Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877
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In collaboration with the New-York Historical Society and Oxford University Press, the Bryant Park Reading Room presents a series of free lectures to stimulate your mind on popular topics including politics, biography, Civil War history, and more.
Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man
Note: This event is sold out
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William Henry Seward was one of the most important Americans of the nineteenth century: progressive governor of New York, outspoken federal senator, secretary of state during the Civil War and its aftermath, and a target of the assassins who killed Lincoln. Join us for an illuminating conversation about a complex and pivotal figure, Lincoln’s closest friend and adviser, and an early architect of America’s empire.
The Dream Continues: Photographs of Martin Luther King Murals by Vergara
Vergara remarked about his work that “most murals and street portraits of Dr. King are ephemeral. Paint fades, businesses change hands and neighborhood demographics shift. Gradually, images reflecting the culture and values of poor communities are lost….Often, my photographs are the only lasting record of these public works of art.” This exhibition offers the opportunity to study the manner in which Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Thirteenth Amendment
One of about thirteen manuscripts Lincoln signed in addition to the original, this copy belonged to Schuyler Colfax, House Speaker in 1863 and later Vice President under Ulysses S. Grant. According to Seth Kaller, president of Seth Kaller, Inc., who acquired the document for Mr. Rubenstein in a private transaction, and arranged its loan to New-York Historical, “this is the one that is directly traceable to a leader instrumental in the amendment’s passage. It has not been displayed in New York for more than forty years."
Cross-section of a model of a slave ship
Negro Life at the South
American and Haitian Revolutions and the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade
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The late 18th and early 19th centuries were a time of upheaval and revolution. In conjunction with the new exhibition, Revolution!, historians examine the tumultuous 30-year period which saw the American and Haitian Revolutions and the end of the transatlantic slave trade to the U.S. and the British colonies. How were these events related and what forces combined to effect so much social change in such a short span?
American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era
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This program transports us to the 1963 centennial celebration of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to explore how Americans made sense of the suffering, loss and liberation that had wracked the United States a century earlier. David W. Blight and Drew Gilpin Faust discuss how four of America’s most incisive writers—including Robert Penn Warren, a white southerner who recanted his support for segregation, and James Baldwin, the searing African-American essayist and activist—explored the gulf between remembrance and reality.
Examination Days: The New York African Free School Collection
It began as a single-room schoolhouse with about 40 students, the majority of whom were the children of slaves, and by the time it was absorbed into the New York City public school system in 1835, it had educated thousands of children, a number of whom went on to become well known in the United States and Europe. The New-York Historical Society’s New York African Free School Collection preserves a rich selection of student work and community commentary about the school.
Civil War Lecture with Randall Fuller Word for Word Non-Fiction at the Bryant Park Reading Room
In commemoration of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Civil War, the Bryant Park Reading Room presents a lecture series by eminent scholars discussing their most recent works on the Civil War. In this program, author Randall Fuller will discuss From Battlefields Rising, his new book examining the profound impact of the war on 19th-century writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Douglass, among others. This series is produced in partnership with the Bryant Park Reading Room and Oxford University Press.
