Whitney Museum: History Plays at BHS
This summer, Whitney Museum Artist-in-Residence, Colin Gee, filmed a series of History Plays in response to works in the Whitney's permanent collection. Three pieces, In Transit, What, and Lobby, were filmed here at BHS. Here's Lobby, which is a response to Eva Hesse's Untitled (Rope Piece), 1969–70:
Home Base on NY1
Check out this NY1 video feature about Ebbets Field and the BHS exhibition Home Base - plus interviews with two Ex Lab students: Borough reporter Jeanine Ramirez visits the former site of Ebbets Field where its legacy continues to make its presence known: The housing complex on Bedford Avenue in Crown Heights looks similar to others in the city. But it's no ordinary location. It's the former site of Ebbets Field -- the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers until 1957, the place where Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier and the site of numerous World Series showdowns. Brooklyn…
Remembering First Grade
BHS partnered with the Brooklyn School of Inquiry (BSI), a citywide gifted and talented school located in Bensonhurst, to conduct oral history interviews with all of the students in the school's first First Grade class. Although these narrators are only 6 or 7 years old, their interviews add much to BHS's Oral History collection, documenting important things about life in Brooklyn in 2010, including details that can only be captured by youthful candor. Students will receive copies of their interviews when they graduate from 8th Grade in 2017. Check out this video from BSI's series A School…
How fun is this?
How the Architectural Walking Tour Built the Preservation Movement
Brooklyn Beatmakers
The Brooklyn Historical Society is proud to announce Brooklyn Beatmakers, a showcase with headliner The New School Sun Ra Arkestra, led by 22-year Sun Ra arkestra musician, master jazz trumpeter, and music director of Sistas' Place, Ahmed Abdullah! Joining the Arkestraʼs “21st century, interplanetary sound and philosophy” made famous by the legendary composer-bandleader Sun Ra, will be emerging songwriter and emcee Imani Kairee, the dub diva Honeychild Coleman, and the Bushwick teen hip-hop collective Nine 11 Thesaurus. The New School Sun Ra Arkestra “represent[s] a milestone in the…
Crown Heights Oral History Exhibit
Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field
Through archives, photos and oral histories, Home Base: Memories of the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field explores the connection between Ebbets Field, the Dodgers and the Brooklyn community. This exhibition is curated by high school students from Brooklyn Technical High School, Cobble Hill School of American Studies, The Packer Collegiate Institute and Saint Ann’s School as part of the Brooklyn Historical Society's Exhibition Laboratory (Ex Lab) after-school museum studies program. Ex Lab introduces high school students to the art of exhibition development: conducting…
Stories from Puerto Rico
Writing in 1975, Angelo Falcón, founder of the National Institute for Latino Policy and currently a professor at Columbia University, said: The more than century-old presence of a politically active Puerto Rican community in New York City has been curiously obscured, afflicted by what Russell Jacoby calls 'social amnesia’ and with serious consequences. (Puerto Rican Politics in Urban America, 1984) 35 years later, last Friday, BHS celebrated the newly accessible Puerto Rican Oral History, 1973-1975. This oral history project, initiated in 1973 by John D. Vasquez, then Director of Puerto…
The Things They Carried
BHS and Queensborough Community College hosted a reading and discussion last Saturday of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. This event was part of The Big Read, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to encourage reading and cultural conversation. Joseph Giannini, Joan Furey, and Anthony Wallace, three veterans featured in BHS's exhibit In Our Own Words: Portraits of Brooklyn Vietnam Veterans, read from their own writings and generously shared stories about their…
Dropping Anchor in Brooklyn
Watch this great video of a giant anchor arriving home to the Brooklyn Navy Yard where it will soon become part of the exhibition at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at Building 92. Since 2007, BHS and BNYDC have partnered on an oral history project documenting the important work that happens in the Navy Yard. We are currently interviewing people who worked in they Yard in the 1950s and 1960s and for any of the private shipbuilders after the 1966 decommissioning. You can listen to some clips from WWII-era interviews here. And to suggest someone we should interview please contact the…
Taylor Branch at BHS Library Dinner
On March 8, 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch spoke at the Brooklyn Historical Society's Annual Library Dinner. Taylor Branch is a native of Atlanta, Georgia and author of the King Era Trilogy, a narrative history of the U.S. during the Civil Rights era which includes Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for History. His most recent book is The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President (Simon and Schuster 2009), a presidential memoir based on secret late-night…
Basketball in Brooklyn
Bats, Balls, Nets and Hoops: Stories of Sports in Brooklyn is the latest in a series of educational curriculum kits from the Brooklyn Historical Society (forthcoming Spring 2010). Organized around four case studies, the kit is packed with more than 50 primary source documents from the BHS archives, including newspaper articles, photographs and oral histories of Brooklyn athletes born between the 1920s and 1950s. Each case study comes in a separate folder with critical thinking questions and document-analysis activities to help students observe, question, analyze and interpret the material.…
Rites and Ceremonies of the Brooklyn African Diaspora
Puerto Rico, March 2, 1917
Saffire
Well, this is just awesome: Here are two videos of the band Saffire playing at BHS for the Make Music New York festival last spring. Saffire is an all-girl rock band from Nyack, New York -- two sets of multi-instrumentalist sisters who play original music.
Ebbets Field Oral History project
Oral History Seminar
Virginia Woolf and Dame Ethel Smyth; photo courtesy of NYPL Digital Gallery Listening to Women: Documenting Women's Lives through Oral History a six week non-credit course at BHS The Brooklyn Historical Society's oral historian Sady Sullivan leads a seminar this spring (March 24 - May 5, 2010) introducing the practice of Oral History as an historical methodology, a unique narrative genre, and a tool in the reconciliation of social injustices. The course is interdisciplinary, drawing from history, sociology, memoir, and gender studies. We will examine oral history in all its forms --…
Brooklynite Howard Zinn
In memory of Howard Zinn (1922-2010) and in appreciation of his life's work, the Brooklyn Historical Society and the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation would like to share these excerpts from an interview we conducted with Howard Zinn on December 8, 2008. Howard Zinn was an historian, activist, playwright, and author of more than twenty books including A People’s History of the United States. In these (very) roughly edited clips, Howard Zinn talks about growing up in Brooklyn, working as an apprentice shipfitter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and his first date with his future wife…
Tivoli Towers in Crown Heights
Tivoli: A Place We Call Home is a new multimedia exhibit curated by Delphine Fawundu opening at BHS next Thursday, February 11. Check out this NY1 News Story and this trailer below: