Browse Items (1400 total)

Number 7 on the Burleigh map, an original modest structure served the needs of a railroad built primarily to deliver coal from the Pennsylvania anthracite fields, east to New York and west to Buffalo on the Great Lakes. Amidst ferocious competition,…

Portions of the stone bridge depicted here date to 1760, when a wooden structure over Catskill Creek (in Greene County) collapsed; the rest was completed in 1792 and remains standing today. Lomoff renders virtually no straight lines in his painting,…

Looking roughly to the east, bird's eye view shows Oatka Creek winding through town of 5,000 as of 1890--the second largest in Genesee County after Batavia. First settled in 1793, Le Roy was created in 1812 from a portion of the Caledonia land…

This excerpt of a Swiss song appeared in a medical study on the phenomenon of nostalgia, usually glossed in English as "homesickness." A researcher named Johannes Hofer had coined the term in his 1688 dissertation, observing that Swiss mercenary…

Full title of the map is "Le Canada, ou Nouvelle France, la Floride, la Virginie, Pensilvanie, Caroline, Nouvelle Angleterre et Nouvelle Yorck, l'Isle de Terre Neuve, la Louisiane, et le cours de la riviere de Misisipi." The title turns out to be…

Lead image of a detailed article on the best ways to lay out a farm renders a bird's eye view of a house, barn and outbuildings, fruit orchard, flower garden, penned livestock, and a field under cultivation. In the foreground a horse and wagon pass…

Under a pale sky, we look uphill along a crooked line of split-rail fences and melting snow toward a pair of dormant trees and farm buildings. Bolton’s close attention to Catskill landscapes is apparent in his treatment of patterns in melting snow;…

Because of its visible brush strokes, this painting is a highly impressionistic landscape of a rocky coastline meeting the sea. Here, the artist makes use of warm reds and browns to contrast the cool, refreshing quality of the ocean with the sturdy,…

This map shows the approximate outline of a proglacial lake dating some 13,000 years ago, when the Laurentide ice sheet was in retreat and blocked water from flowing north into the North Atlantic Ocean. Instead, its outlet was diverted through…

Birds-eye view maps were very popular during the last two decades of the 19th century. This high-end version almost certainly owes its existence to the popularity of the Chautauqua Institution, founded in 1874 and pictured in the lower left…