The history of Books & Culture through one writer.

Andy Crouch on redeeming the gift of power.

A book of poems by Eugene Peterson.

George Marsden on “The Twilight of the American Enlightenment.”

It’s very subjective.

Jo Walton on sci-fi and fantasy.

Some highlights from our March/April issue.

John Pattison and C. Christopher Smith: “Slow Church.”

Previewing the May/June issue.

Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven.”

A volume of her essays and a collection in her honor.

Paw and Order

The Girl Next Door.

J. Richard Middleton’s “holistic eschatology.”

Reliable, user-friendly, much needed.

A reissue of Simenon’s great series.

The Story of Science.

Conceived by housing reformer Lawrence Veiller and produced in conjunction with the Charity Organization Society, the Tenement House Exhibition opened on Fifth Avenue near 38th Street in February 1900. The exhibition was an innovative, groundbreaking way to educate the public about substandard housing in New York City. It resonated with people in a way that...

The post Manhattan Housing Stock, 1900 appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Today, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School is a prestigious K-12 school serving more than 1,600 students on campuses in Manhattan and Riverdale. But like many long-running New York institutions—including the New-York Historical Society—the school has seen multiple iterations and locations before settling into its current form. The school’s story begins with the Free Kindergarten, which...

The post All Work and No Play: Celebration at the Workingman’s School appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

It is the unofficial start of summer; beaches open, some of us think of auto racing, and we hope for suitable weather for a barbecue. Memorial Day is upon us, and its national observance is 150 years old this year, the holiday Americans once called Decoration Day. The veterans’ group known as the Grand Army...

The post Observing Memorial Day as “Decoration Day” appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Between 1945 and 1960 the number of television sets in use in the United States rose from a few thousand to approximately 60 million. Although many of the programs shown originated in New York City, many of Gotham’s denizens had to endure a steadily degrading signal reception. The cause: new buildings in the vertically growing...

The post Wiring Manhattan: Sterling Communications and Cable Television in New York City 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.

Despite the effects of the Great Depression, the City Planning Commission under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia reported for the period 1920–1939 a staggering increase in New York City motor vehicle registrations from 225,000 to nearly one million. As a result of the evolving needs of constituents, and with a glimmering post-war economic boom on the horizon,...

The post Highway to Hell: Tensions in the La Guardia Administration 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.

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.

Time Executive Editor J. Dana Tasker handled the retention or disposition of magazine cover art from around 1945 to 1953. While Time only acquired the first publication rights from the artists when commissioning a cover, Time frequently purchased and sent as a gift, or presented, the cover art to either the subject or a related...

The post What To Do With These TIME Cover Originals? appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

For much of the 19th century, New York City’s public transportation was racially segregated, and African Americans were forced to ride on specially designated horse-drawn street cars.  Newspapers documented acts of resistance to these policies of segregation by members of the African American community, some of whom took the street car companies to court. Three examples are cited here. On Sunday,...

The post Before Rosa Parks: Segregation on New York City Street Cars 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.

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.

On October 31, 1969, Time published “The Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood.” While the controversial piece discussed the public’s growing consciousness of the gay community, it also presented harmful stereotypes, a reflection of the markedly conservative coverage of gay rights issues Time maintained throughout most of its history. At the height of the AIDS crisis, in June...

The post Now on View–“Advocacy Within”: Gay Rights at Time Warner 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.