The New-York Historical Society is an American history museum and library in New York City, along Central Park West between 76th and 77th Streets, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The society was founded in 1804 as New York's first museum. It presents exhibitions, public programs, and research that explore the history of New York and the nation.
The New-York Historical Society Museum & Library has been at its present location since 1908. The granite building was designed by York & Sawyer in a classic Roman Eclectic style. The building is a designated New York City landmark. A renovation, completed in November 2011, made the building more accessible to the public, provided space for an interactive children's museum, and facilitated access to its collections.
Louise Mirrer has been the president of the Historical Society since 2004. She was previously Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs of the City University of New York. Beginning in 2005, the museum presented a two-year exhibit on Slavery in New York, its largest theme exhibition in 200 years on a topic which it had never addressed before. It included an art exhibit by artists invited to use museum collections in their works.
The Society generally focuses on the developing city center in Manhattan. Another historical society, the Long Island Historical Society (later Brooklyn Historical Society) was founded in Brooklyn in 1863.
The New-York Historical Society holds an extensive collection of historical artifacts, works of American art, and other materials documenting the history of New York and the United States. It presents well-researched exhibitions on a variety of topics and periods in American history, such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Slavery in New York, The Hudson River School, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Tiffany designer Clara Driscoll, and the history of the Constitution. The Society also offers an extensive range of curriculum-based school programs and teacher resources, and provides academic fellowships and organizes public programs for adults to foster lifelong learning and a deep appreciation of history.
Collections
The New-York Historical Society's museum is the oldest in New York City and predates the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by nearly 70 years. Its art holdings comprise more than 1.6 million works. Among them are a world-class collection of Hudson River School paintings, including major works by Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church; iconic genre and history paintings, including works by William Sidney Mount and Eastman Johnson; a vast range of American portraits, including paintings by Rembrandt Peale and Gilbert Stuart; all 435 of John James Audubon's extant preparatory watercolors for The Birds of America; and an encyclopedic collection of more than 800 works documenting the full catalog of representational sculpture in America from the colonial period to the present day.
The Historical Society holds an important collection of paintings and drawings by marine artist James Bard. The museum holds much of sculptor Elie Nadelman's legendary American folk art collection, including furniture and household accessories such as lamps, candlesticks, textiles, glass, and ceramic objects, as well as paintings, toys, weather vanes, sculptural woodcarvings, and chalkware. The Historical Society's holdings in artifacts and decorative arts include George Washington's camp bed from Valley Forge, the desk at which Clement Clarke Moore wrote "A Visit from Saint Nicholas", one of the world's largest collections of Tiffany lamps and glasswork, and a collection of more than 550 late 19th-century American board games.
Its research library contains more than three million books, pamphlets, maps, atlases, newspapers, broadsides, music sheets, manuscripts, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings. Among its collections are far-ranging materials relating to the founding and early history of the nation including the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America"; one of the best collections of 18th-century newspapers in the United States; an outstanding collection of materials documenting slavery and Reconstruction; an exceptional collection of Civil War material, including Ulysses S. Grant's terms of surrender for Robert E. Lee; collections relating to trials in the United States prior to 1860; American fiction, poetry, and belles-lettres prior to 1850; a broad range of materials relating to the history of the circus; and American travel accounts from the colonial era to the present day.