Previewing the November/December issue of B&C.

Jo Walton on sci-fi and fantasy.

Eavesdropping, e-bombs, and more: a smart, fast-paced thriller.

Some highlights from our March/April issue.

Ayelet Waldman’s powerful new novel.

A Christian scholar’s journey from America to Africa.

Glimpses of a lost world.

Sometimes when catalogers examine a book, we find that parts of its structure use recycled materials from other books. These materials are often invisible, hidden away under outer coverings of paper or leather, and revealed only when an item is damaged or taken apart for conservation. But sometimes, the entire outer cover itself is made from...

The post Rare Books Revealed: Parchment Repurposed appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

A series of remarkable photographs from the library’s Geographic File (PR20) documents the construction of the Central Park Reservoir,  located between 86th and 96th streets.  Built between 1858 and 1862, the 106-acre reservoir is 40 feet deep and holds over a billion gallons of water. Once a critical part of the city’s fresh water system, it received water from the Croton...

The post Treasure Trove: Constructing the Central Park Reservoir 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.

Though not yet recognized nationally, today is American Eagle Day, the anniversary of the eagle’s inclusion on the Great Seal of the United States on June 20, 1782. Despite also becoming our national emblem in 1789, for decades at the end of the last century the eagle was in dire circumstances. The effects of DDT...

The post “Undaunted, defiant & unsubdued”: The American Eagle appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

While the collections of the New-York Historical Society’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library contain many oddities acquired over a long period of time, none is, at first blush, stranger than our oldest printed book: a copy of the Moralia of Pope Gregory the Great, printed in Basel in 1496. Why strange? Because in collections shaped largely...

The post Treasure Trove: Our Oldest Printed Book 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.

While working on the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library’s hidden collections cataloging project, I’ve found some examples of the different methods authors and printers used to fix small errors in a text after an item was printed. Shown below are a few examples of the corrections that were made directly to the page. In the first...

The post Rare Books Revealed: Text Corrections in Printed Books 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.

An unassuming French pamphlet sits on the shelves at the New-York Historical Society. However, there is far more than meets the eye beneath its aged, brown wrappers. Premier rapport fait au nom du Comité de salut public, sur les moyens d’extirper la mendicité dans les campagnes, & sur les secours que doit accorder la République...

The post Tinker, Tailor, Printer, Spy: Pierrette Jeanne Sophie Charpentier de Mailly appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Set to commence on January 17, 1920, the great social experiment of Prohibition had already begun with a “dry run” for Americans adapting to the restriction of alcohol inspired by World War I. That was followed by a full year anticipating the event through the process of Constitutional amendment and the passage of enforcement legislation...

The post Now on View–“Padlocked”: New York’s Prohibition Years 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.

Sometimes people leave behind a little piece of history that is worth so much to modern day scholars. We do not know who William Worcester Dudley was, but between December 1785 and October 1786, he kept a food diary that tracked every meal he ate for breakfast, dinner, and supper. While it was not uncommon for people to...

The post Victuals, Mincemeat, Pudding, and Veal: William Worcester Dudley’s Food Diary appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

There was a time when Thomas Cole, the celebrated landscape painter and Hudson River School artist, was an unknown portraitist travelling by foot across the northeast, determined to make a living for himself with nothing but a dollar in his pocket. Cole’s eventual success was due in part to that incredible drive, his passionate commitment...

The post “Nature around me in perfect beauty”: Thomas Cole to John Trumbull 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.

Five women huddle around an apartment table on January 18, 1923. Some balance babies on their laps. Older children look on. One boy in a knitted cap stares at the camera, more interested by the photographer than by what the ladies are doing. They seem to be copying in notebooks the exemplars from a portable chalkboard...

The post Becoming American: The Education Committee for Non-English Speaking Women appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Could a subway station have a grand piano, chandeliers, and a fountain with goldfish to boot? Alfred Ely Beach certainly believed so in the years following the Civil War, and, in fact, he was not deterred in creating such a subway, one that debuted 150 years ago, on February 26, 1870. Beach (1826-1896) was an...

The post Beach Pneumatic Transit: The 1870 Subway That Could Have Been? appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

The grim new numbers of the cases and deaths from COVID-19 reach us every day. As laypeople, we want to tune them out at times, but they are crucial to medical practice and public health. Certainly, we see that in history: Here is the sobering list of yellow fever deaths at Bellevue Hospital in 1795...

The post “Take No Medicine Without Advice”: New York Reacts to Pandemics Past 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.

Each October, National Principals Month recognizes the essential role principals play in making schools great.

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.

Principals can play an important role in improving instruction and student achievement in their schools. Many professional development programs focus on strengthening principals’ leadership skills.

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) seeks comments on performance measures used for the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) grant program.

Mathematica will showcase state Medicaid services and support for CMS projects to modernize data analytics for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program at the National Association of Medicaid Directors fall conference.

Mathematica is partnering with The Health Collaborative, the Patient Advocate Foundation, and MediaAgility on a solution leveraging artificial intelligence and other industry-leading methods to achieve a number of goals to drive primary care transformation.

The National Organization of State Offices of Rural Health sets aside the third Thursday of every November—this year, it’s November 21—to celebrate National Rural Health Day.

The Compendium of U.S. Health Systems for 2018 has been released today by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) Comparative Health System Performance Initiative.

Updated nutrition standards called for in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (HHFKA) have made school meals significantly healthier, according to a recent article.

As we step into the new year, Mathematica is proud to announce new partnerships with the U.S. Department of Education. On these projects, we will work together to evaluate education programs and produce insights that strengthen teaching and learning.

Francesconi, Sabrina, 1976-