The history of Books & Culture through one writer.

Crayons, lights, and the boyhood of poet Pablo Neruda.

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

A very tasty menu.

A Christian scholar’s journey from America to Africa.

I’m a big fan of ZEIT Now1 as an application hosting provider. The way the service abstracts all of the cloud computing details and allows teams to focus on building and deploying web applications is fantastic. That said, I had a lot of trouble setting up secure environment variables for my first application to use....

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.

Henry Robinson Luce was born one-hundred-and-twenty years ago, on April 3, 1898, in China to American Presbyterian missionaries. Apart from a visit to the United States in 1906, young Henry spent his first fourteen years living in China, a time of momentous upheavals. While attending Chefoo, a British preparatory school in northern China, the 1911...

The post Introducing the Henry R. Luce Papers 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.

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.

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.

Among the odder holdings of our Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections are two albums of pictures taken at a Halloween party given by one Alan Lloyd Wolfe (Album File, PR-0020-359.1 and 359.2). Why odd? For one thing we don’t know much about Mr. Wolfe other than that he lived from 1889 to 1970....

The post Mr. Wolfe’s Halloween Howl 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People like to say that the daily newspaper is dying, but, as you pass a newsstand and glance at a headline, do not take those tabloids for granted. We pause here to wish the New York Daily News a happy birthday on its centennial. The Illustrated Daily News first appeared on the morning of June...

The post A Centennial Salute to the Daily News 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.

The entertainment and moral education of children through books has not always been intertwined. American Puritanism frowned upon the fantastical imaginations that children often have and appreciate. Many children’s books from the eighteenth century instead emphasize the importance of virtuous behavior and the devastating consequences of vice through cautionary tales. Not until the nineteenth century...

The post Now on View–A Tale for Youth: Amusement and Instruction in American Children’s Books appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Happy October everyone! Halloween is upon us which means it’s time to pick out a costume. The Costume Ball Photograph Collection (PR 223) is the perfect collection to inspire your choice. The collection contains photographs and mounted clippings of members of high society attending New York balls from 1875 to 1932. The New-York Historical Society Collection of...

The post Halloween Costume Inspiration from the Gilded Age 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.

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.

Twenty years before the United States declared its independence from Great Britain, a group of colonial representatives from nine colonies met in Albany, New York during the onset of the French and Indian War. The Albany Congress of 1754 brought together colonial and Indigenous leaders in an attempt to strengthen relations while defending the northern...

The post Benjamin Franklin’s Plan for Unification 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.

Prior to the construction of Robert Mills’ Washington Monument in 1833, proposals to erect a memorial in honor of George Washington began as early as 1783. The defeat of the British under his command and his consecutive time as the first President of the United States had thrust Washington into the public’s mind as an...

The post Benjamin West’s Memorial to Washington appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

George B. Post (1837-1913), an American architect trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition, is perhaps best known for his New York City landmark buildings, including the New York Stock Exchange, City College, and the Brooklyn Historical Society. After working as a draftsman for Richard Morris Hunt, Post opened his first architectural firm in New York City...

The post Lab Notes: Conserving a George B. Post Presentation Drawing appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

This study uses Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registry data to describe trends in thyroid cancer incidence overall and by tumor size in the United States from 1992 to 2016.

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.