Culture & Society

Costume, country life, customs, dress, family life, fashion, social history, sports, traditions

Arts & Literature Cities & Buildings Culture & Society History & Geography Industry & Technology Nature & Science Printing & Graphics All Gallery Collections

Africana & Black History

Several thousand items ranging from historical documents and rare visual materials to contemporary photo-journalism, relating to the entirety of African American history from the 16th century to the present; selected in the course of developing the NYPL website "African American Migration Experience."

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After Columbus: Four-hundred Years of Native American Portraiture

369 prints and drawings by Simon van de Passe, George Catlin, and Karl Bodmer, dating from 1627 to the 1830s; 227 gelatin silver and platinum prints by photographers Edward S. Curtis, Karl E. Moon, and Frank A. Rinehart, and sculptor Frederic Allen Williams.

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American Popular Song Sheet Covers, 1890-1922

Thousands of examples of the covers of popular American sheet music from 1890-1922, the first decades of a much larger collection that stretches to the present.

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America's First Illustrator: Alexander Anderson

Sixteen scrapbooks containing close to 10,000 wood-engravings by 19th-century master illustrator Alexander Anderson, considered one of America's earliest and finest wood-engravers.

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"America's National Game:" The Albert G. Spalding Collection of Early Baseball Photographs

Photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations from the personal collection of materials related to baseball and other sports gathered by the early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding.

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Art from the George Arents Collection on Tobacco

Hundreds of prints relating to tobacco, from an exceptional extra-illustrated copy of Fairholt's Tobacco: Its History and Lore (1859).

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Asia and the Pacific Rim in Early Prints and Photographs

Over 1,000 prints and photographs of East, Southeast and South Asia from the 18th century to the early 20th century, drawn from portfolios, photographic albums, photographically illustrated books and archival collections.

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At Home in Brooklyn: The Nooney Brooklyn Photographs, 1978-1979

Hundreds of black and white photographs by Dinanda H. Nooney (d. 2004) documenting almost 200 families or individuals in their Brooklyn homes.

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Authors: Photographs from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

Hundreds of portraits - prints and photographs - picturing more than 120 authors writing in English, primarily from the 1860s to the 1920s, and later, organized alphabetically by sitter.

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Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era; A Selection of Images

Several dozen images, including book illustrations and print series, reflecting literary and cultural history and the role of women during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

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Books by Alvin Langdon Coburn

66 photogravure portraits of artists, writers, statesmen and other public figures, primarily American and English, in photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn's 1913 Men of Mark (from 1904 to 1913) and his 1922 More Men of Mark (from 1913 to 1922).

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Cabinet Card Portraits in the Collection of Radical Publisher Benjamin R. Tucker

260 portrait photographs, from about 1880-1900, chiefly albumen cabinet cards and cartes de visite, of radical figures, and a variety of statesmen, authors, artists, actresses and other notable, primarily European, cultural figures. The backs of these cards are also viewable.

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Cigarette Cards: ABCs

Hundreds of series published from before 1900 to the mid-20th century, totaling tens of thousands of individual cards (viewable front and back). Arranged by letter of the alphabet, they cover an encyclopedic range of subjects, including film stars, sports, and military topics, plants, animals, and monuments of the world.

Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian Dance and Related Arts

Thousands of photographs of Indonesian costumes, theatrical performances, and dance movements taken by scholar Claire Holt and others, collected by her in travels through the region in the 1930s and later.

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"Classic 6:" New York City Apartment Building Living, 1880s-1910s

More than 1,300 digital images depict elevation views and floor plans for middle and upper class apartment buildings from New York City's pre-World War I residential building boom.

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Customs and Costume: Surveys and Examples of National Studies to 1900

An assemblage of about two dozen (and growing) various and representative plate books, portfolios of paintings and prints, and illustrated surveys on costume and customs of people around the world, principally in the 19th century.

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Detroit Publishing Company Postcards from the Leonard Lauder Postcard Collection

Thousands of postcards (photomechanical prints, primarily in color and on warm white stock, ca. 1898-1920s, featuring views of well-known streets, buildings, historic monuments, natural scenery, industry, transportation, and daily life.

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Dress and Fashion: Design and Manufacture

Several rare and unusual published resources of interest to students of western dress and fashion from the 19th to the early 20th century. Includes historical surveys as well as manufacturers' booklets and sample swatch catalogs.

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Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan

More than 1,000 images encompassing 1,200 years of Japanese book art, including Buddhist sutras, painted manuscripts, portraits, landscapes, calligraphic verse, and photographic books, with related drawings and woodblock prints.

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Ellis Island Photographs from the Collection of William Williams, Commissioner of Immigration, 1902-1913

Photographs relating to Ellis Island and immigration into the United States in the early 20th century, ranging from portraits of individual immigrants by Augustus Francis Sherman to views of the Ellis Island facility and its grounds by Edwin Levick and others.

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Empire and Regency: Decoration in the Age of Napoleon

Twenty primary source illustrated pattern books, scrapbooks, and a set of original French goldsmith's drawings from the late 18th to early 20th-centuries featuring mainly interior decoration, furnishings, furniture patterns, and views relating to the Empire and Regency Styles.

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The Floating World: Japanese Color Woodcuts by Kitagawa Utamaro

Original prints by the Japanese painter and woodcut designer Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806).

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Henry George Collection: Illustrations and Photographs

109 page images presenting the contents of a scrapbook titled "The Single Tax," containing photographs and caricatures of Henry George (1839-1897), the founder of the 19th-century reform 'single tax' movement.

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Historical and Public Figures: A General Portrait File to the 1920s

Over 40,00 portraits of a wide-range of public figures, including political, religious, cultural, literary and artistic personalities, with an emphasis on the 16th through the 19th centuries. Includes some original prints, but consists principally of printed pictures.

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Icons and Images of Cultures: Plate Books from the Russian Empire, Early Soviet Russia, and Eastern Europe, 1730-1935

Thousands of images, reproducing, often in their entirety, important illustrated books published in Russia and adjacent areas. Most notably, includes the several series issued by 19th-century collector and scholar, Dimitrii Aleksandrovich Rovinskii.

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Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts

Over 100 illuminations selected from the 1,156 extant pages of the Padua Ashkenazi Mahzor, a medieval Jewish festival prayer book; Hamburg Haggadah (1731); Ketubbot (1638); and Xanten Bible.

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Lewis Wickes Hine: Documentary Photographs, 1905-1938

More than 500 silver gelatin photographic prints depicting American social conditions and labor, including immigrants at Ellis Island and construction of the Empire State Building, Hine's principal subjects.

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The Luso-Hispanic New World in Early Prints and Photographs

Hundreds of photographs and prints, in albums and rare published volumes, present the territories and countries associated with Portugal and Spain in the New World, from Mexico to Argentina, and parts of the Caribbean.

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Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts from Western Europe

More than 2,000 manuscript pages and associated illuminations dating from the 9th through the 16th centuries give vivid testimony to the creative impulses of the often nameless craftsmen who continually discovered new ways of animating the contents of hand-produced books.

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The Middle East in Early Prints and Photographs

Several thousand prints and photographs contained in works from the 17th century to the beginning of the 20th century. These include books illustrated with prints or photographs, photograph albums, and archival compilations; the processes represented range from engravings to lithographs, and from salt prints to heliogravures.

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Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection, 1851-1930

Thousands of menus beginning with the oldest items in the collection from 1851. The collection is strongest for the period between 1890 and 1910. Organization is primarily chronological by date or range of dates.

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Mountjoy Prison Portraits of Irish Independence: Photograph Albums in the Thomas A. Larcom Collection

150 salt and albumen print photographs in two albums, of prisoners confined in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, in August 1857 and November 1866.

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A New Nation: The Thomas Addis Emmet Collection of Illustrations Relating to the American Revolution and Early United States History

Several thousand original prints, drawings, watercolors, and printed book illustrations relating to early American history, primarily from the period leading to the American Revolution through the early years of the nation.

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"The Pageant of America" Photograph Archive

Several thousand photographs from 1860s-1920s, curated for the 15-volume series The Pageant of America: A Pictorial History of the United States commemorating the nation's sesquicentennial in 1926.

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Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s

More than 54,000 New York City archival photographs (and their captioned versos) from the 1870s-1970s arranged by borough and street; the majority are exterior building views and neighborhood scenes from the 1910s-1940s.

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The Picture Collection of The New York Public Library

Over 30,000 images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, created mostly before 1923 and selected from the over 1,000,000 images in the Mid-Manhattan Library's Picture Collection.

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Picturing America, 1497-1899: Prints, Maps, and Drawings bearing on the New World Discoveries and on the Development of the Territory that is now the United States

Over 1,000 original prints, drawings, and maps, featuring views of American towns and cities, representations of historical events, scenes, places, and battles.

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Posters of the Russian Civil War, 1918-1922

213 posters, placards, and broadsides comprising one of the largest assemblages of such posters outside of Russia.

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Presenting The New York Public Library: Drawings, Photographs and Prints

Over 2,000 images of buildings, collections, and programs, including NYPL predecessor the New York Free Circulating Library. Includes views of the Astor and Lenox Library, Branch Libraries in the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island, and the construction of the Library's landmark Central Building.

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Publisher's Proofs and Related Work from L. Prang & Company

Thousands of chromolithographs of publisher proofs by Louis Prang & Company in seventeen scrapbooks, and advertising cards for Prang and other firms in six scrapbooks.

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Russia and Eastern Europe in Rare Photographs, 1860- 1945

Thousands of original Russian and East European photographs from the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries, in more than 150 albums.

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Staten Island in Vintage Postcards

More than 700 postcards depicting the buildings, scenery, and daily life of Staten Island from the late 19th-century until well into the 20th-century.

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Streetscape and Townscape of Metropolitan New York City, 1860-1942

Over 1,000 prints and photographs from a wide range of image collections and illustrated monographs: Hudson River mansions, including Washington Irving's home (1860s); street views by Alice Austen (1896); a panorama of Fifth Avenue (1911); Wurts Brothers' photographs (early to mid 20th-century); and more.

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Uniforms and Regimental Regalia: The Vinkhuijzen Collection of Military Costume Illustration

Over 20,000 prints, drawings, watercolors, and printed book and magazine illustrations of military costume as well as military medals, regalia, insignia, coats of arms, and regimental flags, from most times and places except the United States.

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United States in Stereo: In the Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views

Stereoscopic views, or stereographs, were as varied and popular in the 19th century as television continues to be in our time. This presentation will eventually include all the United States stereoscopic views in the Dennis Collection (more than 40,000 items), front and back, organized by State or Subject Series.

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Vintage Holiday Postcards

More than 1,800 vintage holiday postcards from the New York Public Library's Picture Collection themed around national celebrations of the United States: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, St. Patrick's Day, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Washington's Birthday, among others.

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Woman Suffrage and Feminism Photographs in the Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection

Hundreds of images documenting the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congresses held from 1906-1913 at Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Budapest, and others. Featured are associates of Rosika Schwimmer such as Jane Addams, Anita Augspurg, Carrie Chapman Catt, Vilma Glucklich, and Lida Gustava Heymann.

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Wonders: Images of the Ancient World

Over 1,700 images of the civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and other ancient Mediterranean cultures as conceived and depicted by artists and travelers from the 18th to the early 20th century, as represented in book and periodical illustrations, engravings, lithographs and photographs. A wide range of subjects includes arms and armor, architecture, furniture, pottery, mythology, religion, theater and the Seven Wonders of the World.

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Yiddish Theatre Placards: Buenos Aires and New York

Placards from the two leading centers of Yiddish theater in their respective heydays: New York, 1890s-1910s, and Buenos Aires, 1930s-1940s

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