Behind The Scenes

To celebrate the opening of our newest special installation Nature Illuminated: A Tiffany Gallery Preview, the exhibition’s curator who is also the Curator of Decorative Arts here at New-York Historical, Margaret K. Hofer, has signed on as this week’s guest blogger. Her post continues this month’s theme of New York women’s history and illuminates the…

“Write right from left to the right as you see it spelled here.” Did you print your answer? If so, you got it wrong—it should have been written in cursive. “Spell backwards, forwards.” Did you include a comma? Wrong. Did you omit the comma? That’s wrong, too. These are only two of the 30 questions…

To celebrate the upcoming opening of our groundbreaking exhibition, Lincoln and the Jews on March 20, Harold Holzer, the Roger Hertog Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and Chief Historian to the exhibition, has signed on as this week’s guest blogger. In his post, he highlights the show and the exciting history it illuminates. So…

To kick-off our celebration of Women’s Herstory Month, let’s travel back to the groovy days of 1970. Pervasive inequality pushed the Second-wave Feminist Movement forward into the next decade. Its Founding Mothers, including Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem established the National Organization for Women (NOW), a centralized force for change. NOW sponsored the Women’s Strike…

Patron saint of the environmentalist movement and celebrated ornithologist, John James Audubon was the first to sound the alarm. He recognized in the early 1800s that many avian species and their habitats were threated. Almost 200 years later, many of the feathered subjects are endangered or extinct. To see 42 of his original breathtaking watercolors…

In today’s installment of our Black History Month celebration, we’ll be exploring Harlem. The first wave of African Americans landed in Harlem after World War I, when hundreds of thousands left the Jim Crow South in search of safety and opportunity. In 1914, only 50,000 blacks lived in Harlem, but by 1930, almost 205,000 had moved to…

Monday, February 16, marked the 25th anniversary of Keith Haring’s death. To celebrate his life, Haring’s former studio manager and personal friend, Julia Gruen (who in 1989 Haring named Executive Director of the Keith Haring Foundation), offered us her thoughts on Haring’s lasting influence on the art world and popular culture. Today, his works live on as one of the…

By day, Zhi hen Li is an Accountant here at the New-York Historical Society. But, by night, he’s a lion dancer. The Lion Dance is a Chinese tradition and a vital component of Chinese New Year celebrations. As a lion dancer, Zhi wears intricate and colorful lion costumes and mimic the majestic cat in movement….

In 2015, New-York Historical hosted the exhibition Freedom Journey 1965, which highlighted photographer Stephen Somerstein’s powerful images of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March. The protest marked a watershed moment in civil rights history and led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act just months later. During the five-day, 54-mile protest, 25,000 brave individuals—including luminaries like Martin Luther…