On Our 250th
On July 4, 2026, the United States will celebrate its 250th anniversary, and The New York Historical will be a center of those commemorations.
Join us at The New York Historical—both in person and online—for a suite of exhibitions, programs, and a digital project called On Our 250th that has a nationwide coalition of history museums inviting Americans to share their hopes for our democracy.
Exhibitions
Fall 2025
Declaring the Revolution: America’s Printed Path to Independence, featuring prints from the David M. Rubenstein Americana Collection, including testimony from Benjamin Franklin on the Stamp Act, political essays from John Adams, a 1733 engraving of Magna Carta, and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.
Stirring the Melting Pot: Photographs from The New York Historical Collection, which uses our vast photography collections as a lens to showcase the immigrant experience in New York.
Early 2026:
Revolutionary Women, which reveals the little known and under-explored achievements of women in the years leading up to, during, and following the Revolutionary War.
Spring 2026
Who were the people of the Dutch Golden Age who founded the colony that would become New York? What drove them to set sail and colonize? A dazzling array of more than 60 Dutch Old Master paintings, Old Masters and New Amsterdam features works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Frans Hals, Jan Lievens, and Jan Steen, and provides viewers with clues into the Dutch society that spawned New York.
Summer 2026:
Democracy Matters, featuring historical objects from The New York Historical’s Museum and Library collections, along with contemporary artwork in conversation with the legacy of 1776.
Finally, we’ll look back to when the US celebrated our bicentennial with the show “You Should be Dancing”: New York, 1976 and a moment when New York City was in crisis—facing near bankruptcy and spiking crime—and the city’s youth rescued and reinvigorated it through musical genres like disco, punk, and hip hop.
