Category Archives: Library
A Christmas Carol: One of those quaint, simple, affecting, humoursome things
Holidays evolve — for better or worse. And while there is reason to bemoan the creep of commercialism into every niche of the holiday season, such disappointment is not necessarily as recent as one might think. Charles Dickens’ iconic work, A Christmas Carol: In Prose: Being a ghost story of Christmas arrived in America at a time when contemporaries [...]
A Word about the Weather
Have you ever read a description of some idyllic, sun-soaked historical moment and wondered how a historian could have assembled such an image? Sometimes it’s pure fabrication, but if a researcher “does it by the book” there actually are sources for such details, even before official meteorological records were kept. According to the Encyclopedia of New York, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Occupying Manhattan’s Public Spaces: 1776 and Today
Post written by Eric Robinson. Love it or hate it, the forlorn but determined group camped out at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan thrust New York City back into the center of a national debate. Our city has long been considered a political outlier because of its progressive voting patterns and ability to weather recessions, [...]
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 [...]
Laudanum: A Dose of the Nineteenth Century
Coroner’s report for the suicide of Richard D. Hamilton, 18 August, 1822. BV New York City Coroner’s Reports, MS 1957 A great primary source often elicits a visceral sense of what it meant to live in the moment of the document’s creation. It’s difficult not to have this reaction when reading through two manuscript volumes [...]
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 [...]
