Henry Pelham created an image for the ages. On the snowy night of March 5, 1770, a group of British soldiers were confronted by an unruly crowd of colonists near the Custom House in Boston. The melee that followed ended with the panicked troops firing into the crowd, killing several colonists, including Crispus Attucks, a…

Panoramas are all about spectacle, and the biggest spectacle in New-York Historical’s current exhibition Panoramas: The Big Picture is Claude Samton’s 1986 photomosaic of Manhattan’s Canal St. An immersive work that runs the whole length of one of our galleries, Canal Street is made up of about 2,000 individual photographs that Samton shot and then…

Tycoons love to survey their empires. And in the 1870s, that empire was San Francisco. The city was in a period of ravenous growth fueled by mining discoveries like the 1848 Gold Rush and the Comstock Lode, and the first transcontinental rail line, a feat that made the men behind the Central Pacific Railroad—Mark Hopkins,…

On the evening of July 9, 1776, downtown New York City was in a rebellious mood. The Declaration of Independence had been read aloud that day in lower Manhattan for the first time, announcing to the city that the Revolution against British rule had begun. That night, 40 colonial soldiers and sailors under the command…

John Hancock needed a check-up. New-York Historical’s portrait of the famed signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first governor of Massachusetts is on view as part of the exhibition Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere. However, before it gets installed, the Museum’s Paintings Conservation Lab wanted to learn more about it. New-York Historical actually knows very…

One of the signature elements of New-York Historical’s exhibition Hudson Rising is the imposing, elegant slabs of white pine and red oak that greet visitors. The live-edged trunks evoke the forests of New York State’s Adirondacks and help make the presence of nature palpable. Hudson Rising—closing on Sunday, August 4—presents the Museum’s stellar collection of Hudson River School landscape…

If you were an adventurous visitor to New York City in the 1950s or 1960s, you might have found your way to the 82 Club. A basement nightclub at 82 East Fourth Street, it wasn’t much to look at from the outside. Located in what was then a remote edge of the Lower East Side,…

In the fall of 2018, Niagara Falls left New York. The 1804 painting by Antoine Phillippe d’Orleans, Duc de Montpensier, departed its home at the New-York Historical Society in late September and traveled to France’s Palace of Versailles, where it was part of an exhibition about the July Monarchy, entitled Louis Philippe and Versailles. For a painting that’s…

Growing up in the North Jersey suburbs in the 1960s, I never thought of my family as makers of American history. But looking back on our weekend trips to Bear Mountain and the banks of the Hudson River, I realize that we participated in an important chapter of the 20th century: the flowering of the…