Newsboys in antebellum New York and elsewhere were embroiled in all the major conflicts of their day, becoming mixed metaphors for enterprise and annoyance.
The British seize Manhattan from the Dutch—and alter the trajectory of North American history
Theodore Roosevelt, his widow recalled, watched Lincoln’s funeral from his grandfather’s house
. . . was a lot bigger than yours. Here’s why you should care.
A never-before seen report shows just how fragile our great cities were—and are
Discovering what a particular time in Harlem says about the whole nation
The City of Churches and Henry Ward Beecher, of Walt Whitman, Coney Island, and a famously departed baseball team is ready for its next act—as a world-class tourist destination
The Stars and Stripes take to the streets
Politics
Martin Scorsese has drawn on his own youth and his feelings about the past—and has rebuilt 1860s New York—to make a movie about the fight for American democracy. Here he tells why it is both so hard and so necessary to get history on film.
On Manhattan’s Lower East Side you can visit a haunting re-creation of a life that was at once harder and better than we remember
One of America’s greatest documentary filmmakers takes on America’s greatest city: Ric Burns discusses his new PBS series, New York
How a mass killing 150 years ago made today’s New York a better place
How a tireless impresario parlayed a cloud of smoke into several fortunes
He excelled at business and made Macy's highly profitable. But Nathan Straus was even better at giving away his earnings to help people in need.
American art was hardly more than a cultural curiosity in the early years of this century. Now it is among the world’s most influential, and much of the credit belongs to a self-made woman named Juliana Force.
The great buildings of the 1920s are standing all over Manhattan, preserving in masonry the swank and swagger of an exuberant era.
A trackside album of celebrities from the days when the world went by train
One of the country’ more bizzarre labor disputes pitted a crowed of outraged newsboys against two powerful opponents—Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolf Hearst
A gathering of little-known drawings from Columbia
University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library illuminates two centuries of American building
The ceaseless clatter of cheap pianos from a mid-Manhattan side street was once music to all America
They could hardly have been more temperamentally incompatible, but the Midwestern writer Willa Cather and the crusading editor S. S. McClure enjoyed a splendid working relationship for six years and a lifetime of mutual respect
… illuminated by the hand-tinted slides that helped make it a hit
The city has been a lure for millions, but most of the great American minds have been appalled by its excesses. Here an eminent observer, who knows firsthand the city’s threat, surveys the subject.
J ohn Wenrich’s original drawings of Rockefeller Center helped attract tenants in the middle of the Depression. Fifty years later they survive as talismans of a golden moment in American architecture .
Americans don’t hesitate to say anything they please about a public performance. But the right to do so wasn’t established until the Cherry Sisters sued a critic who didn’t like their appalling vaudeville act.
Victorian art, collected for patriotism and profit, finds a home in a New York hotel 19