For the next season of his show "What Made America Great," which began airing this week on the Fox Nation streaming service, Brian Kilmeade was tasked with finding a local story with national appeal. Covid-19 made traveling tough, so it had to be close to home in New York for Mr. Kilmeade, one of the anchors of Fox and Friends.
A fervent fan of American history who has also written multiple books, Mr. Kilmeade picked a subject that he had never learned about as a young student, but which, years later, fascinates him: the Culper Spy Ring, which fed Gen. George Washington critical information about British military movements from Long Island during the Revolutionary War.
"In school, we never learned about this stuff. How great would it have been to go walk the spy trail?" Mr. Kilmeade said in an interview last week. "This is something to do in the pandemic, when there are so many things we can't do."
Two episodes of the show will feature the UpIsland hamlets of Setauket and Oyster Bay along with the East Hampton Library, which all play a key role in understanding the Culper Spy Ring. The library is where Morton Pennypacker archived his work on the spy ring in the 1930s. Today, Andrea Meyer, head of the library's Long Island Collection, and Frank Sorrentino, a volunteer with an interest in history, are the ones stewarding the records.
As a college student, Ms. Meyer wrote her undergraduate thesis on the Culper Spy Ring, even after being told it was "too obscure" a topic. More recently, the spy ring inspired the television show "Turn."
"There are a lot of people who, until 'Turn' came out, didn't know about it," Ms. Meyer said. "To say it's very much a forgotten or not-well-known piece of history, I think, is fair."
Dennis Fabiszak, director of the East Hampton Library, said the library is "always thrilled to shine a light on the Long Island Collection, the things that the staff have done in the past here that are of historic importance, and what the current staff is doing to help everyone understand our history."
Mr. Sorrentino, a Northwest Woods resident who recently recovered from Covid-19, has been transcribing the financial records of merchants who witnessed the comings and goings of the British military.
"I just enjoy these account books. It gives me something to do -- it gets my brain working during the week," Mr. Sorrentino said. "I felt good after the interview. It was very good for the library to have that exposure. They're really good people and they have a treasure trove of documents there."
Mr. Kilmeade said that at "a time in which everyone is so critical of America, I always am thrilled to go back and remember what is great about it."
"People can sit down for 40 minutes and learn something, and for Long Islanders in particular, you will hopefully watch this and say, 'I want to see for myself' and take great pride in knowing about it," he said.
