Every so often, a researcher has the joy of stumbling upon a detail so small, so quiet, that it almost feels like a secret whispered across time. At Village Preservation, we’ve grown used to finding delight in the margins, footnotes, and parenthetical asides of the landmark designation reports for sites that have been selected for […]
On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain, and in New York City the news quickly electrified both Patriots and Loyalists. Only five days later, on July 9, General George Washington had the Declaration read aloud to his troops assembled at the Commons (today’s City Hall Park). The mood turned fiery: […]
“These are the times that try men’s souls…” so says the opening line of the first pamphlet of the series, The American Crisis, written by Thomas Paine, which was published on December 19, 1776, in the Pennsylvania Journal. Paine, an eighteenth-century philosopher and author of the Enlightenment, was known as the ‘Father of the American Revolution,’ in large […]
