It has been said that “politics is a blood sport.” Even so, American politicians are expected to have some sense of humor, to be able to take a joke at their expense—at least under well understood terms of engagement. In New York City, those terms have included the annual political roast written, produced and performed...

The post Freedom of the Press . . . To Lampoon! appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

The holdings of the New-York Historical Society Library are vast and fascinating. It is always fun to open a box of photos or unroll a set of drawings to discover something new. Recently, a researcher was working with the Printmaker File (PR 58), a collection of aquatints, engravings, etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, representing work by over...

The post Treasure Trove: The Etchings of Albert Flanagan appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

As preservationists push to landmark 99 Ryerson Street, the only surviving Brooklyn residence of poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the question arises what, if anything, the New-York Historical Society Library holds on the building or the man, whose birthday is May 31st. Sadly, we haven’t got a whole lot on the building. There are insurance maps, which show the...

The post Walt Whitman’s Rule of Poetry appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

It wouldn’t seem like July 4th without the CRACK of fireworks. Remember, though, that fireworks are dangerous, and illegal for the general public to possess in many areas–including New York City. So instead, why not grab a hot dog, kick back, and let Macy’s or our flag-draped Miss Liberty run the show? Miss Liberty, at dawn’s first peep, Awakes...

The post Have a Merry, Bang-Up 4th of July! appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Twice at dusk every spring and summer, the setting sun lines up with Manhattan’s street grid, illuminating the city with the otherworldly spectacle known as Manhattanhenge. The phenomenon is a byproduct of the design for Manhattan outlined in the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, the rectilinear grid of avenues running north/south with intersecting streets running east/west. The...

The post The Druids of Manhattan appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

The James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings in the Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections is a particularly lovely survey of etchings by various artists depicting the city between 1910 and 1935. Boyd donated the collection to the New-York Historical Society in honor of his wife, Agnes Boyd, in 1935, and continued to...

The post Selections from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

When Alice Foote MacDougall (1867-1945) began her coffee roasting and retail business in 1907, she did so under the more ambiguous name A. F. MacDougall. She knew that some of her customers and even some of her suppliers didn’t like the idea of a woman in business, so she let people make their own assumptions...

The post Alice Foote MacDougall, Queen of the Coffee Shop appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

On June 22, 1881, Eliza Seaman Leggett, a New York City native, sat down to pen a letter to her dear, lifelong correspondent, Walt Whitman. She wrote from her home at 169 East Elizabeth Street in Detroit, about 40 miles from her Waterford Township house that had served as a stop on the Underground Railroad....

The post The Voice of Sojourner Truth appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Tiny Canal Park, a .66-acre triangular green space that sits on Canal Street between Washington and West Streets, hides a substantial history. The city’s ownership of this land dates back to the Dongan Charter in 1686 and the Montgomery Charter in 1730. By the time this land was approved as a site for the Clinton...

The post The Return of Canal Park appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

An earlier post introduced readers to a sampling of artwork from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings. Today’s post highlights works by William C. McNulty, an American painter, illustrator, etcher and art instructor whose work is part of the Boyd Collection. McNulty was born in Ogden, Utah in 1884. He began his career as  an editorial...

The post Selections from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings, part 2 appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Every year when the seasons change from cold to warm, I get sick. Usually it’s allergies or a cold, but like clockwork I am out of commission for a few days. I suspect this has happened to people since time began, but if you lived on Manhattan Island during the 1790s, and even as late...

The post Spreading the News of Yellow Fever appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Travel diaries have long been a popular form of self-expression, and can provide us with unique perspectives on cities in the past. The New-York Historical Society holds a number of these diaries within our manuscript collections, with several dating back to the 18th century. Mabel Newton Betticher is one diarist whose collection exists in our holdings. Between...

The post “Her Own Trip”: Reflections of 20th Century New York City appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

In 1725, a then unknown nineteen-year-old journeyman printer named Benjamin Franklin printed A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, responding to William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated. Later, having second thoughts about the soundness of his argument, Franklin destroyed most of the remaining copies of what was already a small run. Fortunately, his distribution of...

The post Copying History: A Handmade Facsimile of a Rare Franklin Imprint appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Modern library conservation was born in the aftermath of a catastrophic flood in Florence, Italy on November 4, 1966. Water from the Arno River devastated the collections of the National Central Library of Florence. An international team of bookbinders and restorers was assembled to save what they could; however in many cases the damage was irreversible. Many lessons were...

The post Lab Notes: The Florence Flood and the emergence of library conservation appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

This Sunday will be the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I, a war that remains etched in the collective memory for the physical and psychological toll wrought on those who lived through it. With that in mind, it seems fitting to mark this occasion through the words of a soldier who...

The post “The Good Lord protected me”: A soldier’s letter on the Meuse-Argonne Offensive appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

You’ve probably heard of a “gaggle of geese.” Maybe even a “murder of crows.” But did you know that a group of November gobblers is called a “rafter of turkeys”? Here are some early 20th-century images (from the New-York Historical Society Postcard Collection) of the runner-up for America’s national bird. Not quite enough feathers to reach the rafters,...

The post Turkeys galore (and a couple of sides) appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Given its links to Massachusetts, it may come as a surprise to many that the earliest surviving text of “Christian Charitie. A Modell hereof” (more commonly called “A Model of Christian Charity”) resides in New York.  A lay sermon attributed to the Puritan John Winthrop, the once unheralded manuscript came to the New-York Historical Society from Francis...

The post John Winthrop’s “City upon a hill” Sermon and an “Erasure of Collective Memory” appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

We are upon a new year and a new political season, as recently-elected governors and legislators take their oaths and move into their offices. Hiring staff is always the first task at hand.  Does one “clean house” of the holdovers or retain them? This question may have had its most relevance in the early American...

The post A Cabinet Staff of Cutthroats, Picaroons, and Nincumpoops appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

The fact that Russian World War I soldiers remained prisoners of war well after the November 1918 Armistice is one of the more obscure aspects of the war’s history. But with civil war raging in Russia, concerns arose over repatriating soldiers that might return to reinforce the Bolsheviks. This meant large number of Russian soldiers remained in...

The post Camp Sagan: The Forgotten Prisoners of World War I appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Hailed as the foremost painter of the American Revolution, John Trumbull (1756-1843) is best remembered for the four iconic images that grace the walls of the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. These paintings depict pivotal events in our nation’s early history: The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, The Surrender of General Burgoyne, The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, and General Washington Resigning his...

The post John Trumbull, Painter of the Revolution appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

If the cold weather kept you from seeing the recent Super Blood Wolf Moon (a.k.a. the total lunar eclipse of January 21, 2019), here’s a celestial event you can view from the comfort of your favorite electronic device: a photograph of a rare, total solar eclipse that darkened the skies over New York City on January 24,...

The post Treasure Trove: The Solar Eclipse of 1925 appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

This third installment of selections from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings (be sure to see part 1 and part 2) focuses on the work of Edith Nankivell (1896-1984), who, with 46 prints, figures prominently in Box 3. In researching her, I discovered that she is in fact the daughter of Frank...

The post Selections from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings, part 3 appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

With St. Patrick’s Day right around the corner it’s perfect timing for an addendum to this post from a few years ago. It discussed the largely overlooked reality that many nineteenth century Irish immigrants spoke Irish, some exclusively. As it turns out, a curious exchange has turned up in a journal kept by the Irish Quaker merchant, Jacob Harvey,...

The post “In his native tongue”: A Fleeting Glimpse of the Irish Language in 19th Century America appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

“Dear Gellatly, Did you leave a pair of dark leather gloves here? Church.” Writing to his friends, the artist Frederick Stuart Church (1842-1924) was a man of few words. Most of his letters were full of casual thoughts, questions and updates on the weather. Known for his love of animals, Church enlivened his letters with colorful cartoons...

The post Bears and Pie: The Illustrated Letters of Frederick Stuart Church appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Each era spawns its acronyms. (POTUS, FLOTUS, and SCOTUS, anyone?) Some World War II acronyms remain familiar, like WAC, for Women’s Army Corps, and its earlier incarnation, WAAC, Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Maybe you know of the WAVES—Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service–a branch of the U.S. Navy in which women could enlist. But chances are you’ve never heard of...

The post “Till Victory is History”: Remembering the W.I.V.E.S. of World War II appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

The story of one of New York’s brightest and most dedicated physicians is often eclipsed by his reputation as America’s first wood engraver. Both stories, however, are tied together in a biography of tragedy, strife, hope, and renewal. Alexander Anderson (1775-1870) was not only a doctor and an artist, but a man of great sentiment,...

The post “Of Some Consequence.” Alexander Anderson: Distinguished Doctor, Accomplished Artist appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Update on April 14, 2020: Hart Island is back in the news for the most tragic of reasons: It’s currently being used as a burial ground for victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the time since this post was first published, control of Hart Island was transferred to New York City’s Department of Parks and burials are no...

The post Rare photographs of Hart Island, New York’s potter’s field appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

In the spring of 1869, a two-column-inch piece titled “The Great New York Fire in 1835” began appearing in newspapers around the country. Written as a reminiscence “clipped from the columns of the Philadelphia Inquirer,” the piece was actually an advertisement for Aetna Insurance, describing the moment when Aetna’s president had first informed his board...

The post The Great New York Fire of 1835 and the Marketing of Disaster appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

“Se confundió el gozo en el pozo”― “he confused the joy in the well”; which is simply a way of saying that something went wrong which was expected to go right. This was the expression that Saturnino Carrias used in 1848 to express his disappointment upon hearing that the $50,000 dollars in compensation that he...

The post The Struggle for the Reclamation of the Amistad appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Like many of the nation’s most revered historical events, Thanksgiving has accumulated a lore that often makes  the lines between fact and fiction indecipherable.  Of particular note is the purported landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in December 1620. Although historians have recognized its dubious foundations for some time (after all, the first assertion...

The post “Revere the Rock of Plymouth”: An American Relic appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

On February 22, 1865, Private William Joseph Nelson wrote a petition for leniency from prison. The black Ohioan was being held as a deserter and explained why he had to leave the army. He said that recruiters cheated him out of his much-needed bounty, forcing him to abandon his post and see to his family....

The post The Loving Black Mercenaries of the Civil War appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

What’s Christmas without Christmas cards? The fanciful greetings here are the work of Oscar Fabres (1894–1960), a Chilean illustrator who studied art in Paris and settled in New York in 1940, where he lived and kept a studio at 715 Madison Avenue. The Oscar Fabres Collection (PR 079), bequeathed to the New-York Historical Society by the artist’s agent,...

The post Santa in the City: The Christmas Cards of Oscar Fabres appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Little is known about long-lived David Grim (1737-1826) outside of the brief personal account of his life held by the New-York Historical Society Library. What can be said is that his memory was sound. A tavern keeper, merchant, and owner of Hessian’s Coffee House from 1767 to 1789, Grim sought to leave behind more than an...

The post “A Correct and Perfect Recollection”: David Grim’s Map of Prerevolutionary Manhattan appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

New Yorkers and Bostonians have a number of things to dispute—Yankees versus Red Sox, Manhattan versus New England clam chowder, good or bad memories of the Super Bowl in 2008 and 2012. We will avoid adding, “Where was the first blood of the American Revolution shed?” as another. Yes, we concede the Boston Massacre of...

The post The Battle of Golden Hill: New York’s Opening Act of Revolutionary Bloodshed appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

When Rose O’Neill’s illustrations appeared in True Magazine on September 19, 1896, she made history by becoming the first female cartoonist to publish a comic strip in America. A self-taught artist, O’Neill (1874-1944) had spent her childhood studying artists and submitting her work to various periodicals around the country. She set out for New York City at...

The post Rose O’Neill, Mother of the Kewpies appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

This study uses South Korean administrative database data to assess changes in incidence of postthyroidectomy hypoparathyroidism during a period of fluctuations in thyroid cancer screening and surgery between 2007 and 2016.

A new research brief illuminates the landscape of professional development in Head Start programs. Using data from the spring 2017 round of the FACES 2014 Survey, researchers explore professional development experiences of Head Start program directors, center directors, teachers, and other staff.

More than nine million active duty and retired military members and their families, including two million children, receive benefits from TRICARE, the military’s health care program. TRICARE offers health maintenance organization (HMO) and preferred provider organization (PPO) options.

Parents who participated in the Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration (CSPED) reported substantially higher levels of satisfaction with child support services compared with those who did not participate in the program.

This interactive data visualization uses SNAP quality control data from fiscal year 2016 and microsimulation modeling to provide detailed information on the demographic characteristics of those at risk of losing benefits.

A Mathematica issue brief synthesizes new and recent evidence on how the two cities’ beverage taxes affected purchases, consumption, and the retail environment.

A final report presents evidence on the long-term impacts of the Steps to Success home visiting program for adolescent mothers in San Angelo, Texas.

A new, publicly available data file on physician group practices has been released by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) Comparative Health System Performance Initiative.