This post was written by Jill Reichenbach, Reference Librarian, Department of Prints, Photographs and Architectural Collections  One of the highlights of the World War II Photograph Collection, which includes press photos and promotional material created by the U.S. War Department, are the shots of women working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, ca. 1942-44. The war-time shortage…

This post was written by AHMC cataloger Miranda Schwartz. The correspondence of three women in the American Historical Manuscript Collection (AHMC) provides an enlightening look at political and public engagement by nineteenth-century American women activists. On July 3, 1841, abolitionist, pacifist, and women’s rights advocate Abby Kelley Foster wrote a lengthy and impassioned letter to…

This post was written by Nina Nazionale, Director of Library Operations. The Social Security Act, a program through which employers and employees contribute money to an account to be drawn upon in retirement, went into effect in November 1936. During the next seven months, 30 million Americans applied and were issued cards, each printed with…

This post was written by Marybeth Kavanagh, Reference Archivist As a previous blog post has explained, Yellowstone National Park was established by Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872. Yellowstone was the first National Park in the U.S. and is also widely held to be the first national park in the world….

This post was written by Mariam Touba, Reference Librarian for Printed Collections. Building, changing, “developing” has always been New York City’s heritage, especially in the years before landmarking became law.  But nineteenth-century New Yorkers did value one relic from its past, a living relic, no less, and one that met its doom 150 years ago…

This post was written by Matthew Murphy, Head of Cataloging and Metadata. In honor of Black History Month, the American Historical Manuscript Collection staff would like to share an item that really resonated with us. It is a note, signed by Booker T. Washington, and dated November 15, 1906. In the note, Washington states “The strongest and…

This post was written by Mariam Touba, Reference Librarian for Printed Collections. Popular culture now makes it known how much Aaron Burr believed in the education of women, endorsing “with avidity and prepossession” what he would read in Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.  He applied these principles to the upbringing…

This post was written by Clare Manias, Enhanced Conservation Work Experience (ECWE) Assistant Near the end of the Civil War, lithographer George John Kerth was stationed with the 96th Civilian Corps, New York State Volunteers, at Dover Mines, Virginia. On June 19, 1865 he received a blank sketchbook (N-YHS museum accession no. X.433), which he…

The West’s relationship with Hebrew is a complex and sometimes contradictory story. The study of Hebrew by Christians, or “Christian Hebraism,” which emerged in the Renaissance and continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and beyond, was generally not a reflection of its adherents’ interest in Jewish contemporaries, or Judaism, per se. Rather, knowledge of the…