Timely to the United States’ 250th Independence anniversary on July 4, the New York Historical Museum is opening a newly built annex featuring exhibitions on the history of American democracy. The opening of the new museum wing on Thursday was described as a “milestone” in the history of the metropolis’s oldest museum, founded in 1804, by director Louise Mirrer.
Across several floors beneath a rooftop terrace with a panoramic view of Central Park, the museum will in the future display artworks, photographs, and historical artifacts about the history of democracy in the United States — for example the simple wooden chair on which George Washington was proclaimed the first president of the United States in 1789.
From 2028 onward, the building is also to house the American LGBTQ+ Museum, which will tell the stories of queer people. The New York Stonewall uprisings of 1969, when revelers in the popular gay bar “Stonewall Inn” on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, resisted a police raid, are widely regarded as the birth moment of the movement in the United States.
Since the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, many critics have viewed democracy in the United States as threatened by his autocratic tendencies. The rights of people from the LGBTQ+ community have been sharply curtailed by the Trump administration.
