Events
DORIS offers programs, tours, and activities related to our holdings. Join our mailing list to be the first to know about exhibition openings, upcoming events, recent blog posts, and much more.
Note: If you require an auxiliary aid or service in order to attend a DORIS event, please contact the Disability Service Facilitator.
Note: To request language interpretation services, please contact the Language Access Coordinator at least three (3) business days before an event.
Lunch & Learn: Unleashing Black Power
Online (Zoom)
Tuesday, June 9 - 1:00-2:00pm
Join the NYC Department of Records & Information Services (DORIS) each month for our virtual Lunch & Learn Series – an intimate conversation with agency staff and special guests focusing on the collections of the Municipal Archives and Library and the history of New York City.
On June 9, Dr. Peter D. Blackmer will examine the methods, uses, and impact of state repression using the Municipal Archives’ NYPD Bureau of Special Services & Investigation (BOSSI) Collection. The author of Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers, Dr. Blackmer, will also explore how archival records can help us understand, analyze, and write more complete and compelling histories of the Black Freedom Movement in New York and beyond.
Unleashing Black Power explores the local dynamics, national connections, and global context of the Black freedom movement in Harlem from 1954 to 1964, illuminating how activists, organizers, and ordinary people mounted their resistance to systemic racism in the Jim Crow North. Peter Blackmer argues that this decade of confrontations between Black communities and white state power caused Harlem residents and activists to seek “new means” for achieving freedom within a city, state, and nation determined to deny them access. Tracing the dual evolution of Black radicalism and white resistance, Unleashing Black Power offers a new framework for analyzing the epochal urban uprisings in the 1960s.
RSVP to join us by clicking here.
Lunch & Learn: Empresses of Seventh Avenue
Online (Zoom)
Tuesday, July 7 - 1:00-2:00pm
Join the NYC Department of Records & Information Services (DORIS) each month for our virtual Lunch & Learn Series – an intimate conversation with agency staff and special guests focusing on the collections of the Municipal Archives and Library and the history of New York City.
On July 7, fashion historian Nancy MacDonell will delve into the work of columnist and editor Diana Vreeland and photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe, for the New York fashion magazine, Harper’s Bazaar. Stemming from MacDonell’s recent book, Empresses of Seventh Ave: World War II, New York City, and the Birth of American Fashion, this presentation will highlight how the work of these two women during the 1940s - specifically, their collaboration on the 1942 photoshoot “Flight to the Valley of the Sun” - showcased the evolution of American style.
Before World War II, American fashion designers were relatively unknown. The industry, then centered on Seventh Ave in Manhattan, looked overseas to Paris, the fashion capital of the world, for “inspiration.” However, when Nazi forces invaded France in 1940, the fashion capital was cut off from the rest of the world.
Empresses of Seventh Ave tells the story of how New York-based designers, retailers, editors, and photographers persevered, creating clothes that perfectly suited the American way of life: sophisticated, modern, comfortable, and affordable. Led by a small group of women, New York’s fashion industry introduced “the American look” to the world and created the template for modern style.
RSVP to join us by clicking here.