This post is by Anne Boissonnault, Archives Intern August 2nd marks a particularly lofty day in New York’s history of aeronautics. On that date in 1819, Louis Charles Guillé ascended in a balloon full of hydrogen gas over Vauxhall Gardens in Manhattan (a pleasure garden and theater near present day Astor Place) and descended using a parachute….

This post was written by Margaret Kaczorowski, an archivist processing New-York Historical Society’s institutional archives on a project generously funded by the Leon Levy Foundation. Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. ― Henry James Summer is in full swing, and it is…

Few things inspire curiosity like a George Washington letter…or a letter about spies. This past fall, a very generous donor presented to the New-York Historical Society a most interesting item: a George Washington letter about spies! Dated August 21, 1780, Washington writes to Major Benjamin Tallmadge regarding the Culper Spy Ring, one of Washington’s most successful intelligence-gathering networks during the American…

It’s National Bike Month again, and it so happens that Albert B. Barkman’s Road-Book of Long Island (1886) recently crossed our path. It’s an unassuming book at best, but like a great deal of our collections, when given a dose of context it turns out to be an interesting little piece of bicycling and mapmaking history. The Road-Book contains…