Vanderbilt was determined to launch the Vanderbilt family into the social stratosphere after she married…

Beautiful, well-connected, and fascinated by power, Susan Mary Alsop was referred to as “the grand dame of Washington society” due to her political dinners attended by a who’s who of the capital city in the early 1960s. Born Susan Mary Jay in 1918, her father, Peter Augustus Jay, was an American diplomat and the great-great…