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…

This post is one in a quarterly series in which the New-York Historical Society highlights the collections for which detailed finding aids were published over the prior three months. All collections receive at least a summary description in our catalog, Bobcat. But many collections have such depth or are simply so large or complex that…

“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…

“Victory depends in large measure on the increased war production we are able to get from our factories and arsenals…This is total war. We are all under fire…soldiers and civilians alike-no one is a spectator. To win we must fight, and to fight we must produce.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Army Navy “E” Award,…

Each Christmas during his presidency Franklin Roosevelt engaged the United States Government Printing Office to produce a limited edition of his writing for distribution as gifts to friends, associates and family members. In 1944, he selected his D-Day prayer, shown here, which he recited in his radio address in which he informed the American public…

In the same way that catalogers and archivists make collections accessible through improved arrangement and description, conservators work to make those same collections stable for researchers to use them. But the paper and book conservation lab at the New-York Historical Society didn’t open until the late 1980s. Instead, its predecessor was an in-house bindery that…