Have you ever wanted to ask Ben Franklin about his infamous kite experiment? Or his time as the first United States Ambassador to France? Or maybe just how to play a good game of chess? The real founding father may be gone, but you might forget that while speaking to Jack Sherry, an American History teacher…

What does smallpox have to do with American history? According to David Rosner, Ph.D., Co-Director, Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University, advisor to the exhibition BE SURE! BE SAFE! GET VACCINATED! Smallpox, Vaccination and Civil Liberties in New York, everything. In this three-part series, written by Rosner, we’ll take a…

by Timothy Wroten On March 22, 1765, British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a direct tax imposed specifically on printed materials sold in the American colonies. News of the Stamp Act’s passage in 1765 ignited a firestorm from New Hampshire to Georgia (though apparently not in Britain’s Caribbean or Canadian domains). No one in any…

Our current exhibition Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn is full of historic documents, artifacts and art, designed to put you in the shoes of people fighting for freedom across the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But between the pamphlets and portraits, you’ll find one piece that’s distinctly modern: a sugar-paste sculpture of Versailles. And for…

What did you do on Christmas morning? Slowly sipped coffee as you rustled through your stockings? Chatted with friends and family at church? Stealthily crossed a frigid river for a surprise attack against Hessian forces? That last one is what George Washington did in 1776 at the Battle of Trenton, a moment that artist Mort Künstler…

What do Americans do when they feel their government, isn’t representing them? In 1765, we revolted. That year Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which taxed all paper documents in the colonies. And according to the New Yorker, the revolutionary narrative is not so different than it is today: “The protests began because people felt that the…

Many objects in the Luce Center, where nearly 40,000 objects from the New-York Historical Society’s permanent collection are displayed, are beautiful to look at. But they are also intriguing portals into the past, making us wonder “Why these objects? What makes them so important?” The answer lies in not what they are, but the story…