Fall Exhibit to Focus on World War II and New York City

By PATRICIA COHEN

Helping to fill the seemingly endless appetite for information about World War II, the New York Historical Society is planning a major exhibition on the conflict's effect on the homefront this fall.

Titled “WWII and NYC,” the exhibition is scheduled to open October 5th and run through May 27th. Among the documents scheduled for display is a rare copy of the original Instrument of Surrender, Japan's formal surrender to the Allies on September 2, 1945, that will be exhibited beginning Sept. 21, before the rest of the exhibition opens. The document, one of 20 copies of the surrender agreement created at the time, has not been displayed in New York since 1945.

Also on tap as part of the museum's programming will be the novelist Ken Follett, who will discuss his latest book, “Winter of the World,” with the CBS anchor Charlie Osgood on Sept. 18th. On October 26th, the director George Lucas will speak at a screeni ng of his 2012 film “Double Victory,” about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American aerial unit. And in December, former New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau will speak with Tom Brokaw about his experience on a naval destroyer during the war and as the grandson of President Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of the treasury.