Since its early days, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School has made use of its buildings for summer programs, both for enrolled students and the public. In 1919, the Summer Play School was founded in partnership with the New York Federation for Child Study, providing summer activities and meals for underprivileged children at the Ethical Culture...

The post S’more fun: The Ethical Culture Camp 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.

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.

“125th Street, Harlem’s principal shopping center, ranks with the best retail streets in the city.” So states a 1940 broadside flyer in the New-York Historical Society’s collections. This description of Harlem’s main retail artery, also known as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard,  has a timeless sound, even as the struggle to make it equitable in terms...

The post Shop 125th Street! 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.

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.

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.

Jack Roosevelt Robinson, better known to the world as Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in Major League Baseball–he broke the color barrier when he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947–was born in Cairo, Georgia, on January 31, 1919. In his ten-year Major Leagues career Robinson participated in six World...

The post Happy Hundredth, Jackie Robinson! 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.

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.

A recent acquisition by the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at N-YHS sheds light on the early history of African American freemasonry. The twelve-page, handwritten Proceedings of the Convention of the Grand Colored Lodge, dated 1845, outlines the intentions of the members of three African American masonic lodges to unite under the auspices of one “Grand Lodge.”...

The post African American Freemasonry and New York’s Grand Colored Lodge 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.

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.

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.

“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.

August 26th is National Dog Day! What better way to celebrate than by sharing a unique,  dog-centric artifact from our library.   This daguerreotype of an unidentified dog (PR-012-2-263)  has the formality of a portrait. The animal’s pose and eye contact with the camera (and us as viewers) personifies it. One of our ongoing preservation projects includes rehousing...

The post Puppies Preserved! appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

The idea of mysterious flying saucers piloted by extraterrestrials had, by the 1950s, been popularized to such an extent that even Time magazine’s Circulation Department wanted in on the fun. The magazine itself was less inclined to dabble in science fiction or conspiracy theories, but a letter sent out to potential subscribers nevertheless reported on...

The post A Flying Saucer Sighting in the Time Inc. Records 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Will we ever get back to watching baseball at Yankee Stadium? It is a fair and frustrating question. Perhaps, as therapy, it helps to go back in time before Yankee Stadium (either the original or the newer one) was even there.  We get this view from the Subway Construction Photograph Collection, and some parts of...

The post Before Yankee Stadium: The View from the Subway Construction Photograph Collection 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.

Mathematica experts will showcase their expertise in providing business analytics and data quality development for the Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) Business Information Solution (MACBIS) at this year’s Medicaid Enterprise Systems Conference in Chicago.

Join the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic and stakeholders from the New Jersey and Delaware Departments of Education for a free four-part series on culturally responsive practices as a strategy for improving education outcomes.

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.

Mathematica’s Jonathan Morse and Clint Eisenhower will team up to share their thoughts on state impacts and expectations for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Medicaid program integrity strategy at this year’s NAMPI Annual Conference in Atlanta.

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.

Join Mathematica at the 2019 ISM Annual Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as Elizabeth Weigensberg, Mathematica’s state and local child welfare lead, and Matthew Stagner, vice president and director of human services, team up to share their expertise on how being data driven can improve outcomes for state child welfare agencies.

A new report from Mathematica, the Notre Dame Initiative for Global Development, and AidData highlights how a set of climate shocks played a major role in impeding the long-term impact of a food security program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in southern Malawi.

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

Across the nation, Black students, economically disadvantaged students, and students with disabilities are disproportionately subjected to disciplinary removals, which are out-of-school suspensions and expulsions that compromise students’ opportunities to learn and increase their risk of dropping out.

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

Early fatherhood can have negative effects on the outcomes of young men, reducing the number of years of schooling they receive and their likelihood of graduating from high school.

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.

Mathematica researchers partnered with key clients and contributed to a number of projects that will be presented at the American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting and Expo in Philadelphia from November 2 to 6.

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.