N-YHS Digital Collections

: Highlights from the Painting Collection; The 881 images presented here highlight the New-York Historical Society's outstanding collection of over 2,500 American paintings — primarily portraits, genre scenes, and landscapes — dating from the colonial period through the 20th century, as well as a select number of European works. N-YHS holds one of the nation's preeminent collections of Hudson River School landscapes, including Thomas Cole’s iconic five-painting series The Course of Empire and works by Asher B. Durand (over 400 pieces including works on paper), Frederic E. Church, Jasper F. Cropsey, Sanford R. Gifford, John F. Kensett and Albert Bierstadt. The paintings collection also features a wealth of portraits that chart the course of the nation's civic, mercantile, literary, artistic, and ecclesiastical history.

: Highlights from the Photograph Collections; The extensive photograph collections in the New-York Historical Society Library's Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections are particularly strong in portraits and documentary images of New York-area buildings and street scenes from 1839 to 1945, although contemporary photography continues to be collected. Both professional and amateur photographers (many unidentified) are represented. The selection of 50 images in this digital collection focuses on twentieth-century photographs that were chosen especially for their artistic merit, featuring the work of Jessie Tarbox Beals, Irving Browning, Arthur D. Chapman, Bruce Davidson, Arnold Eagle, Andreas Feininger, Raymond Germann, Bernard Gotfryd, Charles Gilbert Hine, Frederick Kelly, Rebecca Lepkoff, Chris Mackey, Ruth Orkin, Harold Roth, Kenneth Siegel, and Erika Stone.

: Highlights from the Sculpture Collection; The New-York Historical Society holds an encyclopedic collection of over 800 works documenting the full range of representational sculpture in the United States from the colonial period to the present. Highlights include important groups of portrait busts by an array of sculptors, including Jean-Antoine Houdon, Giuseppe Cerrachi, Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers, Thomas Crawford, Thomas Ball, Jo Davidson, and Malvina Hoffman; many of the contents from Orson Fowler's former NYC phrenology museum of life and death masks; folk sculpture in a rage of forms, the majority acquired by the pioneering collector and modernist sculptor Elie Nadelman; tombstones and mile markers; and a comprehensive collection of figural genre scenes by the prolific "people's sculptor," John Rogers, whose papers and studio tools also reside in the collection.

: Highlights from the Tiffany Glass Collection; Louis C. Tiffany (1848–1933) was the artistic genius behind Tiffany Studios. However, he was not the exclusive designer of its lamps, windows, and luxury objects: Clara Driscoll (1861–1944), head of the Women’s Glass Cutting Department from 1892 to 1909, has recently been revealed as the designer of many of the firm’s leaded glass shades. The New-York Historical Society's entire collection of 132 Tiffany lamps and three windows came as the gift of a single collector, Dr. Egon Neustadt, in 1984.

: New York subway construction negative collection, 1901-1902, and undated; This collection of 41 negatives depicts New York subway tunnels under construction. The majority of the glass negatives bear dates from 1901 through 1902, just after the city awarded a subway construction contract in 1900. These negatives show work being done at unknown locations along the subway’s earliest route in Manhattan, which ran from City Hall to 42nd Street on the East Side, then west along 42nd Street to Times Square, and north along Broadway. Negatives show workers, trenches, tunnel entrances, horses hauling materials, and views of tunnel structures from above gound. None of the images bear captions or identification, only dates. The title of each negative is devised from what was written on the negative sleeves during collection processing. The seven film negatives probably date from a later period, and depict an unidentified elevated station.

: Petition of 547 loyalists from New York City, November 28, 1776; Also known as the "Loyalist declaration of dependence", this was the second petition addressed to the Royal Commissioners Richard and William Howe from loyalists seeking special protection under British occupation. Their first petition, for the suspension of martial law, went unanswered; in this second, insisting that they had risked their lives and fortunes opposing "the most unnatural, unprovoked rebellion, that ever disgraced the annals of time", the loyalists sought only "some level of distinction" from the "inhabitants in general". Little improved for the loyalists, however, and they suffered additionally from the demoralizing effects of inflation, wartime profiteering, street violence, and general dirt and stench., "547 signatures appear on the parchment, a copy of which was sent to London; other signatures, 157 of which have survived, in a loose sheet or sheets of paper, were appended to the memorial. Two fragments of these paper sheets remain"-- Vail, R.W.G. "The loyalist declaration of dependence of November 28, 1776," New-York Historical Society Quarterly 31, no. 2 (April 1947), p. 70.

: Photographs of New York City and Beyond; The extensive photograph collections at the New-York Historical Society are particularly strong in portraits and documentary images of New York-area buildings and street scenes from 1839 to 1945, although contemporary photography continues to be collected. This collection presents photographic prints and negatives depicting New York City and other locations from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century.

: Revolutionary Era broadsides, 1775-1783; The New-York Historical Society has an extensive collection of broadsides that document the American Revolution and the tumultuous events leading up to it. Broadsides, the technical term for any document, large or small, printed on one side of a single sheet of paper, served as posters, handbills, official proclamations, advertisements, and conveyors of ballads and poetry. They were plastered on walls, distributed by hand or read out loud and are especially important for the study of the Revolutionary period. At a time when newspapers were published one or two times a week, broadsides served as the immediate vehicle for late-breaking news., New-York Historical Society

: Slavery Collection, 1709-1864; The Slavery Collection contains correspondence and legal and financial documents related to the North American slave trade, slave ownership, abolition, and political issues pertinent to slavery. The Slavery Collection is called an "artificial" collection because unrelated items with different provenance have been grouped together according to subject matter. Highlights of the collection include the records of Samuel and William Vernon, business partners involved in the triangular trade, 1756-1799; the Rhode Island slave trading firm of Gardner and Dean, 1771-1787; material relating to slavery in Kentucky, 1785-1864; the records of E.H. Stokes, slave trader in Richmond, Va., 1859-1862; manifests of slave ships, 1812-1855; and birth certificates of children born into slavery in New York, 1800-1818.

: Subway construction photograph collection, 1900-1950; The Subway Construction Photograph Collection, 1900-1950, includes over 71,000 photographs taken by various New York City transportation agencies during the construction of the New York City subways. The Board of Rapid Transit, the Public Service Commission, and their successors photographed construction of the subway and its surface extensions in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens in a succession of contracts: Contracts One and Two were awarded to what later became the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT); Contract Three was also awarded to the IRT, and Contract Four was awarded to what became the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT); Contracts Three and Four were known as the Dual Contracts; additional lines were subsequently built by the Independent City-Owned Rapid Transit Railroad (IND). The photographs were primarily taken for insurance purposes in the event that buildings shown would be damaged during construction. The photographs depict the streets as they appeared before construction began as well as actual construction shots. The digitization of the Subway Construction Photograph Collection was made possible by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

: Treasures of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library

: Witness to the Early American Experience; This collection contains digital images of historical documents from the New-York Historical Society's Library that preserve the words of hundreds of eyewitnesses to the American Revolution in and around New York City. The digital archive includes the collection of maps by George Washington's cartographers, Robert Erskine and Simeon DeWitt, the William Alexander Papers, and all broadsides published from 1776 and 1783 in the Library’s collections.

: Women in Sports Collection; This collection on women in sports history, including items from the Billie Jean King collection, was created for Education audiences at the New-York Historical Society.

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