Category Archives: Collections
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 [...]
A Castle on the Hudson: the Bannerman Island Story
Post written by Ashley Todd, a fall intern at N-YHS who processed the Bannerman Family Papers. The collection was generously donated by Virginia Betts in 2011. If you have ever taken the Metro-North Hudson Line train to Poughkeepsie then you are probably familiar with the haunting castle ruins that sit on a small island between [...]
A Spurious Thanksgiving
In 1900, The Century Co. published Colonial Days & Ways, by Helen Evertson Smith, a description of life in New York and Connecticut during that period. According to Smith, the book is largely derived from papers found “tucked away under the eaves in old baskets of Indian make, or in open pine-wood boxes, and even in [...]
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 [...]
Veterans Day: Remembering World War I
At 5 a.m. on November 11, 1918, the United States and its allies concluded an armistice with Germany. Later that morning, at 11 a.m. French time, World War I hostilities came to an end after one concluding salvo. In America, the day became known as Armistice Day until Congress substituted “Veterans” in 1954 to expand [...]
Albert Gallatin — a Big (Swiss) Cheese
“Forgotten” — undeservedly — is the adjective most commonly applied to Swiss-born statesman Albert Gallatin, whose personal papers reside in the N-YHS library. Born to a highly regarded but not particularly wealthy family in Geneva in 1761, he left nineteen years later to seek his fortune in America while the budding nation was still in [...]
An Occasion for a Rare “Screaming” Headline
Written by Mariam Touba, N-YHS Reference Librarian Even as we are told that newspapers are a dying medium, each of us can remember their banner headlines announcing momentous events. Such headlines, however, did not always come with newspapers. How then did early newspapers alert their readers to important occurrences? The answer is, “very subtly,” at [...]
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 [...]
Taking the Plunge: Pools of New York City
It may come as a surprise that the so-called concrete jungle of New York City has no fewer than 54 outdoor pools maintained by the Department of Parks and Recreation. Astoria Park Pool. Geographic File, PR 020. New Yorkers have been taking the plunge in the Big Apple since the late 1800s, when the state [...]
