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...

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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.

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.

In time for its 95th anniversary, the Coney Island Boardwalk has become a New York City landmark! On May 15, 2018, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the wooden walkway a scenic landmark (read the designation report here). It joins others around the city like Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn and Morningside Park in Manhattan. The Boardwalk–officially called the Riegelmann Boardwalk...

The post Brooklyn’s Boardwalk Empire 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.

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.

Preparation for the highly anticipated exhibit, Harry Potter: A History of Magic, has been underway in several of the museum’s departments, including conservation. Our role in an exhibit such as this is huge: we assess artifacts selected for display, make necessary repairs, and monitor the items during the exhibition for exposure to light as well...

The post Aesthetics Considered 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.

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...

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

On June 22, 1881, Eliza Seaman Leggett, a New York City native, sat down to pen a letter to her dear, lifelong correspondent, Walt Whitman. She wrote from her home at 169 East Elizabeth Street in Detroit, about 40 miles from her Waterford Township house that had served as a stop on the Underground Railroad....

The post The Voice of Sojourner Truth appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

While the collections of the New-York Historical Society’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library contain many oddities acquired over a long period of time, none is, at first blush, stranger than our oldest printed book: a copy of the Moralia of Pope Gregory the Great, printed in Basel in 1496. Why strange? Because in collections shaped largely...

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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.

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.

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.

In January 1976, Jesse Birnbaum, the European edition editor of Time, cabled Edward Jamieson, the magazine’s managing editor, about an unusual table he had received as a gift from French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The table’s gold-leaf legs supported a plain top, the edges of which were decorated with an “ornate series of nude figures...

The post Fabulous Gift or Inside Joke? 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.

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 genealogy of America’s earliest Jews can be traced through multiple veins of the Nathan family, including the Hendricks branch, the Seixas branch, and the Mendes branch. However, perhaps no part of the Nathan bloodline is as historically rich and prestigious as their connection to the Gomez family, through which Edgar J. Nathan, Jr.–whose papers have...

The post America’s First Jewish Settlers 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.

From the horrors of Malleus Maleficarum (1486) to the fervor of the Salem Witch Trials (1692), many women were accused of and persecuted for witchcraft. These women (and some men) were often poor, middle-aged, and considered to have abrasive personalities. These personalities disrupted the sensibilities of the rigid and religiously devout communities of New England....

The post Now on View: “Betwixt the Devil and the Witch” 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.

A handwritten circa 1721 Navigation Notebook currently featured in our exhibition Harry Potter: A History of Magic, on view until January 27, 2019, contains all sorts of information that may be helpful in determining one’s location at sea, including descriptions of the constellations, tables, charts, and two volvelles. A volvelle is a paper chart with movable...

The post Lab Notes: Stabilizing a Volvelle appeared first on New-York Historical Society.

Have you mailed your holiday cards yet? The United States Postal Service lists December 20th as the last day to post letters for arrival by Christmas! In the early 20th century, artsy students at the Ethical Culture School in Manhattan printed Christmas festival programs on the school’s own press. Most of the illustrations feature motifs you might...

The post Ethical Christmas Wishes 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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