What are you making, singing about, and dreaming up on this July 4th holiday? Throughout today’s programming, we will be offering July 4th related activities and prompts for the entire family. We would love to see what you’re making and share it here on our History Detectives Blog. We encourage you to submit images of…

This 4th of July, we are digging into Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the slave is the fourth of July.” And we start by considering Douglass himself. Who better to help us understand than David Blight, the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman…

Earlier this month, on the 4th of July, the New-York Historical Society threw a supersized family day to celebrate both Independence Day and the opening of our special exhibition Madeline in New York: The Art of Ludwig Bemelmans.  And, the photos are finally in – check them out below! That day, we made tricorner hats……

  The New-York Historical Society is going all-out for the 4th of July! We’ll have an Independence Day scavenger hunt, a Ben Franklin reenactor, and a whole lot of ice cream. What does ice cream have to do with independence, you ask? Well not that much- very few New Yorkers ate ice cream in the late 1700s; however,…

  The history of fireworks is a long one…even in our young United States. We celebrated our first Independence Day with a fireworks display in 1777, six years before we could be certain we would survive the American Revolutionary War! After signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that the…