Posts from the General Research Division

Including genealogy, the performing arts, LGBT studies and more.

Translation, writes Edith Grossman in Why Translation Matters, “permits us to savor the transformation of the foreign into the familiar and for a brief time to live outside our own skins, our own preconceptions and misconceptions."

Understanding that they, as young people, are historical actors and that their lives are worthy of scholarly analysis can be a profoundly empowering experience.

La forma en que representamos hechos y personajes históricos tiene una fascinante manera de cambiar con el tiempo. Tomemos, por ejemplo, el Cinco de Mayo, también conocido en México como la Batalla de Puebla.

It is not Mexican Independence Day—ultimately, it's a holiday about being proud of your ancestry.

Our Digital Collections are rich with subway material including a collection of photographs by Alen MacWeeney that capture the quirkiness, diversity, and grittiness of late 1970s New York.

Explore our rich online-accessible resources that can help teachers tackle the Reconstruction era.

How did chocolate and Valentine's Day get linked anyway?

Two hundred years after Walt Whitman's birth, a new NYPL exhibition at the New York Public Library examines many of the individuals, beliefs, and experiences that shaped Whitman’s work, and features Whitman's impact on foreign writers and literatures, including Russian authors.

Slavic newspapers are available through the Library’s database, Press Reader, which provides access to current newspapers from around the world in full-color and full-page format.

With the passing of poet John Ashbery, we have been reflecting on where we've found him in the collection—not just as author, but as translator, editor, interviewee, blurb writer, and even lyricist.

Philosophy, as it is practiced today, is abstract, theoretical, and detached from life. In the Greco-Roman world, it was something quite different. Philosophy was a way of life.

Will Eisner is commonly recognized as the father of the graphic novel and is considered one of the most innovative and influential comic book artists of the 20th century.

Ever since its launch in 1925, the New Yorker has been a fixture of newsstands, coffee tables, and commuter bags. The New York Public Library recently acquired the New Yorker Digital Archive, a database that provides access to every issue of the New Yorker, often including new issues days before their print release. Now you can read the New Yorker from home, school, or anywhere else in the world with an internet connection and your library card.

As if by magic, books can now be delivered from underground to the Rose Main Reading Room in five minutes flat. The Library’s new, $2.6 million “book train” connects the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building's iconic reading room to the Milstein Research Stacks underground. All told, 4 million volumes can be stored in the state-of-the-art facility under Bryant Park—and librarians can conjure them with a touch of a button.

What many may not realize is that before becoming a household name in fantasy, Martin began as a science fiction writer, also dabbling in other genres like horror. Finding these early works can be challenging because Martin’s short stories, novellas, and novelettes were often published in pulp magazines.

Everyone's talking about the ten dollar Founding Father these days. If you are researching the Revolutionary Era, the New York Public Library's database American Founding Era Papers is for you.

Opening ceremonies are a few days away, and so the eyes of the world are turning to Rio and the beginning of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. With dozens of events, some more obscure to American viewers than others, it might be time to read up on the ins and outs of these sports.

These new magazine and newspaper titles are international in scope, covering nine cities, six countries, and three continents. Whether you're interested in WWII-era Russia or last year's Chanel couture runway, the only passport you'll need is your library card.