The James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings in the Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections is a particularly lovely survey of etchings by various artists depicting the city between 1910 and 1935. Boyd donated the collection to the New-York Historical Society in honor of his wife, Agnes Boyd, in 1935, and continued to...

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An earlier post introduced readers to a sampling of artwork from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings. Today’s post highlights works by William C. McNulty, an American painter, illustrator, etcher and art instructor whose work is part of the Boyd Collection. McNulty was born in Ogden, Utah in 1884. He began his career as  an editorial...

The post Selections from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings, part 2 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.

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.

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.

As a present of sorts, in honor of what would have been his 160th birthday, here are some sheet music covers depicting Theodore Roosevelt, who was born in Manhattan, at 28 East 20th Street, on October 27, 1858. Probably no American president has gazed out from more sheet music covers than TR, whose rough-riding exploits and...

The post Happy Birthday, Teddy Roosevelt! 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.

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.

This third installment of selections from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings (be sure to see part 1 and part 2) focuses on the work of Edith Nankivell (1896-1984), who, with 46 prints, figures prominently in Box 3. In researching her, I discovered that she is in fact the daughter of Frank...

The post Selections from the James Boyd Collection of New York City Etchings, part 3 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“I am large, I contain multitudes.” We continue to remember that self-declared truth about Walt Whitman in this, his 200th birth year. In our American and New York imaginations, he does loom so much larger than simply poet and journalist. We have, in the past, explored on this blog his service as a comforter and...

The post Walt Whitman on the Bowery appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Harry Potter may have come and gone here at the New-York Historical Society but it turns out that the interplay of magic and science that enlivens the Potter series can still be found in the Historical Society’s collections. On this occasion, it emerges from an unidentified colonial physician’s account book. Although it’s generally written in legible scripts, the...

The post Mercury, Sulphur and Vitriol: A Colonial Physician’s Accounts 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...

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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.

2019 is a year to celebrate the richness of American literature, as poet James Russell Lowell was born on February 22, 1819, two months ago we marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Walt Whitman, and now we certainly want to pause and note that Herman Melville has his bicentennial natal day on August 1....

The post A “Bartleby” Tour for Herman Melville’s 200th Birthday appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Hello, I’m Alec Ferretti, and I recently interned with the Archival Processing Unit at the New-York Historical Society. I’m a professional genealogist by day and a grad student at NYU in their Archives program by night. I set aside every Monday of the spring semester to work on processing collections here in the N-YHS manuscripts division. On...

The post Exploring a life lost to history: Industrialist Irving Olds 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.

On July 3, 1776, the Continental Congress authorized privateering on the high seas. Essentially, any private citizen who obtained a Commission of Marque and Reprisal would be permitted to capture British ships. A common warfare tactic since the Middle Ages, the intent of the act was to weaken the enemy at sea while trading confiscated...

The post Gustavus Conyngham: American Privateer 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.

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.

From the title Scholars and Gentlemen, one of the essential histories written about the New-York Historical Society and that dates from the 1980s, one might get the wrong impression, that only men played a role in the life of the institution over the course of its 216 years. Yet many women have played significant roles...

The post Martha Lamb: New-York Historical Society Pioneer appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

The Department of Prints, Photographs and Architectural Collections in the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library is home to one of the largest cased image collections in the country, consisting largely of daguerreotype, ambrotype or tintype portraits. Cased images typically include the image plate and a cover glass wrapped together in a brass mat, placed inside a...

The post An Ambrotype Army from the Cased Image File appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Food is a critical part of our daily lives, and of our history. Cuisine is passed down from generation to generation and is an expression of a shared identity. At the most basic level, it reflects ethnicity, but also lifestyle, values, and traditions.  The Duane and Wells family’s recipe book gives us a glimpse into...

The post Food for Thought: The Duane Family Cookbooks, 1840-1874 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.

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.

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.

Mathematica staff and their local community partners are vying for an opportunity to share insights from cutting-edge projects related to equity, early learning, the science of learning, and K–12 education.

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.