History Lessons in NYC, New York

WrestleMania meets Debate Club Your hosts Meg Pierson, Zak Martellucci, and Dustin Growick lead a rotating cast of special guest experts in a battle royale of serious—and not so serious—topics.  Who will come out on top? Dinosaurs or mammals? Biology or physics? Space or oceans? Chock-full of trivia, games, and prizes,...

Dinosaurs! Science! Adventure! Break out your pith helmet as we embark upon a brazen expedition through the halls of New York City's world-famous American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Join your maverick tour guide as we deftly navigate this massive 27-building, 1.6 million square foot landmark cultural institution. Learn the science...

Before the grid system, before Central Park, before the Civil War, there was Seneca Village. A small town of around three hundred people, Seneca Village was the home of free African-Americans and recent immigrants from Germany and Ireland. It was a center of diversity, political activism, and an important stop on the Underground Railroad....

Meet the badass Brooklynites who brought us the ballot. Behind the stately facades of Brooklyn Heights’ most gracious brownstones lies the history of firebrand feminism! The wise “women of Brooklyn” were doctors, lawyers, educators and orators who made some of the foremost contributions to the Suffrage movement. Join us for a walk through their...

This is an imaginative exploration of the human and arboreal events that occurred in the life of the oldest tree in New York City. How much of your life overlaps with our wise tree neighbor? When did your annual rings in New York City begin? BYO blanket and snacks and get ready to listen and consider what we can learn from thinking of time to a...

In honor of our Fleet Week this Memorial Day Weekend, Classic Harbor Line and Turnstile Tours have partnered to offer a special series of Naval Harbor History Tours! Join us on Memorial Day Weekend for a special, in-depth tour of our rich harbor-related war history plus up close visits to the military ships visiting New York Harbor. This special 2.5-hour...

Looking is always a form of political entanglement. Photographs, particularly photographs of bodies in pain, are often used as an appeal for charity, for sympathy, or mobilized as calls for a particular political project. Some photographs become iconic symbols in American culture, as the famous image of a young girl running from a napalm attack came...

Corrupt politicians. Crooked cops. Gangsters so terrifying that they’re known only as “Murder, Incorporated.” These are the men and women that have made New York City’s underworld the stuff of legend. But there is so much more to this legend than you’ve ever heard. Why is it that New York has had such a violent past? What drove these people...

Many European thinkers idealized the ancient Greeks as virtuous models of a rational, dignified, and harmonious way of life, one they very much wished to emulate and create anew in the Modern world. In contrast, with The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche painted an ancient world of dynamic contrasts: a constant struggle between forces of order...

The Emergence of Sexuality: Foucault, Sexual Identities, and the Modern Self In his groundbreaking study, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, philosopher and historian Michel Foucault provocatively argued that the thing we call sexuality, the supposed essence of our sexual core, our desires, our selves, is in fact “a name that can be given...

Is gender equality possible without relying on gender neutrality? Whereas many Anglo-American feminists attempt to undermine sexism by eliding sexual difference, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and others embrace it.  These “French feminists” use what might be called “anatamo-epistemology”—invoking the metaphor of the female body to illustrate...

To mark the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, we present an evening of film and discussion about the lives of two singular individuals who ignited this pivotal moment in the modern LGBTQ rights movement. Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box (21 min, 1987) traces the life of Stormé DeLarverie, a...

Compared over the course of her life to Marlene Dietrich, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, a sphinx, a she-wolf, a “foreigner on earth,” and a hurricane, the Jewish Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector moved in mystery. The author of nine novels and a large body of short stories, journalism, and children’s...

On this walking tour, we’ll discover the life of pirates and prostitutes living in the scrappy Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, long before New York was New York. Step into the wooden shoes of the early settlers and see what life was like being an employee rather than a colonist. Based on exciting new research taking place over the last...

Hold on to your number 2 pencils, we’re taking on the SATs. We've taken high school’s most stressful test, sprinkled some comedy on it, and turned it into a drinking game! Your favorite test proctor and comedian Michael Wolf (Comedy Central, MTV) has combined bar-room trivia with real SAT quizzes to create NYC's booziest classroom. Whether you've...