Posts from Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

In this episode, NYPL's Melanie Locay and Amy Sohn, New York Times bestselling author of The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship & Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age, discussed Sohn's research into a critical moment in the history of anti-censorship and reproductive rights activism in America. In 1873, the Comstock law passed, penalizing the mailing of contraception and obscenity with harsh sentences and steep fines.  Anthony Comstock, special agent to the Post Office and the law's namesake, viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family. Between 1873 and the 

In this episode, Doc Chat paid homage to a remarkable Inuit performer and considered how she appealed to and defied stereotypes as an Indigenous woman in modern American society.

Los esqueletos, las calaveras y los huesos son imágenes esenciales que usamos en Halloween para causar espanto. Estas también son imprescindibles para el Día de Muertos, una celebración mexicana que se está volviendo más conocida en los Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, para el Día de Muertos, esos esqueletos, calacas y calaveras no tienen el objetivo primordial de dar miedo.

In Episode Thirty-Three, NYPL’s Sara Spink and Ian Fowler discussed the 1811 Commissioners’ Map and Survey of Manhattan Island, featured in the Library’s newly opened The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures.

In this episode, NYPL's Paloma Celis Carbajal and Jelicia Jimenez were joined by Bronwen Maxson of the University of Oregon to discuss how issues of identity, particularly as relates to immigrant communities in the U.S., have shaped discovery tools such as library catalogs in far-reaching ways. They also examined the role of student activism in catalyzing change.

In this episode, Bogdan Horbal, Curator of the NYPL's Slavic and East European Collections, and Yasha Klots, Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at Hunter College, CUNY, discussed tamizdat, the contraband Russian literature published outside of the Soviet Union.

In this episode, historians Michelle Commander and Christopher Willoughby discussed the racialization of disease in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, analyzing a 1802 medical advice manual for treating enslaved people in the Caribbean and a 1799 pamphlet that argues that blackness (skin color) is a form of leprosy.

The books that English artist Charles Ricketts and his partner Charles Shannon designed for Oscar Wilde offer insight about a network of support between gay men in the publishing industry in the United Kingdom.

Lista de recursos en línea gratuitos para ayudarle a profundizar en los muchos aspectos de la historia y la cultura latinx e hispana, todo gratis con una tarjeta de la biblioteca.

List of free online resources to help you delve into the many aspects of Latinx & Hispanic history and culture, all free with a library card.

In this episode, NYPL's Lyudmila Sholokhova was joined by Jonathan Schorsch of the University of Potsdam. They discussed Schorsch's new publication, 'The Remarkable Life of Luis Moses Gomez', which explores one of New York's most prominent Sephardic Jewish merchant families from the 18th century.

In this episode, NYPL's Andy McCarthy and author and journalist Mark Harris considered what it means to analyze moments in history that do not align with the social ethics, cultural standards, and popular beliefs of the current moment.

The discovery of an accurate and reliable method of determining longitude took four centuries of study. Without this and other innovations in pre-modern navigation, we’d be lost.

In this episode NYPL's Bogdan Horbal and Samuel Casper of Hunter College delved into Dmitrii Moor's 1919 propaganda poster Sud narodnyi (The People's Court). They offered a close analysis of the evocative imagery in the print, which is a satirical procession depicting the various strata of late Imperial Russian society swept away by the Revolutions of 1917.

In honor of Pride Month in June, the Dorot Jewish Division recognizes the achievements of LGBT Jews in history and in the Library’s collection. Here are some key moments and figures.

In this episode, NYPL's Paloma Celis Carbajal and Óscar A. Pérez, Assistant Professor of Spanish at Skidmore College, explored cultural expressions in Mexico during the influenza pandemics of 1918 and 2009 through newspapers and other digitized materials.

In Episode Twenty-Seven, NYPL's Carmen Nigro and Annie Polland, President of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, examined photos taken by inspectors of the New York City Tenement House Department and discussed reform, regulation, and social conditions in Depression-era NYC.

In this episode, Bridgett Pride and Kadiatou Tubman of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture discussed ways that they have used zines and zine-making projects to help students of all ages explore historical research, express their creativity, and envision themselves as historians.

In this episode, NYPL’s Elizabeth Cronin and art historian Katherine Manthorne discuss Manthorne's new book, 'Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex', which tells the story of the most famous woman American artist you’ve probably never heard of.