Jacob Leisler Institute

The Jacob Leisler Institute for the Study of Early New York History is a unique research and study center focusing on the dynamic but under-examined English colonial period in New York and New Jersey. The Institute is named for Jacob Leisler (1640-1691), a prominent New York City merchant, who in the wake of England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution emerged as the leader of a rebellion in New York against King James II’s government. Leisler’s tumultuous 1689−1691 New York administration shaped the region’s political, economic, and cultural life up to the outbreak of hostilities with Great Britain in the 1760s.

As a repository of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century New York and New Jersey materials, the Jacob Leisler Institute’s Collections address a wide range of disciplines: history, geography, archeology, ethnohistory, economics, political science, demography, art history, and others. The Institute’s Library and Archives contain extensive genealogical records, original manuscripts, rare books, prints, and maps,  microfilms, scholarly journals and monographs, and photographic and digital materials that cover the full extent of the colonial mid-Atlantic cultural area.