“The New York Historical Society, with a newly hired president and a conservative financier emerging as a board power, is shifting its focus from the city to more national concerns, stirring the objections of some historians and staff members… This shift in emphasis appears to signal the ascendance on the society’s board of Richard Gilder, a stockbroker and a leading fund-raiser for Republican and conservative causes, who became a trustee a year ago. It also seems to close off all possibility of the society’s merger with the Museum of the City of New York.”