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…

Given its links to Massachusetts, it may come as a surprise to many that the earliest surviving text of “Christian Charitie. A Modell hereof” (more commonly called “A Model of Christian Charity”) resides in New York.  A lay sermon attributed to the Puritan John Winthrop, the once unheralded manuscript came to the New-York Historical Society from Francis…

This Sunday will be the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I, a war that remains etched in the collective memory for the physical and psychological toll wrought on those who lived through it. With that in mind, it seems fitting to mark this occasion through the words of a soldier who…

During the Revolutionary War, printed maps provided the public with the only pictorial representation of battles being fought in the American colonies. Through a powerful combination of text and image, maps conveyed precise details of battles and the geographic settings in which they took place. The majority of battle maps were printed in London where…

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 is by cataloger Catherine Falzone. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), New England preacher and theologian, is perhaps most famous for the 1741 sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and for being a central figure in the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening. If you know him just from that sermon,…

This post was written by Julita Braxton, AHMC Cataloger. On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after Lincoln granted freedom to all persons enslaved within rebellious states through the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation, word finally reached Galveston, Texas. It was on this date that Union soldiers brought news that the war had…

This post was written by Miranda Schwartz, cataloging technician. The New-York Historical Society Library has a collection of eighteen letters by Louisa May Alcott, best known as the author of the 1868 novel Little Women, a classic of American children’s literature. The Alcott letters are in the American Historical Manuscripts Collection, a trove of 12,000 small…

While preparing for a presentation about the intellectual foundations of American political thought, I consulted Donald Lutz’s book A Preface to American Political Theory which offers an interesting introduction into an extremely complicated aspect of American history. Among several things that piqued my interest was Lutz’s discussion of the Enlightenment origin and conception of “political science,” a term…