Author Archives:
Carriers’ Addresses: The Holiday Gratuity, With a Little Flair
Written by Mariam Touba, Reference Librarian It still happens at this time of year, a holiday greeting is slipped under the door from a service provider offering good wishes and a subtle hint to be remembered with an end-of-the-year gratuity. The practice is an old one, but was, in the 18th and 19th centuries, carried [...]
Selling for a song
Peace on earth and good will to men may be in short supply, but there is no time like Christmas to appreciate that nowadays advertising is everywhere. Billboards, newspapers, magazines, television, the Internet, cell phones . . . advertisers will try any means available to get consumers to buy their products. So it’s hardly surprising [...]
African Americans and the World of Tomorrow
Post written by Kenneth Cleary, a summer intern at N-YHS who processed the Paul Gillespie Collection of New York World’s Fair Materials. A rich collection of photographs from the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair is newly available to researchers at the N-YHS library. Donated to N-YHS in May of this year, the Paul Gillespie Collection [...]
Prohibition’s Prelude
As viewers of Ken Burns Prohibition documentary this week will know, there was a year-long lag between the date the 18th Amendment was ratified (January 16, 1919) and the date it went into effect (January 17, 1920). This gave Tin Pan Alley plenty of time to ponder questions like: Bella Landauer Collection of Business and [...]
Making fun of fashion
Fashion week, Alexander McQueen at the Met . . . . lately, we’ve been looking at fashion very seriously. But fashion has always had its funny side too. Take, for example, this 1776 caricature of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Caricature File, PR 010 One of a series of satires by the husband-and-wife team Matthew [...]
