With the 20th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001 approaching the coming months will bring many remembrances of the tragic loss of life and destruction of the World Trade Center buildings. Given these somber events, and that these buildings once symbolized New York City in a way few others have, my discovery last…

In 1735, Fort Hunter, today just a half hour ride from Schenectady, was an outpost of colonial settlement. There Queen Anne had ordered the erection of the fort in 1711 at the behest of neighboring Mohawks. Included was a chapel that became a hub for various missionaries to the local Indigenous and European inhabitants. Among…

For an institution that’s been growing since 1804, the odd outlier is hardly a surprise. A rather remarkable one is a set of original manuscripts and fair copies of the work of eighteenth century British historian, Catharine Macaulay. Not only did Macaulay never did live here but the work that minted her status as England’s…

Dorothy B. Porter (later Wesley) was a librarian, curator and bibliographer. These aren’t roles that attract heaps of popular interest, so odds are you haven’t heard of her before this. Regardless, she made important contributions to advance the study of Black history and culture during her long tenure at Howard University. There she played a…

Among the many treasures in the Department of Prints, Photos and Architectural Collections in the Klingenstein Library is the Architect & Engineer File, which, as the name suggests, is a collection of architectural and engineering drawings culled over many years from myriad sources. While retrieving other material in this collection for a researcher a couple…

In case you missed it, February 11th was National Inventors’ Day, so we take a moment to salute those nineteenth-century tinkerers and entrepreneurs who strove to make domestic life easier.  In these cases they chose to advertise their innovations on broadsides, a bibliographer’s term for single-page flyers.  Broadsides often announced the latest news, sometimes even…

A few months ago I came across an 1862 letter from William Cooper Nell, one of the nation’s earliest Black historians, an educator, and abolitionist. In it he discusses work on a second edition of The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, originally published in 1855. It was something of a revelation since I had…

“A Contradiction” was published in the February 29th issue of Freemen’s Standard, an African American-published newspaper. “The statement,” it reads, “in the papers of Wednesday, 26th inst., in regard to Mary Richards, a mulatto, who was arraigned […] on the charge of disorderly conduct, is entirely false.” An alarming recollection of the abuses of the…

By now most of us no longer passively accept the popularized First Thanksgiving narrative. After all, despite its kernels of truth, the story is infused with a mixture of myth and, well, outright fabrication (as we’ve previously seen). Many elements of the story only emerged in the last century too. In fact, historian James Baker…