Prehistoric and Ahead of Her Time: Sapphasaura at the Museum of Natural History
By Rachel Pitkin
In the summer of 1973, members of the newly formed Lesbian Feminist Liberation (LFL) group were engaged in a unique construction project in the Upper West Side backyard of one of its members, Robin Lutsky. A physically onerous labor of love, the project unfolded over ten days of round-the-clock attention, a last-ditch protest effort to gain the attention of one of New York’s most celebrated yet controversial institutions: the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
Stages, Streets, and Screens: The Geography of NYC Dance in the 1960s-1970s “Dance Boom”
By Emily Hawk
In the early 1970s, New Yorkers could see concert dance performances at Lincoln Center as well as in the open-air splendor of Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. Crowds could gather in Harlem to catch the DanceMobile, and families could turn on their television sets to watch evening-length concerts on PBS. The prevalence of dance throughout and beyond the city resulted from the “dance boom” in the previous decade.
A Loyalist and His Newspaper in Revolutionary New York
By Joseph M. Adelman
New York in the 1760s was a divided town, riven by local factions as well as imperial politics. Local elections were fiercely contested, as they had been for decades. The imperial crisis didn’t help.
Christopher Bonanos Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder
In the middle of the 20th century, a newspaper photographer who went by the name of Weegee took memorable pictures of New York City’s street life that appeared everywhere from tabloid newspapers to seminars on the history of photography.
The Regional Nationalism of New York’s Literary World
By Alex Zweber Leslie
In the 1840s literary New York was electric. The city was booming, and its material success fueled a surge in cultural aspirations. A new generation of authors, including Herman Melville, joined an influx of emigres such as Edgar Allan Poe and Caroline Kirkland, while old standbys like Washington Irving became firmly canonical. An explosion of new magazines devoted to arts and politics meant that there were ever more writing in print and editorial sides to take. Boston may have still been the nation’s cultural capital, but New York was experiencing a renaissance that shifted the regional balance of cultural authority. It was a world of tightly-knit cliques, petty rivalries, inside gossip, playful pseudonymity, waggish jokes, and, most of all, youthful hopes for the future of literature in America.
