Malkin Lecture Series
Launched in 2007, the Malkin Lecture Series presents scholars and experts on topics relating to Park Avenue Armory and its pivotal role in the civic, cultural, and aesthetic evolution of New York City in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Past Malkin Lectures
2025 Season
Malkin Lecture Series
New York's Scoundrels, Scalawags, and Scrappers
Social and architectural historian John Tauranac profiles the New Yorkers who gamed the system to survive and thrive in the tough times for the working class of the 1890s.
Malkin Lecture Series
Politics and Memory
Author and professor Akela Reason illuminates the complex intersection of art, politics, and memory within New York City's Civil War monuments while highlighting the ever-changing ways different constituencies have engaged with them.
Malkin Lecture Series
Finding Frederick Law Olmsted in Cotton's Kingdom
Landscape architect Sara Zewde examines the Central Park designer's research journey through Southern States in search of his radical idea that public parks could redress society’s ills at the height of slavery in America and the implications today.
2024 Season
Malkin Lecture Series
Fifth Avenue
Mosette Broderick brings listeners on a journey through Fifth Avenue's history as New York city has evolved, from speculative brownstones to grand Gilded Age mansions to the modern architecture of today.
Malkin Lecture Series
Bookshop
Scholar of American and urban history Evan Friss guides audiences through a chronicle of the bookshop in New York and across the country, illuminating how these vital institutions have shaped American life.
Malkin Lecture Series
Nineteen Reservoirs
Lucy Sante examines the triumph, tragedy, and unintended consquences of the decision to create New York City's network of reservoirs and acqueducts on New York City’s divided public—urban and rural, rich and poor, human and animal.
2023 Season
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Malkin Lecture Series
American Everyman: Winslow Homer
Biographer William R. Cross gives a lively account of major American artist Winslow Homer’s varied and important life, taken from the text of Cross’ lates book.
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff is joined in conversation by Michael Gately to discuss the life of Samuel Adams and the process of writing this and other biographies.
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Rough Rider and the Professor
Evoking the political intrigue of the Gilded Age, Laurence Jurdem chronicles the extraordinary 35-year friendship between President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, highlighted in his 2023 book.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Zoe Anderson Norris
Former weekly Antiques columnist for The New York Times Eve M. Kahn gives a progress report on her Zoe Anderson Norris biography, following the life of The East Side magazine founder that documented early 20th century immigrant poverty.
2022 Season
Malkin Lecture Series
Tin Pan Alley and American Musical Comedy
Musical director Robert Lamont and singer-actress Gabrielle Lee celebrate the history and music of Tin Pan Alley with a fascinating look at the music publishing district’s relationship to musical theater including an intimate song performance.
Malkin Lecture Series
Design on Display
Exploring behind-the-scenes in window display workrooms, shop fitting factory floors, and architects’ and designers’ studios, this illustrated talk by curator Emily M. Orr highlights the department store’s dynamic role in design history.
Malkin Lecture Series
Modern Gothic
Curators Barbara Veith and Medill H. Harvey share new scholarship and fresh insight into the Kimbel & Cabus deisgn firm and its contributions to American design history.
2021 Season
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Seventh at Sea
Historian and author Gareth Russell uses previously unpublished sources and artifacts to examine the personal lives and experiences of Titanic victims Archibald Gracie IV and Frank Millet, both of whom were connected to the Armory's Seventh Regiment.
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Daughters of Yalta
Catherine Grace Katz reveals the history of three young women who were chosen by their fathers to travel to the Yalta Conference, each bound by fierce family loyalty, political savvy, and intertwined romances that colored these crucial days.
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Barbizon
A look into the Barbizon Hotel and how it offered women a chance to remake themselves however they pleased in a time defined by gender separation and restrictions, led by award-winning writer and historian Paula Bren.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Hero of Two Worlds
Author and podcaster Mike Duncan describes how the Marquis de Lafayette remained unshakably committed through an era of upheaval to his principles of liberty and democracy across multiple continents, his resolve never wavering.
2020 Season
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Presidents Versus the Press
Join acclaimed scholar and Lincoln Prize winner Harold Holzer as he chronicles the eternal battle between these core institutions that define our republic, revealing that the essence of this confrontation is built into the fabric of the nation.
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Malkin Lecture Series
In with the “New Movement”
Through the lens of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s early years and its developing collection of American art, this lecture will examine how established artists and founding trustees intersected the city's with “New Movement” progressives.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Providing a Platform for Women Painters
This lecture explores the role of prominent Gilded Age periodical Scribner’s Monthly/The Century as a progressive mouthpiece for women artists and critics in a burgeoning American art world.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Playing with the Varsity
PBDW Architects founder Samuel G. White traces the collaboration between Stanford White and Louis Comfort Tiffany on Gould Memorial library, a process that was rarely linear, occasionally messy, and begins with a cameo on the silver screen.
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Age of Innocence at 100 Years
Architectural historian and writer Francis Morrone marks the centennial anniversary of Edith Wharton's great novel, taking a look at the New York Wharton knew and how much of it survives to today.
2019 Season
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Formative Years of the Funnies
Cartoonist and historian Brian Walker recounts how comics and their star characters became essential parts of American life, outlining the the major innovators and ground-breaking trends that developed in the earliest decades of comic history.
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Most Magnificent Playground in the World
Suzanne Hinman gives an illustrated book talk on her latest publication, The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scandal & Architecture in Gilded Age New York, discussing the work of architect Stanford White and his sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Everybody's Doin' It
Musicologist Dale Cockrell illuminates the how, why, and where of America’s popular music and dance, and traces a buoyant journey that stretched from downtown Five Points to midtown Tin Pan Alley, then all the way to Harlem.
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Big Fella
Drawing on her new book, The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, Jane Leavy speaks with Yankees expert Marty Appel about Babe Ruth’s journey from Baltimore to the big league to the center of the nation’s adulation.
2018 Season
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Malkin Lecture Series
Walt Whitman, the Civil War, and New York's Seventh Regiment
Professor of American Literature and US History David S. Reynolds enriches our understanding of America's greatest poet by placing him within the context of people, politics, arts, science, and philosophy of his time.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Sargent's Women
New York Times best-selling author Donna Lucey speaks about four of the women behind portraitist John Singer Sargent's most famous works, revealing stories of forbidden love, family conflict, ambition, desire, and triumph.
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Malkin Lecture Series
The Unexpected President
Author Scott Greenberger introduces us to this New York president and describe how from the moment Arthur took office, he proved to be not just honest but brave, going up against the very forces that had controlled him for decades.
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Malkin Lecture Series
“Ever Since the Town Went Dry”
Michael A. Lerner gives a lecture on Prohibition and New York City history, from its early adopters in the Progressive Era through the end of the "noble experiment."
2017 Season
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Malkin Lecture Series
Casey Stengel
Baseball expert Marty Appel discusses New York baseball and his new book on the legendary Hall of Famer Casey Stengel—the only man to wear the uniforms of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants, the Yankees, and the Mets.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Henry James
This lecture examines three different houses that figure in Henry James’s 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady, illuminated by Michael Gorra and excerpts from his book Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of An American Masterpiece (2012).
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Malkin Lecture Series
Eleanor Roosevelt
Distinguished professor and author Blanche Wiesen Cook invites audiences into the third and final volume of her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, which gives details from World War II through the first lady's death.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Edith Wharton and France at War
Biographer Hermione Lee describes American novelist Edith Wharton’s feelings for France, the amazing story of her activities on behalf of her adopted country during the First World War, and her complex relationship with America at the time.
2016 Season
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Malkin Lecture Series
How We Got Here
Political commentator David Gergen explores how political, social, and economic history—both in the American and global context—have shaped 2016 and what it means for Election Day on November 8th.
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Malkin Lecture Series
“Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”
A character study by professor Annette Gordon-Reed analyzing the changing image of Thomas Jefferson—from the 40s, when the Jefferson Memorial was first built, up to this moment when the Broadway musical Hamilton is helping to shape modern attitudes.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Rightful Heritage
Historian and author Douglas Brinkley discusses how FDR’s lasting contribution to our country extends further—across the entire continent in fact—through his passionate and resolute efforts to preserve and conserve our natural resources.
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Malkin Lecture Series
A Crystal Palace Soiree
Professor Tim Barringer along with special musical guests explores one of the wonders of the Victorian age: the Crystal Palace, site of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.
2015 Season
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Malkin Lecture Series
New York City's Historic Armories
Architectural historian Nancy L. Todd traces the evolution of the armory through local military history, reasons for the rapid pace of the construction of armories New York City, and how those armories were used for training and social activities.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated Artists Decorate Mark Twain’s House
Tracy Brindle—Beatrice Fox Auerbach Chief Curator at The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut—examine Twain’s connections with Louis Comfort Tiffany and his design firm Associated Artists.
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Malkin Lecture Series
When Iridescence Met Incandescence
Join historian Francis Morrone for an illustrated talk on Thomas Edison and Louis Comfort Tiffany, two creative titans whose backgrounds could not be more dissimilar but whose parallel paths yet converged and lit up the world around them.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Holiday Entertaining in the Gilded Age
Discover the elaborate etiquette and enchanting entertainments of a century ago with vivid descriptions of dinner parties, cotillions, and elegant holiday events that transport you back in time with historian Francine Segan.
2014 Season
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Malkin Lecture Series
A Tale of Two Lockwoods
Professor Tim Barringer explores the relationship between the Lockwoods de Forest, importer of East Indian crafts and design to late 19th-century America, and Lockwood Kipling, prominent figure in the British Raj.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment
Curator Sarah Greenough examines the enduring significance of the Shaw Memorial, Saint-Gaudens' memorial masterpiece commemorating the service and sacrifice of the first regiment of African-Americans formed in the North during the Civil War.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Stepchild Regiment
NYU history professor Jeffrey Sammons tells the story of the Fifteenth Regiment also known as the Harlem Rattlers, New York's first Black National Guard regiment that also became one of the most decorated United States units in World War I.
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Malkin Lecture Series
An Aristocracy of Wealth
Curator Jeannine Falino surveys the social and cultural history of New York's Gilded Age through the lens of the architecture, furniture, fashion, and jewelry of the time.
2013 Season
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Malkin Lecture Series
Matthew Brady
Using his images to establish Brady as the master of his art form, Robert Wilson draws from his new biography, Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation, to reintroduce the photographs of the single most important American in photography’s first decades.
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Malkin Lecture Series
“I am afraid of this man”
Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than any other individual to create modern capitalism.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Thomas Nast
Fiona Deans Halloran speaks on Thomas Nast’s political cartoons for Harper’s, his place within the complexities of Gilded Age politics, and the many contradictions in his own life.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Pre-Raphaelites in Britain and America
Yale Professor Tim Barringer explores the radical artistic practices of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Britain and its American counterpart, the artists associated with The New Path, which was dedicated to the “Advancement of Truth in Art.”
2012 Season
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Malkin Lecture Series
Emancipating Lincoln
As we near the Emancipation Proclamation’s 150th anniversary, author and historian Harold Holzer examines this foundational text of American liberty that in recent years has been subject to woeful misinterpretation.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Thomas Jefferson
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham guides us through the life and extraordinary times of Thomas Jefferson, a man often admired but, until now, never truly understood in all his complexity.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Woodrow Wilson
Professor John Milton Cooper Jr. reshapes audiences understanding of Woodrow Wilson as president, pulling from his latest publication Woodrow Wilson: A Biography.
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Malkin Lecture Series
Seventh Regiment
Military Historian and Park Avenue Armory Chairman Elihu Rose presents an overview of more than 200 years of New York City military history through one hometown regiment, the Armory's Seventh Regiment.
2011 Season
Malkin Lecture Series
A World on Fire
Speaking on her new bestselling book A World on Fire, author and historian Amanda Foreman provides fresh accounts of US Civil War battles and discussed how the war spread to Britain and was fought just as continuously there as it was in America.
Malkin Lecture Series
Colonel Roosevelt
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris discusses the final volume of his award-winning three-part biography of Theodore Roosevelt covering the last ten years of Roosevelt’s life.
Malkin Lecture Series
The Romance of the Sister Arts
Yale University Professor of Art History Tim Barringer explores the relationship between music, painting, and the decorative arts during the Aesthetic Movement during the late 19th century in Britain and the US.
2010 Season
Malkin Lecture Series
Appetite City
This lecture by William Grimes explores the rich culinary history of New York, from the simple chophouses and oyster bars of the early 19th century to today’s world of celebrity chefs.
Malkin Lecture Series
Inventing the Modern World
Lecturer Jason T. Busch broadly investigates the objects shown at world’s fairs from London’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851 to the New York World’s Fair in 1939, showcasing advancements in the modern world.
2009 Season
Malkin Lecture Series
The Indian Connection
This lecture by curator and professor Tim Barringer tracks the rise in admiration for the art and design of South Asia among British and American designers, architects, and theorists during the 19th century.
Malkin Lecture Series
Boss Tweed
This discussion with Kenneth D. Ackerman and Kenneth T. Jackson covers the meteoric rise and highly public fall of William Magear Tweed, Boss of Tammany Hall and New York’s Democratic Party after the Civil War, in New York City politics.
2008 Season