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…

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 West’s relationship with Hebrew is a complex and sometimes contradictory story. The study of Hebrew by Christians, or “Christian Hebraism,” which emerged in the Renaissance and continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and beyond, was generally not a reflection of its adherents’ interest in Jewish contemporaries, or Judaism, per se. Rather, knowledge of the…

This post was written by Alison Barr, Manuscript Department volunteer With the advent and popularity of NASCAR in America, long forgotten is New York’s road racing circuit in the tradition of the European Grand Prix. Between the two wars, in 1934, the Collier Brothers (Barron, Samuel and Miles) and Thomas Dewart founded The Automobile Racing…

Scrapbooks are unpredictable. Each page turn may reveal some obscure, interesting piece of ephemera, photograph or letter. But it’s still a bit surprising to unearth x-rays of a man’s head and chest as we found in one of  two enormous scrapbooks of Melville E. Stone Jr. Born in Chicago in 1874, Stone was an 1897 graduate of Harvard…