Past Events

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Seventh at Sea

    September 21, 2021

    Historian and author Gareth Russell, author of The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era (2019), is known for examining the personal lives and experiences of the Titanic’s more notable passengers to immerse his audience in the story of one of history’s greatest disasters.  In this lecture, he focuses on two men who were closely related to the Armory’s Seventh Regiment—Archibald Gracie IV, a veteran member of the Regiment and part of an old New York family, and Frank Millet, a notable artist whose work at the Armory in 1880 has been recently restored. Within a week of setting sail, they were caught up in the horrifying disaster of the Titanic’s sinking, one of the biggest news stories of the century. Today, we can see their stories and the Titanic’s voyage as the beginning of the end of the established hierarchy of the Edwardian era. Using previously unpublished sources and artifacts, Russell immerses his audience in a time of unprecedented change in British and American history.

    Gareth Russell is a historian, novelist, and playwright who was educated at Oxford University and Queen’s University Belfast. His 2019 book, The Ship of Dreams, was named a Book of the Year by The London Times and a Best History Book of 2019 by The Daily Telegraph. Previous works include Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII (2017), A History of the English Monarchy from Boadicea to Elizabeth I (2015), and An Illustrated Introduction to the Tudors (2014).

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Daughters of Yalta

    October 19, 2021

    ensions during the Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin just as victory was close at hand. For all that is known about “The Big Three” and their time spent deliberating the fate of postwar Germany and much of the world, too often overlooked is the parallel history of three young women who were chosen by their fathers to travel with them to Yalta, each bound by fierce family loyalty, political savvy, and intertwined romances that powerfully colored these crucial days. Anna Roosevelt, Kathleen Harriman (the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union) and Sarah Churchill, through an intricate web of politics, clashing loyalties, and secret power brokering, each in her own turn played an intrinsic role in a conference that would shape the rest of history as we know it.

    Catherine Grace Katz is a writer and historian from Chicago. She graduated from Harvard in 2013 with a BA in history and in 2014 received her MPhil in modern European history from Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, where she wrote her dissertation on the origins of modern counterintelligence practices. After graduating, Katz worked in finance in New York City before returning to history and writing. She is pursuing her JD at Harvard Law School. The Daughters of Yalta is her first book.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    The Barbizon

    November 16, 2021

    Built in 1927, at the height of the Roaring Twenties, the Barbizon Hotel was designed as a luxurious safe haven for the “modern woman” hoping for a career in the arts. Over time, it became the place to stay for any ambitious young woman seeking fame and fortune. Sylvia Plath fictionalized her time there in The Bell Jar, and, over the years, its almost 700 tiny rooms with matching floral curtains and bedspreads housed, among many others, Titanic survivor Molly Brown; actresses Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, and Jaclyn Smith; and writers Joan Didion, Gael Greene, Diane Johnson, and Meg Wolitzer. Mademoiselle magazine boarded its summer interns there, as did Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School its students, and the Ford Modeling Agency its young models. Before the hotel’s residents were household names, they were young women arriving at the Barbizon with a suitcase and a dream. An Armory neighborhood landmark, the Barbizon offered its residents a room of their own and a life without family obligations. It gave women a chance to remake themselves however they pleased; it was the hotel that set them free. No place had existed like it before or has since.

    Paulina Bren is an award-winning writer and historian who teaches at Vassar College. She attended Wesleyan University as an undergraduate, later receiving a MA in international studies from the University of Washington, and a PhD in history from New York University. Her most recent book, The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free (Simon & Schuster, 2021), is a New York Times Editor’s Choice and has received international press coverage, with reviews in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian’s Sunday Observer, and The London Times, among others. In addition, Bren is a well-known scholar of everyday life and communism behind the Iron Curtain, starting with her groundbreaking book, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Cornell UP, 2010), which cast the first line in what is now a new field of study.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Hero of Two Worlds

    December 7, 2021

    Few in history can match the breadth and depth of the revolutionary career of the Marquis de Lafayette. Over 50 incredible years at the heart of the Age of Revolution, he fought as one with righteous revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic. As an idealistic and courageous teenager serving in the American Revolution, he used his considerable wealth and savvy to help the Americans defeat the British. He then returned home and was a principal player in the French Revolution. And, in his final act, at 70 years old, he was instrumental in the dramatic overthrow of the Bourbon Dynasty during the Revolution of 1830. Lafayette was a particular admirer of the old Seventh Regiment, which served as his honor guard in 1824, forging a bond between our regiment and France that remained long into the 20th century. Join author and podcaster Mike Duncan as he describes how Lafayette remained unshakably committed through an era of upheaval to his principles of liberty and democracy, his resolve never wavering.

    Mike Duncan is one of the most popular history podcasters in the world and author of The New York Times bestselling book, The Storm Before the Storm. His award-winning series, The History of Rome, remains a legendary landmark in the history of podcasting. Duncan’s ongoing series, Revolutions, explores the great political revolutions that have driven the course of modern history.

    For more information about Mike Duncan’s new book, Hero of Two Worlds, visit publicaffairsbooks.com.

    The Marquis de Lafayette (copy of the portrait by Joseph-Désiré Court in the Musee National, Versailles, France). Presented to the Seventh Regiment on April 12, 1934 by the Republic of France. Photo Credit: 7th Regiment Archives, NYSMM