New-York Historical Society

What comes to mind at the mention of astrology? Perhaps zodiac signs and horoscopes? Or maybe millennials, the full moon, and new-age ideas? Today astrology has the less than stellar reputation as the unempirical version of astronomy, and certainly nowhere near the academic realm of science or mathematics. Historically, astrology and science are not as…

Milton Halsey Thomas’ passion for bibliography and history began early. As a high school student in Troy, New York, he spent his free time working on projects for various libraries that included gravestone transcriptions and genealogical research. In 1920, he became “Chatham’s Local Historian” and eventually went on to study library science at Columbia University….

In 1896, construction began on the Williamsburg Bridge, the East River span that would terminate at South Fifth Street and Driggs Avenue in Brooklyn, and Delancey and Clinton Streets in Manhattan. To make way for construction, 26 ½ acres of land were used, evicting about 10,000 people from their homes on either side of the river. The…

The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., printed in New York by a C.S. Van Winkle at 101 Greenwich Street, was published in seven serialized installments from 1819 to 1820. The book was also an entirely pseudonymous affair by none other than Washington Irving, the father of American folklore. The Sketch Book, and in particular…

Will we ever get back to watching baseball at Yankee Stadium? It is a fair and frustrating question. Perhaps, as therapy, it helps to go back in time before Yankee Stadium (either the original or the newer one) was even there.  We get this view from the Subway Construction Photograph Collection, and some parts of…

George B. Post (1837-1913), an American architect trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition, is perhaps best known for his New York City landmark buildings, including the New York Stock Exchange, City College, and the Brooklyn Historical Society. After working as a draftsman for Richard Morris Hunt, Post opened his first architectural firm in New York City…

Archival collections often have variety of printed material and ephemera such as pamphlets, broadsides, books, and maps. Periodically, these offer unexpected perspective on an aspect of history, as is the case with a smallish, three-dimensional 1872 relief map titled Map of the White Mountains N.H. nestled in the papers of Lincoln’s assistant secretary of the navy, Gustavus Vasa Fox. As its name…

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…

The grim new numbers of the cases and deaths from COVID-19 reach us every day. As laypeople, we want to tune them out at times, but they are crucial to medical practice and public health. Certainly, we see that in history: Here is the sobering list of yellow fever deaths at Bellevue Hospital in 1795…