Snow. Blizzards. We complain, dread the commute and the shoveling and—especially for New York City dwellers—the slush. But, in truth, we love the excitement, especially when the inches pile up and produce record numbers, and photographers—amateur and professional—can roam the streets. This becomes clearer when we look through the collections of the New-York Historical Society….

This post was written by cataloger Catherine Falzone. The American Historical Manuscript Collection (AHMC) contains a wealth of manuscript materials by Americans both famous and obscure. For April’s “AHMC of the Month,” we turn to someone from the latter category: amateur astronomer James H. Gardiner (approximately 1845-1889) of Newburgh, N.Y. In a letter to James Wells from March…

We hadn’t even started changing the climate, and Wall Street could only be understood in a literal sense, but the title page of a tract published in 1753 captures the spirit of this week’s protests perfectly, viz: America Dissected, being a Full and True Account of all the Colonies, showing the Intemperance of the Climates;…

Above-average temperatures at other times of year may raise alarms of global warming, but autumn heat waves are still fondly referred to as “Indian summer.” So where does the term come from, and what exactly does it mean? A number of explanations have been advanced over the years, including the following: 1. In 1804, Charles…

Have you ever read a description of some idyllic, sun-soaked historical moment and wondered how a historian could have assembled such an image? Sometimes it’s pure fabrication, but if a researcher “does it by the book” there actually are sources for such details, even before official meteorological records were kept. According to the Encyclopedia of New York,…