There is a nationwide movement to reconsider the names of places and teams and to stop honoring racists and racist symbols. The Cleveland Indians will soon be no more; the baseball team will be known as the Cleveland Guardians. The Washington Redskins are now the Washington Football Team while a new name is being considered. A bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader, a Confederate general responsible for atrocities committed against African American troops serving in the United States army, and a founder of the terrorist Ku Klux Klan, was finally removed from the state capitol building in Nashville, Tennessee. Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced the Reconciliation in Place Names Act to create a special advisory committee to investigate and propose changes to offensive place names. There remain thousands of towns, lakes, streams, creeks and mountains in the United States with racist names.
In New York City, Eric Adams, the Democratic Party candidate for Mayor, pledges to rename streets and buildings named after slave-owners. The name of a Bronx Park was recently changed from Mullaly to Foster. John Mullaly was indicted during the Civil War for inciting a draft riot that led to the murder of African Americans on the streets of Manhattan. The Reverend Wendell Foster was a Bronx community activist who campaigned to have the park restored.
The following Manhattan streets are named for slaveholders and slave traders: [Read more…] about Manhattan Street Names Tied to Slavery Listed from A to Z
On September 11th, 2021, the traditional Last Night of the (BBC) Proms took place at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Away from the usual and rather bizarre jingoism, this performance was memorable for the “revolutionary” introduction of an accordion on stage.
Frances Perkins, who served as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor in all four terms of his administration, is often credited with designing many of the New Deal’s social welfare programs, including Social Security. As such, she ranks among 
On May 19th 2020, the Waterfront, Parks and Cultural Committee of Manhattan Community Planning Board No. 1, at a virtual meeting, rejected a proposal by the New York City Department of Transportation to move Arturo DiModica’s Charging Bull statue from its current location at Bowling Green to Broad Street in front of the New York Stock Exchange.
Born in March 1804 in Bavaria, Franz Seraph Hanfstaengl studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. He settled in Dresden and began copying paintings in the splendid collection of the city’s 
The Mill Street Synagogue, the first synagogue in North America, was constructed in 1730 and located on what today is 26 South William Street in Lower Manhattan. It was from this synagogue that two of the leading Jewish figures in eighteenth and early nineteenth century America, Gershom Mendes Seixas and later Mordecai Noah, influenced the Jewish community in the city of New York and beyond.
Tucked away on the 4th floor of a much-repurposed 1850s school building in Greenwich Village, the LGBT Community Center’s National History Archive is a cultural and historical refuge-within-a-sanctuary.
On a bitterly cold January morning in 1917, the painters John Sloan and Marcel Duchamps, along with friends, climbed to the top of Washington Square Arch to proclaim the secession of Greenwich Village from the United States. Thenceforth the neighborhood that stood as America’s repository of avant-garde art, literature and social enlightenment would be known as the Free and Independent Republic of Washington Square. The stunt defined the character of the Village, as it is popularly known to New Yorkers, for the ensuing half century. 
A new National Park Service theme study identifying places and events associated with the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer-identified Americans has been released.