New York Historical Society

This trip to the New York Historical Society was much more exciting for me than the first one. Not only was it focused on WWII itself, but it showed it from a New Yorkers point of view. I think that’s what caught my attention the most because to me New York is so beautiful that learning some history behind it would was interesting. Overall, the museum was very interesting and I liked almost all the artifacts that they had describing post, during and after WWII.

An artifact that caught my attention right away when I first walked in was the artifact of the 1939 students of the new High School of Music & Art. Over 90,000 students marched for a “strike of peace” and created many drawings and poetry for their Peace Issue of their high school newspaper. Ben Brown was student who drew a picture and later served in the army. My favorite artifact was the story of an army soldier Sidney Diamond (1922-1944), who joined the army right after high school. He was in love with his high school sweetheart, Estelle Spen. During the time he was away, he wrote to her 525 letters, and she saved them all. He was killed in battlefield in the Philippine’s on January 24, 1944, at age 22. He received a silver star for serving the country. Another artifact was the ad that described how many New Yorkers contributed to the war. Over 900,000 New Yorkers joined the military, and 3,300,000 shipped out from The Great Harbor over to North Africa and Europe. Some information that I found interesting was that after the attack on Pearl Harbor, of that time, Mayor Fionella La Guardia, sent out protection for the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and any Japanese, German or Italian that were non-citizens on Ellis Island, were interrogated by police for possible incarceration or deportation.

It was great to know that in 1942 New York City was made headquarters of the United Nations and in March of 1945, New York was the first state to pass the bill to forbid job discrimination on the basis of race, religion or creed.