New-York Historical Society

This post is by Ted O’Reilly, Curator & Head of the Manuscript Department Nearly four hundred years ago, in the winter of 1648, a man named Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert drowned in the frigid Hudson River. Bogaert had fallen through the ice while pursued by soldiers from Albany’s Fort Orange. He had arrived in the New…

This post is by Tammy Kiter, Manuscript Reference Librarian. The pursuit of a vegetarian lifestyle is certainly not a new concept. On the contrary, ancient civilizations in India, Asia, Southern Europe and Egypt explored meat-free diets long before the veggie burger was invented. Throughout the Age of Enlightenment and spanning into the early 19th century, England…

This post is by Amanda Bellows, Bernard and Irene Schwartz Fellow. During the nineteenth century, literature became increasingly accessible to Americans thanks to rising literacy rates, decreasing production costs, and advancements in print and distribution technologies. In 1871, Appleton’s Journal of Literature pronounced that recreational reading had become “the most facile distraction, the most available…

Iceland is a nation rich in both history and culture but it’s unlikely to rank very highly among nations you’d expect to find ordering Steinway pianos in the 1940s. Yet it’s curiously well-represented in two account books from the Historical Society’s collections kept by longtime Steinway employee Ralph Tapp. In one example,  Asta Helgadotter [sic] of the Icelandic consulate…

This post is by Clare Manias, Enhanced Conservation Work Experience (ECWE) Assistant. Earlier this year, the New-York Historical Society Conservation Lab treated a sketchbook with drawings by lithographer George John Kerth, a volunteer soldier with the 96th Civilian Corps stationed in Virginia near the end of the Civil War. His sketchbook (N-YHS museum accession number X.433) was filled…

This post is by Jill Reichenbach, Reference Librarian for the Department of Prints, Photographs and Architectural Collections. [*Blog post title taken from the song “Picture Book,” by The Kinks.] The Album File, as its name suggests, is a collection of over 450 photo albums and scrapbooks, with the earliest dating back to the 1860s. The…

This post is by Matthew Murphy, Head of Cataloging and Metadata. Virtually every document in the American Historical Manuscript Collection holds a surprise. Take for example the seemingly nondescript receipt below, given to George H. Yewell to document his payment of $65.00 for cabin passage aboard the ship James Foster Jr. in 1856: Not terribly exciting, but flip…

This post was written by Mariam Touba, Reference Librarian for Printed Collections This week marks the 150th anniversary of New York’s passage of the Tenement House Law of 1867. Loophole-ridden and difficult to enforce, this state law “for the regulation of tenement and lodging-houses in the cities of New York and Brooklyn” nonetheless opened the way…

Joshua Brookes arrived in the United States in 1798 at just twenty-five years of age. It was to be a 5-year tour, which he would document in a journal that now resides in the New-York Historical Society’s collection. Though he sailed back to his native England in 1803, Brookes did not stay away long, coming…