Dyson American Studies

What is the impact of personal electronic devices on interpretation of collections and the visitor experience? Discussion of New-York Historical Society and smart phone tour Hidden Sites of Slavery and Freedom. Raises issues of cognitive change and epistemology.

A heavy diet of driving and the view through the windshield of the ubiquitous roadside billboard created a new mode of perception for what Hulser calls the "chaffeur-flaneur" of the 1950s. The essay probes the interaction of the spectator and the exuberant large-format advertising of the period to pose questions about how commercial culture influences modes of consciousness. A nod to Walter Benjamin, but re-situated in suburbia.

When did people begin to want pets in the city? How did attitudes towards animal companions change from the 19th century to our time? A major New-York Historical Society exhibition ransacked collections for clues to answer these questions and uncovered some interesting trends.

Demons of Discord: Two New York Riots from Chatham Square to Astor Place.

New Yorkers of the nineteenth century acted out their political passions in the streets. Fears of racial mixing and abolitionist activity touched off a round of racist rioting in 1834 that left houses and churches wrecked, and targets running for their lives. A mere fifteen years later ethnic and class tensions crystallized in the personalities of dueling Shakespeare performers, igniting protests that drew tens of thousands to the Astor Place Riot. More than 22 died and five times that many were injured, when the mayor called out the state militia for the first time to quell the disorder. Probing the causes and contexts, Hulser will illuminate the face of urban disorder in a period when politics out of doors often spelled blood on the cobblestones.

Illustrated talk asks historians to take their history work outside and use encounters with real places and dialogues that look at changing spaces. Luxuriously Bad considers contradictions in radical women’s history walking tours in Manhattan’s formerly bohemian Greenwich Village.  Touring the current landscape of multi-million restored brownstones can be taken as a call to honor a debt to bold women’s deeds, rather than using  the collective memory of dissent as historical décor – a juicy real estate selling point – for a neighborhood now dominated by the owning classes.

Sympathy and Suspicion in Wartime Greenwich.
An Exhibition Talk by Kathleen Hulser

In small towns across America, the Great War plunged ordinary citizens into global affairs. Greenwich, Connecticut had a special take on this stemming from its artistic colony with powerful French sympathies and its immigrant communities with links to the warring parties in the Old World. How should Americans respond to the terrible tales coming from abroad as President Wilson proclaimed neutrality? To many people neutrality did not mean inaction. Rather, it meant doing things that were not military, such as debating issues, working overtime in the economic boom caused by supplying the Allies, defending one’s Old World ties, targeting aliens, and volunteering in humanitarian causes. Once the US entered the war in April 1917, American relations to the European conflict shifted again, placing citizens in more crucial international roles that defined the United States as part of an emerging global order which linked fates across the oceans.

The exhibition’s tales of Greenwich citizens, modest or heroic, on the homefront or  in the service, or caught up in alien registration and wartime suspicion reveal these dramatic changes. In small communities choices were very visible, such as the stars mothers posted in their windows to show their sons in service, or the war bonds people bought in noisy patriotic pep rallies. Tonight’s talk shows how a town on the Sound came to see itself as part of a new national order through the crucible of wartime conflicts over how Americans defined themselves.
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Kathleen Hulser is a public historian, currently curating the exhibition “The Volunteers: American Join World War I, 1914-1919” for the National World War I Museum. She is the former senior curator of history at the New-York Historical Society, and teaches history and American studies at the New School and Pace University in New York.

New York City landrush to auction internet domain. What is the public interest and how should it allocate names reserved for some types of non-commercial use? Who are the people who might handle these types of sites? NYC is the first to create its own domain, so other big cities are watching.

Review of Ada Calhoun book on Lower East Side history "St. Marks Is Dead." From New York's Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant to punk boutique queens Tish and Snooky, to the Museum of the American Gangster this East Village street is full of stories and fascinating characters

This essay provides an overview of the argument and scope of an exhibition, ''Petropolis: A Social History of Urban Animal Companions'' (15 July to 9 November 2003), curated by the authors for the New-York Historical Society. The visual history of pets in New York City from the 18th century to the present reveals a great deal about the changing relationships between humans and animals as the city became increasingly urbanized and industrialized and as the city came to have its dramatic mix of people drawn from many races, ethnicities and social classes. The exhibition shows a remarkable diversity of animals participating in domestic and in public city life, proving that the social history of New York City really cannot be told without including companion animals as actors and objects in that history.