NEW YORK.-The remarkable, untold story of New York's deep involvement in the slave trade is the focus of a new multi-media exhibition, Slavery in New York, which opens October 7, 2005 and runs through March 5, 2006 at the New-York Historical Society, at Central Park West and 77th Street in New York City.

The 9,000 square-foot multi-media exhibition (the largest in the Society's 200-year history), incorporates historically detailed video re-enactments, audio narrative and interactive video displays, along with rare, primary source materials to detail this remarkable, dark time in America's history.

Exhibition highlights include: giant billowing sails and voices (speaking a dozen African dialects) suggestive of the harrowing Middle Passage; and a multi-media installation portraying a local well where slaves met as they gathered water and (in 1712) fomented a slave rebellion. Wire sculptures evoke the toil of the faceless, voiceless peoples whose histories were (nearly) erased. The rarely seen, original hand written draft of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation will be on display from October 7-15.

Bills of sale for the human slave trade; advertisements offering rewards for runaway slaves; original 18th century maps detailing farmland (in what is now Soho) dedicated to freed blacks; letters revealing the details of daily life of both slaves and slave holders; and objects such as a silver tea service crafted by slaves from the Gold Coast, offer a compelling window into another time.

A portion of the exhibit will recreate, through ships logs and diaries, the experience of a 10-year-old, Priscilla, kidnapped from Sierra Leone and brought as a slave to the New World.

The exhibit's chief historian is James Horton (author of Slavery and the Making of America), and Richard Rabinowitz of American History Workshop is curator. A companion book, Slavery in New York (New Press, October 2005), will present essays by leading experts in the field on New York as a slave city.