An Upstate Boyhood is a charming, highly literate memoir of the author’s life growing up in Upstate New York and his early adulthood farther south in the Empire State. Born in the middle of the Great Depression, Thomas O. Kelly II attends parochial school, serves in Korea, begins college and graduate school, and finally becomes a budding history professor and a family man.

Told with wit, and limned in the kind of detail that everyone can relate to, An Upstate Boyhood is a reminiscence that will remind some of their youth, surprise those now young with how some things have changed, and delight all with an enjoyable reading experience. 

About the Author

Thomas O. Kelly II, a native New Yorker, Army veteran, and longtime teacher and university administrator, is also the Co-Director and Founder of the Siena Research Institute, whose studies have appeared in major newspapers like The New York Times, journals, books, and have been cited on television. He has been a member of many organizations, including the Organization of American Historians and the VFW, and is currently at work on a research study about whether the Civil War was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”