Category Archives: General
A Drunken Bookbinder in the Stacks?
This post was written by Henry Raine, Director of Digital Programs and Library Technical Services Contrary to popular belief, previously unknown treasures rarely turn up in the stacks of a great research library. Most collections are cataloged, and even if they aren’t, curators, librarians and archivists tend to know what they have in their collections. [...]
The Pastoral Records of Frederick W. Geissenhainer
This post was written by Bob Greiner who is working on behalf of the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society to index the Reverend Frederick W. Geissenhainer records at the New-York Historical Society . The Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at the New-York Historical Society maintains the pastoral records of the Reverend Frederick W. Geissenhainer in its manuscript collection [...]
Snake Oil Almanacs: Patent Medicine Advertising in the 19th Century
This post was written by cataloger Catherine Falzone. The Patricia D. Klingenstein Library of the New-York Historical Society has a number of almanacs that were printed as advertisements by patent medicine companies. Most people in the nineteenth century bought an almanac every year and considered them trustworthy sources of information. Unscrupulous patent medicine manufacturers capitalized [...]
Postmortem photography at the turn of the 20th century
By Joe Festa, Print Room Reference Assistant Today, photographs of dead humans are seen as taboo, and talk of death is almost always avoided at all costs. But this hasn’t always been the case. During the 19th- and early 20th-centuries, capturing the image of a corpse was commonplace, and was viewed as a normal, culturally acceptable [...]
NYC 2012: Imagining the Olympic Games in New York City
From 2000-2005, New York planned a bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympic games. It was New York City’s first bid to host an Olympics and was managed by Daniel Doctoroff and his private non-profit organization, NYC2012. New York City was one of five candidates for the games but came in fourth behind London, [...]
Croquet, an Olympic Sport?
It was in 1900, for the first and only time. The 1900 Olympics, held in Paris, were also the first which allowed women to compete (an Olympic tradition which has, happily, had a longer track record than croquet). According to Olympic games historian Bill Mallon, two women competed (with other men) in a croquet [...]
Before Rosa Parks: Taking on New York’s Segregated Street Car Companies
Post written by Eric Robinson So much has been written about the struggle against slavery and segregation in the American south that it is easy to forget that race relations in the north have been just as knotty. It is comparatively unknown that nineteenth-century New York City’s public transportation systems were racially segregated: African-Americans were [...]
Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
It sounds like an easy question, right? Well, Thomas Jefferson certainly wrote it — in terms of authorship. But do you know whose hand it was that literally produced the famous handwritten copy? If you’re not sure, don’t worry, historians aren’t completely certain either. That said, there is consensus that it was “probably” Timothy Matlack, of [...]
