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Lest Liberty Perish from the Face of the Earth - Buy Bonds
In 1917 the United States entered the Great War, as World War I was known at the time. A national propaganda campaign was started to convince Americans to support the war effort. Some of the images used in this campaign have become a permanent part of American cultural iconography, notably J.M. Flagg’s famed 1917 poster of Uncle Sam declaring, “I want YOU.” In addition to recruiting troops to fight, the U.S. government issued “Liberty Bonds” to help finance the war effort. Artists helped the cause by making ...
Contributed by
Library of Congress
Mulberry Street, New York City
This photolithograph from the Detroit Publishing Company documents the busy street life of New York City’s Lower East Side at the start of the 20th century. Between 1870 and 1915, New York’s population more than tripled, from 1.5 million to 5 million. In 1900, when this photo was taken, foreign-born immigrants and their children constituted a staggering 76 percent of the city’s population. Often described as the Main Street of Little Italy, Mulberry Street was dominated from the 1890s by immigrants from Italy. These immigrants jostled ...
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Library of Congress
Declaration of Intention of Maria von Trapp
Maria von Trapp became a household name in the United States when her story was turned into the 1959 Broadway musical The Sound of Music. She and her family previously had immigrated to the United States from their native Austria following the takeover of the country by Nazi Germany. This Declaration of Intention to become a U.S. citizen, submitted to the U.S. District Court in Burlington, Vermont, on January 21, 1944, sheds light on the real Maria von Trapp.
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U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Journal of New Netherland 1647. Written in the Years 1641, 1642, 1643, 1644, 1645, and 1646
Willem Kieft (1597–1647) was a Dutch merchant who was appointed by the West India Company as director-general of New Netherland in 1638. Kieft instituted a harsh policy toward the Indians of the colony, whom he attempted to tax and drive from their land. In 1643, a contingent of soldiers under Kieft attacked a Raritan village on Staten Island in a dispute over pigs allegedly stolen from a Dutch farm. This led to the bloody, two-year conflict known as Kieft’s war, which raged in parts of what is now ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
Complaint by Some Members of the Dutch Reformed Church, Living at Raritan, etc in [...] New Jersey [...] about the Behavior [...] of Dominie Theodorus Jacobus Frilinghuisen and his Church Council
In 1664, the Dutch colony of New Netherland ceased to exist when Governor Peter Stuyvesant was forced to surrender New Amsterdam--soon to be renamed New York--to an English fleet. Many residents of what became the British colonies of New York and New Jersey continued to speak Dutch and to worship in churches where services were conducted in Dutch. This pamphlet, published in New York in 1725, concerns a dispute within a Dutch Reformed congregation in Raritan, "in the Province of New Jersey, in North America, under the Crown of Great ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
Articles about the Transfer of New Netherland on the 27th of August, Old Style, Anno 1664
On August 27, 1664, a fleet of four British warships under the command of Colonel Richard Nicolls sailed into the harbor of New Amsterdam (present-day New York City) and demanded that Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, surrender the colony to the British. The out-gunned Stuyvesant had no choice but to comply, and under English rule Nicolls became the first governor of the renamed Province of New York. This document lists the articles of capitulation by which the colony was surrendered and that established the ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
Remonstration of the Administrators of the Dutch West India Company to their Lords the State General about Several Examples of Tyranny and Violence by the English in New Netherland
In the 1660s, colonists from the English colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts to the east and northeast and Maryland and Virginia to the south and southwest increasingly infringed on the Dutch colony of New Netherland, which was located in parts of present-day New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut. This remonstrance, or complaint, published in Schiedam in 1663, was an appeal by the directors of the West India Company to the States-General, the ruling body of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, for increased protection against the incursions of the ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
Brief and Concise Plan Intended to be a Mutual Agreement for Some Colonists Willing to go to the South River in New Netherland
Pieter Cornelis Plockhoy was a Dutch Mennonite and social reformer, born in the city of Zierikzee circa 1625. He moved to Amsterdam in 1648, where he became well known in the city’s intellectual circles. In 1658 he went to London where he tried unsuccessfully to gain the support of Oliver Cromwell, the antiroyalist Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, for the establishment of utopian settlements in England. Plockhoy returned to Netherlands in 1661 and in 1662 concluded a contract with the Amsterdam magistrates for the establishment of a settlement on ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
Short Story about New Netherland [...] and Special Possibilities to Populate
This pamphlet, published anonymously in Amsterdam in October 1662, concerns the establishment of a settlement on the South River (as the Dutch called the Delaware River) in New Netherland by the Dutch Mennonite and social reformer Pieter Cornelis Plockhoy. The pamphlet consisted of proposals sent to the magistrates of the city of Amsterdam to gain their support for the settlement, which Plockhoy intended to be for poor and needy families and based on reformist principles. The pamphlet was partly intended to reassure investors that the settlement would also be a ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
Conditions as Created by their Lords Burgomasters of Amsterdam
This pamphlet, published in Amsterdam in 1656, contains information about the patroonships offered by the West India Company to settlers in the Dutch colony of New Netherland, and in particular about the policies of the city of Amsterdam toward overseas colonization under the terms of the agreement between the city and the West India Company. Intended to help populate the colony, the patroonships were large grants of land made to Dutch investors who agreed to establish a colony of “fifty souls, upwards of fifteen years old.” The pamphlet was, in ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
Freedoms, as Given by the Council of the Nineteen of the Chartered West India Company to All those who Want to Establish a Colony in New Netherland
The Lords Nineteen, the governing body of the Dutch West India Company, established the patroon system as a way to encourage the settlement of New Netherland, the Dutch colony in North America that covered parts of present-day New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Delaware. Patroons were wealthy Dutchmen who were given extensive tracts of land, powers of local government, and some participation in the fur trade in exchange for settling colonists in New Netherland. In June 1629, the West India Company issued the Charter of Liberties and Exemptions, which declared ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
Description of New Netherland (as it is Today)
This book, published in Amsterdam in 1655, is one of the most important sources for the study of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. Adriaen van der Donck was trained as a lawyer at Leiden University. In 1641–43, he worked at the vast patroonship (estate) of Rensselaerswijck, surrounding present-day Albany, New York. He then applied for and received from the West India Company his own grant of land, a large tract located just north of Manhattan in present-day Westchester County, New York. (The city of Yonkers takes its name ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
Destruction by Fire of Pennsylvania Hall. On the Night of the 17th May, 1838
This dramatic print shows the destruction of Pennsylvania Hall, a large building that was constructed in 1837–38 at Sixth and Haines Streets in Philadelphia as a meeting place for local abolitionist (antislavery) groups. Dedication ceremonies began on May 14, 1838, and continued over several days in a climate of growing hostility from anti-abolitionist forces in the city. On the night of May 17, 1838, an anti-abolitionist mob stormed the hall and set it on fire. Fire companies refused to fight the blaze, and the building was completely destroyed. A ...
Contributed by
The Library Company of Philadelphia
Road to Philadelphy
This circa 1830 print by Edward Williams Clay (1799–1857) caricatures the pretentiousness and prejudice of early 19th-century Philadelphia Quakers toward people they regarded as their social inferiors, but it also mocks those seeking to imitate the Quaker elite. On a Philadelphia road in front of a small house with an open picket fence and a visitor arriving on horseback, a raggedly dressed, dark-skinned traveler with buck teeth, possibly an Irishman or African American, asks a rotund Quaker man and his daughter, "I say, this isn't the road to ...
Contributed by
The Library Company of Philadelphia
American Classical and Military Academy at Mount Airy, Germantown, 8 Miles from Philadelphia
This lithograph shows the American Classical and Military Academy in the Mount Airy section of Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, located some eight miles (13 kilometers) from the center of Philadelphia.  The right wing was built in 1750 as “Mount Airy,” the country seat of Pennsylvania Chief Justice William Allen, and early in the 19th century the area took the building’s name. Founded as Mount Airy Seminary (later Mount Airy College or Collegiate Institute) in 1807, the school served as a military academy in 1826–35 under the superintendence of Augustus ...
Contributed by
The Library Company of Philadelphia
Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania. Near Philadelphia
This hand-colored lithograph shows a view looking past farmland to the Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania. In the foreground, two boys sit in a fenced pasture in which cows graze near sheds and an enclosed pond with ducks swimming on it. In the background, a farm is visible in front of the prison at which a carriage is parked and a man rides on horseback. The penitentiary was built in 1823–36 after the designs of John Haviland and opened in an unfinished state in 1829. Located at 2101–99 Fairmount ...
Contributed by
The Library Company of Philadelphia
General View of Laurel Hill Cemetery
In the 1830s, a group of influential Philadelphians wanted to establish a rural cemetery that would be naturalistic, serene, and in genteel seclusion. They settled on Laurel Hill at 3822 Ridge Avenue, the former estate of merchant Joseph Sims, which had rocky bluffs and spectacular views and was about six kilometers from the city center. The cemetery, built in 1836–39 after the designs of Scottish-born architect and landscape designer John Notman, is seen in this bird's-eye view of part of the grounds. This view shows horse-drawn carriages and ...
Contributed by
The Library Company of Philadelphia
Fairmount
This landscape view looking west from Reservoir Hill in Philadelphia shows the Fairmount Water Works, originally constructed between 1812 and 1822 after the designs of Philadelphia chief engineer Frederick Graff. Built to supply the expanding city with safe drinking water, the works included an engine house, mill house, and a millrace bridge. Visitors are seen strolling on the landscaped grounds of the works and rowers are visible on the nearby Schuylkill River. Also depicted are residences, probably including Lemon Hill, the Schuylkill Canal lock, and the river dam. The illustration ...
Contributed by
The Library Company of Philadelphia
View from the Inclined Plane, near Philadelphia
This circa 1840 print shows the view looking east down the inclined plane cut into Belmont Hill (Fairmount Park) for hauling railroad cars from the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia to Columbia on the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad. Two men watch the cars being hauled by cables from within the plane. The covered Columbia Railroad Bridge over the Schuylkill, completed in 1834, is visible in the background. In the foreground is a heavily wooded landscape, with the cityscape in the distance. The plane connecting the river with the rail line was ...
Contributed by
The Library Company of Philadelphia
General View of Laurel Hill Cemetery
In the 1830s, a group of influential Philadelphians wanted to establish a rural cemetery that would be naturalistic, serene, and in genteel seclusion. They settled on Laurel Hill at 3822 Ridge Avenue, the former estate of merchant Joseph Sims, which had rocky bluffs and spectacular views and was about six kilometers from the city center. The cemetery was built in 1836–39 after the designs of Scottish-born architect and landscape designer John Notman. In the foreground, horse-drawn carriages approach the main gate (visible at left) of the cemetery, which contains ...
Contributed by
The Library Company of Philadelphia
University of Pennsylvania
This lithograph shows the twin buildings of the University of Pennsylvania, Medical Hall and College Hall, located on the west side of 9th Street between Market and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia. The view includes a group of students gathered in a doorway, two women carrying parasols, and other pedestrians. Designed by Philadelphia architect William Strickland (1788–1854) and constructed in 1829–30, the buildings housed the university until its removal to West Philadelphia in the 1870s. Strickland was one of the first architects of the Greek Revival style in the ...
Contributed by
The Library Company of Philadelphia