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Shelley Mulitz
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“Flaco was bigger than life.” As our acclaimed exhibition enters its final weeks, watch our in-depth exploration of the Flaco phenomenon with the people who experienced it firsthand. From the act of vandalism that allowed him to escape his Central Park enclosure to his months aloft over Manhattan to his untimely death, our short documentary looks back at what the majestic Eurasian eagle owl meant to New Yorkers.

The Year of Flaco

On the eve of Donald Trump’s second term and a new GOP-controlled Congress, many New Yorkers are wondering what the next four years will mean for our city—from housing to education to immigration to transportation. NYC Council Members Erik Bottcher, Gale Brewer, and Rita Joseph talk to WNYC's Arun Venugopal about what changes we might see on a local level and what citizens can do to protect the values of New York City.

Our City, Trump, and the New Congress: A Community Forum

Russell Shorto, acclaimed author of The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America and the curator of New York Before New York: The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam, discusses some of the stories behind the exhibition, including a map depicting the New Amsterdam at its height, a letter discussing the "purchase" of Manhattan by the Dutch from the Lenape, and a collection of artifacts known as Mpungu, attributed to Africans living in the colony who were likely enslaved.

Russell Shorto on "New York Before New York: The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam"

Russell Shorto on New York Before New York: The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam

A special talk about the upcoming election season and the LGBTQ+ community with Melissa Sklarz, the first transgender elected official in New York. A judicial delegate since the 1990s, she has served on many trans rights legislative committees, including Stonewall Democrats and Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats, and was a delegate for the DNC in 2016. She discusses the urgency of the moment as well as her vision for a more just, trans-inclusive future.

Vote Louder! Election Year Impact on the LGBTQ+ Community

Vote Louder! Election Year Impact on the LGBTQ+ Community

In their podcast series Fiasco: Vigilante, Leon Neyfakh and Madeline Kaplan explore the 1984 subway shooting of four Bronx teenagers that turned a man named Bernhard Goetz into a nationally recognized figure. In conversation with curator Meredith Mann, Neyfakh and Kaplan discuss the event and how our Patricia D. Klingenstein Library collections played a role in their research.

The Subway Vigilante // Primary Source

Slavery, race, community, and family were vital to the history and development of colonial New Amsterdam and New York. Examining familial and community networks of diverse women, especially enslaved women, reveals multiracial and dynamic connections among ordinary people who shaped the trajectory of the city’s history. In this program, historians Nicole Maskiell and Deborah Hamer discuss various aspects of women’s community building, what it meant to have a family network, and what these connections tell us about slavery in Manhattan.    

Nicole Maskiell is an Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. Her book, Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry, centers slavery as a crucial component to the rise and enduring influence of the moneyed Northeastern elite.   

Deborah Hamer is Director of the New Netherland Institute, where she is responsible for initiatives aimed at identifying, preserving, digitizing, and translating Dutch language documents in repositories around the world. She is a historian of the Dutch Atlantic world and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.  

Live From New Amsterdam is an ongoing series hosted by the New Netherland Institute and the New Amsterdam Project at the New-York Historical Society. Through vibrant conversations with scholars and historians, each program will investigate new and exciting research related to New Amsterdam, New Netherland, and the lasting legacies of Dutch rule in New York.  

Diana’s Child: Enslaved Communities and New York History // Live From New Amsterdam

Diana’s Child: Enslaved Communities and New York History

Celebrate International Women's Day with renowned Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick, who joins New-York Historical's Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto in conversation. WalkingStick is the focus of our acclaimed exhibition Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School, which places her work in a fascinating dialogue with 19th-century Hudson River School paintings and explores the relationship between Indigenous art and American art history. They discuss WalkingStick's remarkable career and her decades of work reimagining and reframing the American landscape. 

A Conversation  with Kay WalkingStick // Women's History Salons

How does a man like Donald Trump—simultaneously hailed as an all-American hero and condemned as a harbinger of the end of American democracy—become not only a cultural phenomenon, but the president of the United States? Maggie Haberman, the New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the 45th president, offers insight into his background, his motivations, and the true nature of his personality, not to mention the means by which he gained a seat in the Oval Office.  

Maggie Haberman, a senior political correspondent for the New York Times and a political analyst for CNN, is the author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. David M. Rubenstein (moderator), co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, is the author of How to Invest: Masters on the Craft and the host of History with David Rubenstein on PBS.

Confidence Man with Maggie Haberman // The American Story

The New-York Historical Society's new installation New York Before New York: The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam is organized around the Castello Plan, a map depicting New Amsterdam around the peak of its settlement circa 1660. A key part of the installation is a digital 3D model created by the New Amsterdam History Center. Check out a sneak peek of what the model looks like and how it brings the 17th-century outpost to life. 

The Castello Plan—3D Model

Hear from curators from the Center For Women's History as they discuss the importance of Women's Work, an exhibition currently on view at the New-York Historical Society. The exhibition showcases approximately 45 objects from the Museum and Library collections to demonstrate how “women’s work” defies categorization.  

What is "Women's Work"? // Center for Women's History

Did Lyndon Johnson always believe in civil rights, even though he fought against legislation early in his career? Biographer Robert Caro says yes and explains how he conveyed this in the final draft of a page from his The Years of Lyndon Johnson biography by linking two key moments: a telephone call Johnson had with civil rights leader Roy Wilkins and Johnson's time as a teacher during his college years.

Lyndon B. Johnson Final Draft // Inside the Robert Caro Archive

Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive: A Page from The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson

"I see the painting Niagara as one of the best paintings I've ever made," says Kay WalkingStick in this video about the artist and her landmark painting that's on view through April 14, 2024, as part of the exhibition Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School. Curator Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto contextualizes the work, which recently became the first painting by a Native artist to join New-York Historical's collection. 

Kay WalkingStick on Her Painting "Niagara" [Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School]

An exciting new exhibition explores the history of the New York City Marathon through the activism and innovation of the New York Pioneer Club and the New York Road Runners, two New York-based running organizations that revolutionized long distance running in the United States. A defining characteristic of the Marathon is that it remains open to all non-professional runners regardless of race, gender, age, or ability.

Running for Civil Rights examines the early days of that promise by exploring the leadership and legacy of two African Americans, runner Ted Corbitt (1919–2007) and civil rights activist Joseph Yancey (1910–1991), a co-founder of the interracial New York Pioneer Club in Harlem in 1936. Between 1942 and 1976 these two men, their clubs, and the accomplishments of their members would prove instrumental in democratizing long-distance running in the US and creating the ethos associated with the Marathon today.

Running for Civil Rights

Before it became Central Park, the more than 800 acres of land in the middle of Manhattan was the site of farms, churches, businesses, wars, burial grounds, and homes to many different kinds of New Yorkers. Before Central Park author Sara Cedar Miller, historian emerita at the Central Park Conservancy and Valerie Paley, senior vice president and Sue Ann Weinberg Director of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, discuss the materials Miller uncovered at New-York Historical, and how much of that history still echoes in Central Park today.   

Primary Source is a series of free and public programs exploring how the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at the New-York Historical Society supports new research and historical inquiry. Presented in our renowned Reading Room, enjoy these behind-the-scenes conversations about New York's past and present, deeply grounded in the Library's rich collections.

Before Central Park // Primary Source Series

Discover our 2023 exhibition about the work and influence of J.C. Leyendecker, a preeminent illustrator and gay artist who helped shape American visual culture in the first three decades of the 20th century through captivating advertising campaigns including the legendary “Arrow Collar Man” and countless covers for the Saturday Evening Post. As a gay artist whose illustrations for a mainstream audience often had unspoken homoerotic undertones, his work is especially revealing for what it says about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality of the period.

Watch a recording from our live, online program series for New-York Historical Members, featuring Rebecca Klassen, curator of material culture join guest curator Donald Albrecht; project advisor Monica L. Miller, professor of English and Africana Studies at Barnard College; and George Chauncey, professor of American history at Columbia University as they discuss the exhibition.

Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity // Curator Confidential

Curator Confidential: Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity

In a recording from our program on April 12, 2023, physicist and mathematician Brian Greene and journalist Faith Salie explore the past and future of the cosmos—from the big bang to the closest science can take us to the very end—illuminating essential questions of human existence.  

This program is also part of the World Science Festival’s Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter and Meaning

Have you seen the five-painting series The Course of Empire? New-York Historical Society curator Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto introduces one of the signature pieces in our collection and artist Thomas Cole's magnum opus, a large-scale landscape series—created between 1833 and 1836—that charts the birth and death of an imaginative empire. 

In the late 1820s, the young Thomas Cole quickly built a successful career as a painter of Hudson River landscapes, but he harbored ambitions of turning the landscape form to a larger purpose. As early as 1827 he conceived a cycle of paintings that would illustrate the rise and fall of a civilization, and a few years later he began sketching and developing his ideas. In 1833, he secured a commission from New York merchant Luman Reed to paint a cycle of five paintings for the art gallery in his home. 

The resulting series consists of The Savage State, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, Destruction, and Desolation. In it, Cole presented a cyclical view of history in which a civilization appears, matures, and collapses. The artist's distinctly pessimistic vision differed from that of many of his peers; in the early years of the United States' history, its future was considered limitless. Cole drew from a number of literary sources, such as Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Byron's epic Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The motto he attached to the series was taken from Byron's popular poem: "First freedom, then glory; when that fails, wealth, vice, corruption." The artist finally settled on a title in 1835, taken from Bishop George Berkeley's 1729 poem, "Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America," which begins "Westward the Course of Empire takes its way." 

The five paintings follow a dramatic narrative arc, anchored by the imperturbable mountain in the background, and expounded with rich and complex symbolic systems that illustrate this imaginary world's history, including the course of the sun across the sky, the changing relation of man to nature, the role of animals, the arts, and the military, and even the placement and character of his own signature. 

Luman Reed, Cole's generous patron, did not live to see the completion of the series. He died in June of 1836, but Reed's family encouraged Cole to complete the work. The series was exhibited to great acclaim in New York later that year. The Course of Empire, along with the rest of Reed's collection, became the core of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts. That group of works was donated to the New-York Historical Society in 1858, forming the foundation of its acclaimed collection of American landscape painting.

"The Course of Empire" by Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire: A Curator's Introduction

Renowned historian and Thomas Jefferson scholar Annette Gordon-Reed talks about her lifelong fascination with the third president, her research into his relationship with Sally Hemings, and why it's crucial to study Jefferson’s life and legacy despite his many flaws. “You constantly have to rewrite history and revise,” she says. “Every historian asks questions that grow out of what’s going on in their time.” 

Thomas Jefferson Today with Annette Gordon-Reed

Historian David W. Blight looks back on Frederick Douglass' "barnburner" of a speech, “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” that he delivered on July 5, 1852 in Rochester, NY. This masterful piece of oratory managed to simultaneously condemn the horrors of slavery and honor the Founding Fathers, encompassing both the hypocrisy and the promise of America. 

Frederick Douglass & the Fourth of July with David W. Blight

Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July with David W. Blight

New-York Historical's exhibition “Turn Every Page”: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive showcases never-before-seen highlights from life and career of Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author behind such masterful biographies as The Power Broker and the multi-volume series The Years of Lyndon Johnson. 

In this clip, Caro gives us the inside story of one of the key sections in The Power Broker, his 1974 biography of NYC infrastructure planner Robert Moses. He describes the day that he and his wife, Ina, tallied the racial makeup of the crowds visiting Jones Beach State Park, demonstrating on paper what a profound effect Robert Moses’ own racism had on the history of New York.

Jones Beach Tally // Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive

Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive: Jones Beach Tally

Group of teenage boys watching a television at the Tompkins Square Building, New York City, 1949. Boys' Club of New York records. Series VII: Photographs.

Enjoy these free videos, including select talks, New York City trivia clips, and interviews with renowned scholars. 

Browse our extensive library of videos related to exhibitions, programs, and educational initiatives. 

Video Library

Champion History

Video Library

Champion History

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