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Kathleen Hulser

Kathleen Hulser is an independent historian who manages cultural projects. She is curator at the New York Transit Museum. Hulser has recently worked on rewriting tours of Gracie Mansion and City Hall. She has taught history, urban studies and American Studies at Pace, New York University and the New School. She is currently working on a film/exhibition project about an early 20th century caricaturist, "Rediscovering Kate Carew."

Arrested Attention: The Women’s House of Detention

June 29, 2022 by Kathleen Hulser Leave a Comment

The Women's House of DetentionThe quick-witted Hugh Ryan has a nose for history, as demonstrated in his book When Brooklyn Was Queer. His latest The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison mines little-known historical sources to point out how a large and vocal population of queer-identified and trans people passed through the old cement monstrosity that used to stand next to today’s Jefferson Market Library in Manhattan‘s Greenwich Village.

Now a community garden, the site is a shout away from the Stonewall Inn, and Ryan writes the story of some of those imprisoned voices left out of the customary tales of the riot. In fact, prisoners set fire to their bedclothes and tossed them from the barred windows overlooking 6th Ave chanting “gay rights, gay rights gay rights.” Even before Stonewall’s impassioned response to police exploitation of gay bars, House of D. queer women, transmasculine people and other women were rioting for their rights in the jail. [Read more…] about Arrested Attention: The Women’s House of Detention

Filed Under: History, New York City Tagged With: Crime and Justice, LGBTQ, Manhattan, New York City, Political History, Social History, womens history

New York 2140: A Climate Change Thriller

March 27, 2017 by Kathleen Hulser Leave a Comment

A global warming apocalypse has been brewing for centuries since the Industrial Revolution converted Western countries and then the world into great carbon emission machines. Some historians divide history up into periods by looking at energy source: from very early fire to wood, wind, water, then on to coal, gas petroleum. Environmental history generates interpretations that resonate with this energy-based view of the past, because industrialization has such dramatic impacts on ecology. [Read more…] about New York 2140: A Climate Change Thriller

Filed Under: Books, History Tagged With: Climate Change, Environmental History, SciFi

Kerry James Marshall: The Master is Present

January 14, 2017 by Kathleen Hulser Leave a Comment

School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012. Kerry James MarshallKerry James Marshall, at the Met Breuer exhibition until January 29, boldly claims center stage in American art with his show entitled “Mastry.” A Chicago-based painter, Marshall seizes the spotlight at the center of conversations about American art at the center of the country’s art scene in New York. His mastery unfurls over a grand expanse of work, complemented by his own selections from the Metropolitan Museum’s collections, a curated sidebar that testifies to his confident deployment of art history in his own work. History, genre, cityscape, portrait – Marshall draws from the visual riches of the past, transforming Western art traditions into his own language. His cityscapes suggest how his paintings reclaim space.  [Read more…] about Kerry James Marshall: The Master is Present

Filed Under: History, New Exhibits Tagged With: Art History, Black History, Cultural History

New World Symphony With Puppets

May 16, 2016 by Kathleen Hulser Leave a Comment

DvorAmHorejsLaMama Theatre on East Fourth Street is where puppets, monsters and actors cavort, presenting classic and cutting-edge performance, whooping and hollering in many languages to stage just about any variety of theater from around the globe.

In March, in the space named after the founder, Ellen Stewart, the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre partnered with Dvorak American Heritage Association to present “The New World Symphony: Dvorak in America,” by Vit Horejs. A jazz trio led by James Brandon Lewis on sax threaded musical commentary on the live and puppet action, adding a contemporary flavor to tales of Dvorak’s musical journeys through American sounds. [Read more…] about New World Symphony With Puppets

Filed Under: History Tagged With: Jazz, Music, Musical History, New York City, Performing Arts, Theatre

Volunteers: Americans Join World War One

March 10, 2016 by Kathleen Hulser 1 Comment

Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas as volunteer drivers, with their Ford "Auntie" They drove ambulances, bandaged the wounded, fed the hungry, ran hospitals and orphanages and raised money. The men and women who volunteered in Europe during the early years of the Great War – when the United States maintained neutrality – forged a template for modern humanitarian efforts.

Their work helped to pioneer ways to negotiate aid around the interests of warring countries, and created the infrastructure for food relief and other efforts. These activities are featured in The Volunteers: Americans Join World War I, 1914-1919, a new teacher’s curriculum launched in conjunction with an exhibition at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, opening in April. [Read more…] about Volunteers: Americans Join World War One

Filed Under: History, New Exhibits Tagged With: Education, womens history, World War One

Wild History Tales From St. Marks Place, NYC

February 14, 2016 by Kathleen Hulser Leave a Comment

Tish and Snooky, punk rock boutique Manic Panic at 33 St. Marks Place.

“The street has provided generation after generation with a mystical flash of belonging… experiences of mortal peril, dissipation and adventure…” writes Ada Calhoun in her new book St. Marks’s Is Dead. Her wry and witty journey through history notes that each generation plunged in the excitement and grunge of the Lower East Side street proclaims its own moment “the golden age,” while bemoaning subsequent events as the death of the place’s “true essence.” That heart might be an immigrant’s dream, revolution, creativity, dissent, fashion experiment or altered consciousness.

Her bedlam of voices making these claims is entertaining and illuminating, the voluble chatter of participants, residents, business folks and dissidents who gave the street its gritty allure. Calhoun conducted over 200 interviews to assemble this history, and they range from obscure rantings of yesteryear to tales of the poor and famous. You will hear from Leon Trotsky, W.H. Auden, Debbie Harry, Klaus Nomi, street people, skate-boarders, drag queens and theater operators. Emma Goldman, famed anarchist, ran the Modern School for a while, where ardent revolutionaries could learn from the works of Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx. Pamela Moore, a pulp novelist of the 1960s described the creative invasion of the 1950s as “their own brand-new Beatnikville where the artists had moved in on the Slavic factory hands and all lived together in glorious, outrageous, dedicated poverty!” [Read more…] about Wild History Tales From St. Marks Place, NYC

Filed Under: History, New York City Tagged With: Historic Preservation, Manhattan, Museum of the American Gangster, New York City, NYC

Caribbean Connections: 6 Printmakers

January 5, 2016 by Kathleen Hulser Leave a Comment

Francks Deceus. Jumpsuit, 2002Since colonial times, the port city of New York has sent ships, goods and ideas to the Caribbean which in turn dispatched its own flow of staples, people, symbols and imaginative language North.

In the new show at Harlem’s Wintner-Tikhonova Fine Art Gallery open till Jan. 17, Caribbean artists show varieties of imagination rooted in that history of exchange. Francks Deceus from Haiti offers an abstracted photographic image of a dapper suited man in derby hat imprinted on an outlined version of a worker’s jumpsuit, evoking the urban and rural amalgam that haunts the identity of so many New Yorkers hailing from the Caribbean. [Read more…] about Caribbean Connections: 6 Printmakers

Filed Under: History, New Exhibits Tagged With: Art History, Harlem, Hispanic History

Converting A Historic Jail To Women’s Activism

December 3, 2015 by Kathleen Hulser Leave a Comment

Women exchanging ideas. Photo:Kathleen HulserArt deco murals, decorative brick work, mosaics – not quite what you expect to encounter at a women’s prison. The Bayview Women’s Correctional Facility at 550 West 20th Street in Manhattan was built in 1931 as a YMCA for merchant sailors. Converted to a prison, it was closed after Superstorm Sandy flooding and is now being converted to a Women’s Building. As an adaptive reuse, the main building will be preserved with some elements that reflect the history, even as the site is re-purposed as a women-focused community facility. [Read more…] about Converting A Historic Jail To Women’s Activism

Filed Under: History, New York City Tagged With: Crime and Justice, feminism, Gender History, Historic Preservation, Manhattan, New York City, Public History, womens history

Magdalen: New Views of Girls in Trouble

November 17, 2015 by Kathleen Hulser 35 Comments

Erin Layton plays a girl sentenced to scrub.Every kind of bad name was pasted on them: delinquents, hussies, misfits, fallen, flirts, incorrigbles.

For much of the 20th century institutions run by various religious orders such as the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Good Shepherd housed and disciplined young women who had – possibly – transgressed society’s rules. [Read more…] about Magdalen: New Views of Girls in Trouble

Filed Under: Events, History Tagged With: Crime and Justice, Gender History, New York City, Peekskill, Religious History, Theatre, womens history

Corset Portraits of the Loves of Aaron Burr

November 12, 2015 by Kathleen Hulser 2 Comments

Madame+Jume_RGB.BillOrcuttArtist Camilla Huey has a close to the skin interpretation of founding father Aaron Burr. While we know about his schemes to gain and keep political power, Huey tempts us to think about Burr’s gender politics. Was the former Vice-President who shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel, a full-fledged Lothario, or might there be another story?

The film “The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Binding and Corsetry”  premiering at Symphony Space at 95th St. and Broadway in Manhattan on Saturday, November 14 at noon offers a much more complicated and nuanced view of the man and his significant female others.  As Thomas Paine wrote in that revolutionary era “If we take a survey of the countries and the ages… we will find the women adored and oppressed. Man who has never neglected an opportunity of exerting his power,  in paying homage to their beauty has always availed himself of their weakness… at once their tyrant and their slave.” [Read more…] about Corset Portraits of the Loves of Aaron Burr

Filed Under: Events, History, New Exhibits, New York City Tagged With: Aaron Burr, Documentary, Fashion History, Gender History, Haiti, Haitian Revolution, Material Culture, Political History, womens history

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