Previewing the July/August issue.

The Summer 2013 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review.

A standout amid the outpouring of books on Lewis.

When the setting is also the "main character."

A reissue of Simenon’s great series.

Previewing the March/April issue of Books & Culture.

Last year, I wrote about how to schedule Jekyll posts using Netlify and AWS Lambda[^1]. I used that approach from the moment I wrote that blog post up until today. What changed? In the past year, GitHub has introduced GitHub Actions[^2], a way to run container jobs triggered by different GitHub events. One of those...

It’s that time of year again. March 23rd marks National Puppy Day! Founded in 2006 by Colleen Paige, National Puppy Day educates the public about the atrocities of puppy mills, and helps save orphaned puppies around the world. Although some of these four-legged poseurs below are well past puppyhood, we couldn’t wait until National Dog Day...

The post Snips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dancing geishas, ancient palaces, drifting over misty rivers in a houseboat. The adventures of a businessman traveling through China, Japan, and Korea in 1923 are captured within the detailed correspondence and ephemera saved by Myron S. Falk (1878-1945), an engineer from New York City who was sent on a trip to Asia with the American Silk...

The post The 1923 American Silk Mission to Asia 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.

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.

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.

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.