Turn Every Page:  Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive Opens at New York Historical Society

A new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society,  Turn Every Page:  Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive, offers an unparalleled look at HM 1953 alumnus Robert A. Caro's research and methodology as a reporter, biographer, and writer.

The ongoing exhibition includes never-before-seen highlights from the archive, including Caro's files and papers on Robert Moses (The Power Broker) and Lyndon Johnson (The Years of Lyndon Johnson), providing an intimate view of how Caro started his career and worked as a reporter. Caro's meticulousness as a reporter, biographer, and historian is demonstrated in his research notebooks, handwritten interview notes, scrapbooks, photographs, and original manuscript pages. The exhibition also includes one of Caro's Smith Corona Electra 210 typewriters.

Turn Every Page will both illuminate and delight audiences," said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New York Historical Society. "This first-ever exhibition of Robert A. Caro's work offers a unique window into his process, his thinking, and his writing. It also underscores the value investigative journalism has in historical research, and Caro's extraordinary ability to uncover as well as convey—brilliantly, and with clarity and elegance—the essence of power. That Caro's research and writing will be permanently on view in our building attests to his monumental standing as a biographer and historian."

The exhibition traces the arc of Caro's early career, first as a student journalist at Princeton and later as an investigative reporter for Newsday, and highlights his on-the-ground research for both The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The display reveals the writer's extraordinary output, his persistent effort to capture a multitude of voices in his research and reporting, and his drive to examine events and understand their deeper causes. It also features interviews with residents of the New York neighborhoods Moses destroyed, with farmers and ranchers from the Texas Hill Country whose lives young Congressman Johnson transformed by bringing them electricity, and with African-Americans denied the right to vote before Johnson passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

 

 

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