History, Natural History & the Arts
In June, 1883, Jefferson and Helen Beardsley of Ithaca, New York, were indicted, tried, and sentenced for “selling and exhibiting obscene pictures.”
In Smut: An 1883 Obscenity Trial and Its Echoes Today (Paul Dry Books, 2026), historian Carol Kammen draws directly from the trial transcript and reveals the fascinating history surrounding the case and its surprising relevance today. [Read more…] about Smut: An 1883 Obscenity Trial and Its Echoes Today
Staten Island photographer Elizabeth Alice Austen (1866–1952) is best known for her street photography and intimate depictions of women’s lives and relationships in the Victorian era.
“New Eyes on Alice Austen,” a groundbreaking permanent exhibition at the Alice Austen House Museum finally puts her into an appropriate LGBTQ+ history context with respect denied her during her lifetime. [Read more…] about New Eyes on Alice Austen: Queering the Museum
The University at Albany (UAlbany, or SUNY Albany) has digitized and put online over 120 yearbooks spanning more than a century of campus history.
This collection, managed by the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, offers a look back at student life, sports, and major events on campus and off from 1900 to 2014, including also one student produced edition from 2022. [Read more…] about UAlbany Puts More Than A Century of Yearbooks Online
“Lunch on a Beam,” also known as “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” shows iron-workers eating lunch on a steel beam during the construction of Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building in 1932.
It’s a photo so famous you can likely picture it in your mind: seated in a row, eleven men chat and break bread 850 feet above the ground, the dense cityscape behind them. [Read more…] about Lunch On A Beam: The Making of an American Photograph
Most people don’t know Nat Fein’s name — but they know his work. Fein, who lived in Tappan, in Rockland County, NY, for many years, captured one of the most iconic images in American sports history.
Babe Ruth’s final appearance at Yankee Stadium occurred June 13, 1948, and the photograph, which earned Fein the 1949 Pulitzer Prize, became known as “Babe Ruth Bows Out.” [Read more…] about Nat Fein: The Man Behind The Iconic Babe Ruth Photo
The National WW II Museum in New Orleans is home to about 250,000 artifacts, including more than 100,000 photographs ranging from battlefield pictures captured by military and press photographers to individual albums full of wartime snapshots donated by veterans and their families. [Read more…] about Mechanicville’s WWII & Korean War Veterans Photo Collection
Peter Bennett is a photographer who grew up in Greenwich Village and lived in the East Village from 1979-1988, bartending by night and photographing the neighborhood around him by day.
In the latest addition to the Village Preservation historic image archive, he has shared some of his photographs of the East Village in the early 1980s. [Read more…] about 1980s East Village Photographs Go Online
During its glory years of operation, the first two decades of the 20th century, the J.E. Sexton Boat Shop, located in Hague, was one of the most respected boat-building businesses on Lake George.
Years later however, the decaying wooden structure where Jesse Sexton and his colleagues built many excellent vessels, finally tumbled to the ground. [Read more…] about Jesse Sexton’s Lake George Boat-Building & Photography Shop
An outspoken critic of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, Jewish photojournalist Gisèle [Gisela] Freund fled her native Germany in 1933 with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Having settled in Paris, she obtained her PhD at the Sorbonne in 1936 and would become the most talented chronicler of the vibrant and multi-national bohemian community of artists and writers that made its home in Paris during the 1930s.
By 1939, Freund had photographed many of the greatest writers and artists of the twentieth century, amongst them Henri Matisse, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, André Breton, Colette, André Malraux, Paul Valéry, Tennessee Williams, Peggy Guggenheim, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. [Read more…] about The Battle for Ulysses in Paris & New York
Location scouting is a part of the pre-production process of making a film or television show. Before digital files and location-scouting apps transformed the business of film location scouting, New York’s production world ran on hard copies — real photographs, taped into real folders, stored in real boxes. [Read more…] about New York City Location Scout Photo Collections
Spread over an archipelago of islands nestled amongst the marshes of the northern Adriatic coast, Venice was founded in the fifth century AD by refugees who fled the “barbarian” onslaught after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
In 811 its seat of government transferred from the island of Malamocco (one of the earliest settlements) to an area corresponding to present St Mark’s Square which was less vulnerable to attacks from sea. [Read more…] about Venice Design & Manhattan’s Skyline
Before humans had spoken language, they had infographics. The earliest humans communicated information through drawings on cave walls. Over the course of history, people understood that visual representations were invaluable to teach (best hunting practices), create a writing system (hieroglyphs), provide directions (maps), and explain intricate relationships (graphs and charts).
Visual data exploded with the use of social media and the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) in Portland, Maine, has jumped on that bandwagon big time. [Read more…] about Anatomy of an Infographic: BRI’s Visual Information Artists
Photographs of historic buildings can be very valuable resources. They help inform historically accurate building restorations and modifications, they show the building’s and neighborhood’s changes over time, and they are a window into the past.
When proposing changes to a landmarked building in New York City, especially changes that will alter the appearance of the landmark, the Landmarks Preservation Commission will require historic photos as part of the application. [Read more…] about Where to Find Photos of NYC Historic Buildings
Solitude is hard to find these days, and harder still to capture in an image. But that’s just what award-winning photographer Russ Hartung does in his photographs of the majestic peaks and intimate views of the Adirondacks.
Adirondack Solitude: Peace and Stillness in the Adirondack Wilderness (Globe Pequot, 2025) explores the feeling of being on top of a mountain before sunrise and watching the light change over the landscape. [Read more…] about Adirondack Solitude Captures The Spirit of the Place
This Saturday, August 16 at 2 pm, Bronx County Historical Society will host Drew Stone, and Tish and Snooky (of Manic Panic) at the Museum of Bronx History for a book talk “London ‘77: The Lost Archive,” look at a musical era that changed the face of modern music.
Buried and forgotten for more than 45 years, vivid photos by photographer Gregory Rudolph Smith have been rediscovered. For eighteen months in 1977 and 1978, Smith documented the golden age of the Punk era in London. [Read more…] about London ‘77: A Lost Punk Rock Archive
No views of New York City are more iconic than looking from the harbor toward Manhattan. The Dutch who first settled Manhattan sketched the island with little more than a fort, a windmill, a dozen houses rising near the shore, and Indigenous people paddling around the bay. Four centuries later a photographer captured the new One World Trade Center half-clad but already towering over Wall Street.
Regular New York Almanack contributor Bill Greer has developed an online gallery of thirty-two images framed by those two. [Read more…] about Manhattan from the Harbor: Views through Four Centuries
While attending Yale University, Theodore (Ted) Case explored his love of science through the transmission of light and the reproduction of sound, developing a method of photographing sound waves which he referred to as a “lightograph.”
Upon his return to Auburn, NY, Case would establish laboratories in the basements of the family homes on Genesee Street and Casowasco on the shores of Owasco Lake. When his father inherited the Willard Mansion, the two restructured one of the greenhouses on the property into a working laboratory: The Case Research Laboratory. [Read more…] about Birthplace of Sound Film Re-Opening for Public Tours
A poison register, now on a shelf in the Clinton County Historian’s Office, was used between 1905 and 1951 in Larkin’s Pharmacy at 1 Bridge Street in Plattsburgh, NY.
It gives an enticing look into the reasons people gave for using poisons in the early years of the 20th Century and how their reasons changed over the next half century. [Read more…] about Larkin’s Poison Register: Rats and Cats and Crows
Village Preservation’s Tom Fox Photography Collection includes images of the Hudson River waterfront dating from the 1970s, 80s and 90s taken by Fox, who played an influential role in the research, planning, and advocacy for the redevelopment of the waterfront. [Read more…] about Featured Collection: NYC Hudson River Waterfront Photos
The March 2025 episode of the Crossroads of Rockland History podcast celebrates both Women’s History Month and Saint Patrick’s Day in a discussion with Eve Kahn, the former Antiques Editor for the New York Times and Elizabeth Stack the Executive Director at the American Irish Historical Society who explore the life of Anna Frances Levins (1876-1941). [Read more…] about Irish American Photographer Anna Frances Levins
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