The New York Public Library’s Digital Collection includes Yiddish theater posters dating back more than a hundred years. These ephemeral pieces, with their bold titles, portraits of actors, and exuberant descriptions of plays, illustrate the dynamic Yiddish theater tradition in two major centers: New York and Buenos Aires. Together with hundreds of manuscripts, photographs, books, periodicals, and sheet music, they comprise one of the largest Yiddish theater collections in the world.
“Hell and Heaven”
The earliest posters utilize detailed illustrations, such as this one for “Gehenem un gan-eydn” (literally, “hell and heaven”) by Abraham Goldfaden, starring Morris Finkel (pictured), who was also the director and business manager. This “famous comic opera” of January 8, 1891, at the Romanian Opera House in New York, promises new decorations, costumes and scenery. Sheet music for a duet from the opera was published in 1897. In a truly hellish twist, Finkel later shot and disabled his wife, Emma Thomashefsky Finkel (sister of Boris Thomashefsky) and then killed himself in a grisly real-life tragedy that shocked the Yiddish theater world.
“Gehenem un gan-eydn” starring Morris Finkel, January 8, 1891, at New York’s Romanian Opera House. Image ID: 435120
“Positively the last production”
The placard below advertises “Kidesh ha-shem” [literally, “sanctification of the name”], a historical drama about Jewish martyrdom by the Yosef Latayner, an ever-prolific playwright known for the quantity, rather than the quality, of his work. Starring Sigmund and Dina Feinman (pictured), the cast included other heavyweights like Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, Bertha Kalich, Sophia Carp, Rudolph Marks and [Max] Rosenthal. This was “positively the last production”, with performances scheduled for Friday and Saturday, October 30 and 31, [1891?].
Kidesh ha-shem, starring Sigmund and Dina Feynman. Image ID: 435096
Pioneering Prima Donna
The benefit advertised above was held on Thursday, January 5, 1893 at the Thalia (formerly Bowery) Theatre, a popular early Yiddish venue at 46-48 Bowery, whose gallery is home today to the Jing Fong Chinese restaurant. The beneficiary, Sophia Karp (1859-1904), was probably the first Yiddish actress, starting her career at age 16 with Abraham Goldfaden and being the first to sing the famous “Eli, eli, lomo azavtoni” (later recorded by Belle Baker). The brochure’s extremely Daytshmerish text (a prententious Germanic style of the time meant to convey sophistication) proclaims Karp’s status as a prima donna of the “Yiddish-German” theater of New York and invites audience members to an (unnamed) opera. The benefit performance—both for actors and for charitable organizations—was a frequent occurrence and helped to guarantee an audience on weekdays.
January 5, 1893 benefit poster for Madame Sophie Karp. Image ID: 435095
For “Appreciators of True Art”
Speaking of Daytshmerish, this next poster for “Di zilberne hokhtsayt” [The silver wedding] use the German “hochzeit” instead of the Yiddish “khasene” for the word “wedding”. The text admonishes “appreciators of true art... not to miss this evening….which each person can only enjoy once in a lifetime”.
The “Fereynigte Idishe Shoyshpiler Gezelshaft” [United Yiddish Actors’ Society] sponsored this benefit performance on January 30, 1894 for the play’s author/adapter, Yaakov Ter (1850-1935, pictured) who sold tickets at his home at 39-41 Suffolk Street. Ter, whose name stamp appears on the right, donated Yiddish theater ephemera to NYPL, along with Chonon Jacob Minikes and Boris Thomashefsky.
“Di zilberne hokhtsayt” Image ID: 435134
Rosh Ha-Shanah Openers of 1898
From Friday night and Saturday performances, to High Holiday openers, the Yiddish theater mirrored (and for some, replaced) the synagogue. The poster below contains the traditional Rosh Ha-Shanah wish “Leshone toyve tikoseyvu” [May you be inscribed for a good year] and uses rhymed verses, like the Rosh Ha-Shanah cards of the time, to describe the performances scheduled on the holidays.
Legendary actors Bertha Kalich (pictured) and David Kessler appeared in a performance called “the new and old Kol Nidre” by A. Sharkanski, named after the Yom Kippur prayer. Bertha Kalich had already sung for Yom Kippur services in Bucharest, a terrifying and elating experience she describes in her memoirs in the newspaper Der Tog on July 8 and 11, 1925. As for Sharkanski’s play, you can read it online and find associated sheet music by Louis Friedsell at NYPL and the Library of Congress.
The busy holiday season also included performances of “Shloyme ha-meylekh” [King Solomon] and “Hizkiyahu ha-meylekh, oder, di roze fun Kavkaz” [King Hezekiah, or, the Rose of the Caucasus] by another mass-market hack, “Professor” Moyshe Hurwitz; plus “Di Yudishe Vitse-Kenig” [The Jewish Viceroy] by Sigmund Feinman and “Khanele di finisherin” [Khanele the Finisher]. Participating stars included Sigmund and Dina Feinman, Shmuel Tabatshnikov (Samuel Tobias), Hayne, Mary Wilensky, and Moshkovitsh.
For more Yiddish theater ephemera, visit these sites:
Atlas of Hudson County, Bayonne, NJ. 1919. Image ID: 3991145
“: a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea; a confession…” - William Carlos Williams, Paterson.
In 1609, Dutch explorer Henry Hudson sailed west from the port of Galway Bay in search of a northwest passage to Indo-Russia. Crossing the Atlantic, Hudson instead found northeast passage to New Jersey. The explorer sent men inland who returned with red and green tomatoes the size of bowling balls which they had seized from the food supplies of the Seminole indigenous tribes who inhabited the stretch of Pine Bogs along the Union City River. Returning to Europe, Hudson and his men distributed their booty of tomatoes on the black markets of the Midlands and the Andalusian steppe, where the fruit eventually found its way to Southern Italy. So goes the genealogy of the pasta sauce.
Confused? Alarmed? Enlightened? If the truth of these facts provokes questioning, the local history resources related to New Jersey available in the New York Public Library's Milstein Division might prove a useful pursuit. The division holds an abundance of genealogical and historical material related to the state once known as a “barrel tapped at both ends,” given the migratory magnetism of the neighboring Big Apple and City of Brotherly Love.
Perhaps familiar to New Yorkers as a garden state of smokestacks, or surrogate playing field for the Jets and Giants, or otherworld of childhood memory, New Jersey bucks understanding from without and blinkers perspective from within. It is where Albert Einstein died and Joe Pesci was born; during the American Revolution, the colony was defended by the rebel father of Robert E. Lee and governed in exile by the Tory son of Benjamin Franklin; South Mountain Reservation in West Orange served as the shooting locale for The Great Train Robbery (1903), the archetype of movie westerns, produced by Thomas Edison, whose 60,000 square foot lab was down the hill off Northfield Avenue; and in 1981 Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco along Kittatinny Ridge in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area was the setting of grade-Z slasher franchise Friday the 13th. “The Voice” turns 100 this year, and the ref desk in Room 121 is ready for questions on The Chairman’s family history or his history with the Family.
While New Jersey was the first Mid-Atlantic state to legislate the registry of vital record information, in 1848, and the third in the U.S., it also has been lamented as infamously underdocumented, with gaping holes in the record because of British destruction of courthouses, churches and county repositories in the Revolutionary War, in addition to patterns of delinquent recordkeeping. 19th century Boards of Freeholders have been known to sell off pension documents as waste paper, and county clerks to chuck out marriage records over 20 years old. In 1997, using a calculation based on the ratio of historical publications to state population, the Task Force on New Jersey History determined that New Jersey ranked the lowest of the original thirteen states. However, as noted by legion NJ genealogist Kenn Stryker-Rodda, NYPL, in combination with the NY Historical Society and Brooklyn Historical Society, contains more “unofficial documents” on New Jersey than all the collections within the state itself.
“New Jersey genealogy,” says Stryker-Rodda, “is not for the lazy minded, the unimaginative, or those who demand quick results.” Collections in the Milstein Division now include the humongous addition of the unique Jersey resources formerly housed at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Yet, while the NYPL catalog lists 121 entries under the subject heading “New Jersey—History,” searching “New York (N.Y.)–History” brings up 781 entries. The spike in curatorship of New York City’s past since the 1970s has yielded hundreds of documentaries, microhistories, neighborhood blogs, targeted guidebooks and revisionist museum exhibits, while in comparison New Jersey has benefited briefly from the best show in TV history, The Sopranos, to the worst, Jersey Shore.
New Jersey materials have been a highlight of research collection policy at the Local History and Genealogy Division since the inception of the New York Public Library. Whether appreciated or unfairly deprecated, the proximity to New York City, a symbiotic early colonial history, and a major legacy of cross-migration and industrial connections, qualifies New Jersey’s past at NYPL as local history.
Proposed NYC-NJ Tunnel. 1919. Image ID: 810062
Local History
With a total area of 4.8 million acres, and 1,200 inhabitants per square mile, New Jersey is the most densely populated state in America. In land area only larger than Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island, New Jersey tallies 8.8 million people within 7,355 square miles; roughly twice the amount of residents of Ireland but nearly one-fourth the size.
New Jersey is a peninsula, with only 48 miles of border out of a total 480 that are land-based. Traditionally, migration to New Jersey was aquatic; into the ports of Newark and Perth Amboy from Long Island and New England, down the Passaic River from New York State , and up or across the Delaware River from Pennsylvania.
What colonial proprietors in the 17th and 18th centuries once officially delineated as East and West Jersey is today perceived in the idioms of North and South Jersey. North Jersey is roughly the seaport crook of hyperpopulation and industry that converges with New York City, with the stretch of Highlands bordering New York State that includes a patch of the Appalachian Trail. South Jersey is anchored in Delaware Bay by Cape May, flanked at the ocean by Atlantic City and coordinated east of Philadelphia across the Delaware River by the city of Camden. The state capital of Trenton is too equatorial to easily fit in either domain, and the New Jersey coastline, “down the shore,” from Sandy Hook Bay down to Cape May, straddles both sections, whether proprietary or imaginary. Summerers in Belmar, N.J. refer to Union County as “up north,” while on a clear day the Rockaways in Queens might be visible from the beach, and Atlantic City is still a two hour drive south.
Bayonne Bridge. Image ID: 730854F
New Jersey was known as the “Corridor State” in the American Revolution, the “connector of North and South.” If the Mason-Dixon line had extended to the Atlantic Ocean, six counties in New Jersey would fall south of the border. Conversely, between 1685-1692, Boston was the capital of New Jersey, when King James, the former Duke of York, corralled all the New England colonies under one short-lived dominion. In the Civil War era NJ was sometimes referred to as a “border state” because of its strong Democratic politics and softness on slavery. When George McClellan, former Major-General of the Union Army, ran against President Lincoln on the Democratic ticket in 1864, he lived in West Orange, NJ.
In the late 18th and early 19th century, Jersey gave women and blacks suffrage rights equal to white male property-owners, on an alleged typographical error that was soon revoked, and was “the last state in the north to abolish slavery.” However, the inductive Quaker presence in early East Jersey led to the subtle initiation of free African-Americans as landowners in the Shrewsbury area south of the Navesink River. Monmouth County Deed Books show multiple real estate transactions involving free blacks, dating just before passage of the Gradual Abolition Act (1804) through the end of the Civil War. The town of Fair Haven was a viable active black community where locals organized as trustees of schools and the Methodist Episcopal Mount Zion Church.
Land Use
Colonial land transactions are the key but controversial legacy around which much of the local and genealogical history of early New Jersey revolves. As recounted in numerous writings on early Jersey history, the territory formally originated as an English colony with two separate claims to the land.
In 1664, anticipating the submission of the Dutch West India Company to British forces, King Charles II granted northeast regions in the New World to his brother, James, Duke of York, while those areas were still known as New Netherland. New Amsterdam and Fort Orange upstate were increasing in size and consequence, while the central areas west of the lower Hudson River were inhabited by the Unami, the Turtle Clan; north by the Minsis, the Wolf Clan; and southwest by Unalachtigo tribes, the Turkey clan. These Delaware Indians outnumbered the additional handful of Germans and Scandinavians in 1660s NJ. The Pavonia Massacre in 1643, when Dutch marauders slaughtered Lenni Lenape men, women and children in modern Jersey City, was one of several imperial acts which disposed the Indian tribes in Jersey lands as violently intolerant of Dutch colonists, whom generally stayed out of in fear of attacks.
Massacre of Indians at Pavonia. Image ID: 834404
The Duke of York, also known as the Duke of Albany, was appointed lord high admiral after the Restoration, and fervently supervised the operations of the English navy to out-contend the supremacy in world trade of the Dutch, with whom England feuded in 1652, then 1665, and again in 1672. In the New World, King Charles assumed the right to overrule colonial authority, alter boundaries, and seize territory by conquest. The King granted James “an astonishing assortment of lands extending from the St. Lawrence to the Delaware.” Before the Dutch surrendered their port colony, having been promised English citizenship under royal oath in exchange for sustaining the well-established Dutch court system, the Duke of York conveyed land-granting powers to incipient Governor Richard Nicholls, who issued the “Duke’s Laws,” renamed the colony, and referred to New Jersey as “Albania.”
Nicholls validated the 1664 purchase between Long Island settlers John Ogden, John Bailey, Daniel Denton and Luke Watson, and Lenni Lenape real estate agents Mattano Manamowaouc and Couesccoman, for 500,000 acres of land in what was once a scarcely colonized sprawl of New Netherland between the Raritan and Passaic Rivers, and which would later form the counties of Essex and Union. The men were now freeholders of the flatlands west of the Hudson River, and formed what would be known as the Elizabethtown Associates.
Meanwhile, soon after the departure of Nicholls from English ports, the Duke of York, flush with the megalomania of impending conquest, was seized with magnanimity. Having just empowered Nicholls to issue land patents in his new domain, the Duke, apparently without any sense of contradiction, bestowed the lands of Albania to loyal friends from the Admiralty, Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley, who received the vast acreage in the form of a proprietorship. Sir George got “East Jersey” and Lord John “West Jersey,” which divisions, in various permutations, would characterize the state through the 21st century.
Map of East and West Jersey. 1682. Image ID: 433742
The divisions were split by a roughly 45 degree boundary line between Little Egg Harbor and Minisink Island in the Delaware River, today in Sussex County.
Lord Berkeley had been loyal to the Stuart brothers when Cromwell drove out the monarchy, and joined Charles and James in exile on the Isle of Jersey, near the coast of France, which was the domain of Sir George Carteret, later to hold the office of Treasurer of the British Navy.
His Royal Highness, James, Duke of York and Albany. Image ID: 423111
Sir George and Lord John were invested with shareholding rights within their divisions, the authority to collect remunerations for the use of the property, and the ability to transfer proprietorship to other parties. However, this arrangement would have voided any title obtained in the manner of the freeholders who purchased land under the Nicholls grant, known as “headrights,” and instead would have beheld the settlers to “quit-rent” payments to the proprietors rather than ownership.
The years 1664 to 1702 form the first period of dispute and civic upheaval over the proprietary claims to the lands of East and West Jersey. Before Nicholls was finally made aware of the Duke’s deal with the Carteret and Berkeley, due to the lumbering dispatch of letters via oceanic passage, the Governor had authorized the sale of numerous Jersey lands both East and West. An increasing amount of settlers claimed that the Duke had never properly owned the land, the proprietorship was false, and no rent should be due.
Little resolution was achieved, including the name of the settlement. The proprietors claimed that Elizabethtown was named for the wife of Sir George, while the ex-Long Islanders claimed the provenance in honor of the Queen. Still, the territory acquired its etymological ancestor from the isle birthplace of Sir George Carteret, Nova Caesarea, New Caesarea, New Jaesarea, New Jersey.
The “Concessions and Agreements” issued in 1665 by the Jersey proprietors provided for a registry of land transactions and the guarantee of “liberty of conscience” and freedom of religion. Persecuted and ambitious Quakers settled rampantly in West Jersey, and Newark was founded by Congregationalists sailing into the Passaic River from the puritanically constricted settlements of Connecticut. Though a more indiscriminate mandate on religion was proffered in order to attract more settlers, whom arrived chiefly from Long Island and New England, atheists were not tolerated. It may be that today atheists are better tolerated in New Jersey than settlers from Long Island or New England…
Original trustees such as the Elizabethtown Associates were ineluctably forced to reckon the political and economic disposition of the proprietary system, which was rooted in English plantation laws and the feudal relationship between owners and tenants. But little had been codified in distinguishing the right to political office and legislative decision in relation to the conveyance of land title. Both sides invested their own idea of land rights with political consequence, and confusion between the act of land-holding and the right to govern was sustained. The trustees contended that the Duke’s gift to the Lords was simply a “grant of the soil,” with no transfer of governmental powers. The Council of Proprietors sought to enforce laws and create political bodies while collecting quitrent payments, akin to dues for occupation and husbandry of the land, often in the form of barrels of pork.
In 1670, Philip Carteret, a young cousin of Sir George, debarked at New Jersey as a representative of the proprietors, assumed the role of governor of both East and West Jersey, yet, ironically, soon bought into the Elizabethtown Associates, which group was disputing the claims of the proprietors. Complicating the gnarled network of antagonisms, New York Governor Sir Edmund Andros demanded that Carteret yield all Jersey authority to New York. Philip balked and asserted that Jersey, though in adherence to the “Duke’s Laws,” garnered its own independent jurisdiction, and as a result, vessels trading in Jersey ports were exempt from paying customs to New York. Governor Sir Edmund Andros did not agree with this, and subsequent to further brinkmanship, ordered gubernatorial henchmen to invade the home of Carteret, drag the Jerseyman from his bed, imprison him in New York State, and administer a vicious drubbing that caused permanent and eventually fatal wounds to New Jersey’s first governor.
The Landing of Governor Carteret in New Jersey. Image ID: 1207338
The Crown sought to equalize these disagreements in 1702 with the appointment of a Royal Governor of both New York and New Jersey, Lord Cornbury, to whom the proprietors relinquished governmental power. However, disputes continued into the 1730s and 1740s, with land riots in West Jersey and the successful jailbreak in Newark of dispossessed yeomen Robert Young and Thomas Sergeant, orchestrated by a determined gathering of three-hundred citizens armed with cudgels and staves. The militia cocked their muskets, the sheriff drew his sword, but the jailbreakers were not attacked and the two men went free.
In the ensuing years, lawsuits neared a resolution, but appeals to the king, claims of errors in the proceedings, and overruled verdicts stalled both clarity and closure.
In Historical and Genealogical Miscellany; Data Relating to the Settlement and Settlers of New York and New Jersey (1903), one of the many compilations of NJ local history available in the Milstein Division, one finds the brief “Discourse By Way of Dialogue between an old Inhabitant of the County of Monmouth and a Proprietor of the Eastern Division of New Jersey.” The succinct dialogue between “William” and a nameless proprietor is contemporary to the 17th century and demonstrates the convictions of landowners against the claims of the proprietors:
Pro. You Will not allow then that King Charles had a Right to the Soil. Therefore the Proprietors none.
Will. No because he never had it by Discovery Conquest Gift nor Contract. Therefore no right to the Soil.
Pro. Pray by what title Do you Pretend to hold your Land if not by patent from the Proprietors, Wee hold our Land by an honest Purchase and Consideration paid for.
Will. A Title Derived from a Charter Granted to the Sons of Adam by the Great and Absolute proprietor of the Whole Universe God almighty and has Stood Recorded In the best record on Earth 3,198 years…
Pro. Then you Deny that there is any acknowledgement due to the Proprietors?
Will. Yes Wee Do.
William’s glib Jersey-style comeback merges a Protestant eco-evangelism with the minutiae of early U.K. land laws.
The Tombstone of Aaron Burr, Princeton, NJ. Image ID: 420481
Library Resources
When searching the NYPL classic catalog for genealogy materials that relate to a specific region, it is always most useful to conduct subject searches by county name to yield the most comprehensive results:
Materials will include local histories, periodicals, estate records, business information, family trees, travelogues, guidebooks, and anecdotal miscellanea, in addition to official reports on potentially relevant subjects such as environmental conditions, municipal projects, transportation, demographics, and agriculture. Also, the Map Division is abundant with NJ collections:
[COUNTY] (N.J.) -- Maps.
New Jersey -- Maps.
Atlantic Coast (N.J.) -- Maps.
Subject headings are highly useful for grouping together materials on a specific topic, but sometimes are not all-inclusive. Hours could be spent browsing the results of a simple subject search using “New Jersey,” or pairing the state with a topical search term in a keyword search, like “transportation” or “Muslims” or “oysters.” For instance, if a researcher were interested in 19th century sources on NJ fraternal organizations, a potentially rich avenue of genealogy or local history, one will not find subject headings which group together the many items in NYPL collections on this subject. Keywords are needed. Pairing the phrase “New Jersey” with keywords like “proceedings” or “organization” or “minutes” will yield more heterogeneous results on private groups, political clubs, and legislative actions.
Below is a sample list of New Jersey resources that highlight the subject collections at NYPL:
The contents of the four volume Genealogical and Memorial History of the State of New Jersey (1910), edited by Francis Bazley Lee, is summed up by its subtitle, “a record of the achievements of her people in the making of a commonwealth and the founding of a nation.” The first entry is for the Frelinghuysen family, described as having given New Jersey “more great and distinguished men in proportion to their numerical strength as a body of individuals than almost any other family.” Patriarch Theodorus Jacobus was born in 1691 in East Friesland, ordained a minister in 1715 and three years later charged with leading the congregations of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Raritan Valley. A number of constituents accused Frelinghuysen of heresy because of the askew interpretations of church teachings in his sermons. “Evangelical fervor” combined with a habit of “autonomous actions” characterized the minister’s tenure, along with official complaints, threats of excommunication, and demands for “Peace Articles” that would reckon the domine to the church status quo. Frelinghuysen was an independent but strict mind. Family descendants would include Senator Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, at whose country home in Somerset County President Warren G. Harding signed the 1921 treaty to formally end World War I. Today, an avenue is named for the family out by Newark International Airport.
The Milstein Division holds multiple boxes of historic travel and promotional brochures, arranged by city. This evocative collection is uncataloged and undigitized, but easily accessible by visiting Room 121 in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building and inquiring with a reference librarian.
The NYPL online digital gallery features thousands of finely zoomable photos, illustrations, cartographic and atlas collections, portraits, and stereographs. Search the online Picture Collection for images pulled from books, magazines and newspapers among the 30,000+ visual materials collected at the Mid-Manhattan Library.
It is advisable to search the NYPL Archives and Manuscripts Home Page for potential New Jersey primary sources. A related stand-out trove is the Stryker-Rodda collection, comprising the papers of the F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of tri-state area genealogy.
Jersey Marriage document. 1782. NYPL Manuscripts and Archives. Image ID: 4005164
In addition, the digital databases available at NYPL are serendipitous sources of regional Jersey history, as the below three examples might illustrate:
The 49 page guidebook All Rail to Long Branch: a work descriptive of the new all-rail route from New York via the New York & Long Branch R.R. to the sea shore of New Jersey, and of the summer metropolis of America (1875) at HeritageQuest Online;
A spike in New Jersey scholarship over the last fifteen years is well reflected in the volumes made available through the library’s account with Project Muse, where numerous books and academic anthologies regarding NJ subjects are available to patrons in the research libraries. Most notably invaluable are A New Jersey Anthology (2010) and New Jersey: A History of the Garden State (2012), both published by Rutgers University Press and edited by Maxine N. Lurie, professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Seton Hall University.
The controversy over proprietorship versus patent is well-recounted in books, local histories, and the Guide to the Records of the East and West Jersey Proprietors, only recently processed and made available by the NJ State Archives. Plenty of land records and transcribed primary sources are published in Jersey serials like New Jersey History and the Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey. Because of the thorny, abstruse, multi-lapping and contradictory predicament of early Jersey land records, cross-referencing among primary and secondary resources is recommended. Use the below subject headings as points of entry for NYPL collections:
Centuries back, roads were scarce and the capitals distant. It was common for land transactions to remain unrecorded for many years because of travel difficulties, which is ironic for a state later stereotyped for its manifold mandala of interstates, parkways, highways, skyways and turnpikes, which toll roads in NJ trace back at least to the first decade of the 19th century in boosting transit and generating cash. The first Public Roads Act was passed in 1673 by the East Jersey Assembly, the local governing body organized by the landowners under the Nicholls grant.
The land records of the East Jersey and West Jersey Proprietors have only recently migrated to the collections at the NJ State Archives in Trenton. In 1998, the East Jersey records moved from their 300+ year old home in the former colonial capital of Perth Amboy, and not until 2005 did the West Jersey Proprietors do likewise from the former capital at Burlington. “The main purpose of proprietary records,” says NJ State Archivist Joseph R. Klett, “is to document land surveys and the initial severance of title from the proprietors.”
Numerous resources in the Milstein Division are available for tracking the shifting county boundaries and emergence of new counties from former territories, as in the creation of Union County from a chunk of Essex in 1857. Three in particular:
In 1777 New Jersey founded one of its earliest newspapers, the New Jersey Gazette, in South Jersey, while two years later East Jersey found the New Jersey Journal. Both were funded by the state as instruments of “war measure,” though the Journal was a paper for the military while the Gazette was espoused by the State Legislature and Governor William Livingston. “I can assure you,” the Governor wrote to printer Isaac Collins, a Quaker from Trenton, “that the blaze of our Eastern Comet the New Jersey Journal has not diverted my attention from the western light the Gazette…” Unlike New York City across the Hudson from East Jersey and Philadelphia across the Delaware from West Jersey, the “Cockpit of the Revolution” operated a state-funded press unthwarted by Tory command, but belabored by lack of paper and the routine capture of post-riders who dispatched the issues and collected subscriptions.
Collins was continuously struggling for funds, often printing his news using old army “tent-bags,” and supplemented the state money by operating a general store, selling paper and printing goods, and hosting slave traders. Dependent on the state for finances, Collins maintained his publication’s independence of opinion. Collins printed a caustic and tasteless attack on Governor William Livingston, the benefactor of the Gazette, under the alias Cincinnatus, and when the Legislature demanded Collins reveal the true name of the author, the printer refused, publishing under his own byline two pieces titled “Liberty of the Press.”
New Jersey is currently represented somewhat marginally by digitized newspaper resources, most of which early printings are found in the database America’s Historical Newspapers, including the Gazette, and in America’s Historical Imprints, a useful database of distributed printed matter that may serve as an indirect point of entry for business information, city directories, or local history information.
NYPL collections include many obscure, older, or short-run NJ newspapers on microfilm. A major exception is the Hudson County succession of newspapers that evolved into The Jersey Journal, which, though a major publication in the industrial, commercial, and highly residential metro peninsula of Hudson County, the paper is only available in full on microfilm at a handful of Jersey repositories, and digitally by subscription online. In addition, the New Brunswick Public Library has begun a newspaper digitization project.
[ETHNIC GROUP -“Americans”] -- New Jersey -- Newspapers.
As a result of the absence of comprehensive or complete collections of New Jersey genealogy sources, and the scattershot predicament of NJ records, the use of serials and publications may yield tractable results. The open stacks in the Milstein Division, Room 121, feature extensive runs of the two most valuable NJ genealogy journals, New Jersey History and the Genealogy Magazine of New Jersey (GMNJ).
GMNJ, issued triennially by the Genealogical Society of New Jersey, publishes the commonly sought but not always found genealogical timber that builds family history research. A surname index provides the point of entry for family notes and lineage histories, baptismal rolls and registers of vital information, gravestone inscriptions, 18th century loan office records, tax ratable lists, church records, county census schedules, an ongoing series reprinting New Jersey Supreme Court Cases (1704-1760), and likewise information. Issues on the open stacks in the Milstein Division run to 2004 and current issues can be accessed in Room 119.
New Jersey History, the successor publication to the Proceedings of the NJ Historical Society (first published 1845), is a Willowbrook Mall of niche articles covering a multivalence of historical NJ subjects, with titles like “Strikes and Society: Civil Behavior in Passaic (1875-1926);” “Ezra Pound’s Tribute to Newark;” and “Oraton, Sachem of Hackensack.” Issues can be navigated using a bibliographic index (1845-1992) of subjects, names, and authors, or a subject index (1845-1919). Many issues of the Proceedings and NJH can be accessed at NYPL research libraries using the digital database HathiTrust, and all issues are available either in the Milstein Division open stacks or by request. Current issues are made available freely online by Rutgers University Libraries (2009-present).
New Jersey Genesis and The Jerseyman: A Quarterly Magazine of Local History & Genealogy are two additional genealogy journals offering much research fodder for the Garden State. Issues of The Jerseyman are in copyright and available in NYPL digital databases.
Often incomplete and unindexed, state censuses were taken in New Jersey every ten years between 1855-1915. NYPL collections include Jersey state census schedules on microfilm in Room 119 of the Schwarzman building. Locate these materials in the catalog using the below suggested subject headings:
[NAME OF COUNTY OR CITY] (N.J.) -- Census, [YEAR].
New Jersey -- Census, [YEAR].
Rarely are indexes available for these census records. NJ state censuses are arranged by local township, borough, precinct or ward district, and searchable by municipal subdivision. Once the locality is identified, one must browse the pages for the subject name or address. If an address is unknown, NYPL holds numerous NJ city directories, which are described in a subsequent section below. It can be a foggy procedure and patrons should inquire with Milstein librarians beforehand about research steerage in Jersey census records.
Up to 1895, the state census did not list address. Columns indicating nationality are divided by German-born, Irish, or “other,” suggesting the high populations of Germans and Irish, and the marginalization of New Jersey’s abundant first and second generation ethnic populations. The 1905 state census is the first to list a street address, and includes the birthplace of parents, with the exclusive nativity columns for German and Irish removed. The 1915 schedules include occupations and the school attended by enumerated children. Sometimes the school will be named, but often the column will simply indicate “grammar” or “high school,” with a column for public, private or parochial.
In addition, for Federal census indexes that zero in on a particular NJ county or city, use the above census subject headings for population schedules and indexes as well as nonpopulation schedules like mortality, manufacturing, or Merchant Seaman schedules.
Tax ratables abstracted and indexed by genealogist Kenn Stryker-Rodda act as a “census of the heads of families and of bachelors who had a source of income outside the family.” Cattle, horses and swine are enumerated, but not children; families might have been taxed according to horned animals and fatback, but not kids. These tax lists are published in multiple issues of the Genealogy Magazine of New Jersey and in the microform series County Tax Ratables, 1778-1822 [New Jersey]. Also useful is Revolutionary Census of New Jersey; an index, based on ratables, of the inhabitants of New Jersey during the period of the American Revolution / Kenn Stryker-Rodda.
Cranberry picker from Browns Mills, NJ. 1910. Image ID: 464525
The earliest Jersey directories date back to circa 1830. NYPL collections, accessed on microfilm, can be located in the catalog using the below subject headings:
Directories include basic residential listings, business, the county farm journal, and railroad directories, and specialized reference publications like The Classified Directory of Negro Business Interests, Professions of Essex County, compiled by Ralph William Nixon for the Bureau of Negro Intelligence, Newark, New Jersey (1920). For digitized directories, Ancestry has dozens of towns and counties dating up to the late 1950s, for both major hubs like New Brunswick or small exurbs like Verona.
The pre-proprietary landowners recognized binding real estate transactions with Delaware tribes, which, though civilized and nonviolent, slowly extinguished the peoples from the territory. At the time of first European contact, the indigenous population of New Jersey is estimated between 8-12,000; by 1700, the number was around 2,400-3,000; in 1763 had dwindled to less than 1,000; and by 1800 diminished to fewer than 200 (Lurie, 2010). These tribes migrated out of the state with little traces of assimilation into New Jersey culture. East Jersey laws in the 1660s allowed tribesmen to collect the bounty on killed wolves, but white men were fined heavily for sharing liquor with any indigenous people. In 1832, Delaware professor and Revolutionary War veteran Shawuskukung, or “Wilted Grass,” known to whites as Bartholomew S. Calvin, successfully petitioned the state legislature for $2,000 in land reparations. The speech was published in The Daily Union History of Atlantic City and County, New Jersey.
Subject headings for indigenous history:
Delaware Indians -- History.
Delaware Indians.
Delaware Indians -- Folklore.
New Jersey Indians Of North America.
Russian Church and Orphanage. Image ID: 490751
Religion, Racial and Ethnic Subjects
NYPL collections should be mined for materials that support the multiethnic and polysectarian identity of Jersey, a subject whose scope demands its own research guide. As usual, key subject headings are a springboard:
[ETHNICITY] – New Jersey – History.
[RACIAL GROUP] – New Jersey – [ COUNTY OR TOWN].
[RELIGIOUS GROUP] – New Jersey – [SUBJECT].
[RELIGIOUS GROUP] – New Jersey – [COUNTY OR TOWN].
Rounding out NYPL collections is the salmagundi of external resources available for Jersey research. Birth, marriage and death certificates can be accessed by contacting the New Jersey State Archives. Select vital information is made available online at the New Jersey Vital Records Searchable Databases, plus population schedules for Passaic County and Atlantic City in the 1885 state census, along with additional digitized collections including the Federal Writers' Project photographs, Civil War Service Records, and Early Land Records (1650-1801) of the East and West Jersey Proprietors.
Hopefully, many things have been left out, unexplained, forgotten, glossed over, or abandoned to the Meadowlands off Route 3 in Secaucus. Librarians in the U.S. History, Local History & Genealogy Division encourage researchers to reach out to the reference desk in Room 121, where New York City collections, like the Statue of Liberty, share land borders with New Jersey.
This project started as a comparison of copies of a series of beautifully illustrated books on fashionable dress, trades’ dress, and ethnic costume at New York Public Library held in both the Art and Architecture Collection and the Rare Book Division. The books in the NYPL collections were originally published beginning in 1800 with The Costume of China and continuing through 1804 with the Costume of the Hereditary States of the House of Austria. (NYPL does not hold all the books in this series). A popular but peculiar volume, The Punishments of China (1801), is also considered part of this series—the format is the same and though not credited on the title page the author is generally acknowledged to be George Henry Mason, author of The Costume of China. Punishments continued its life in print in various dated editions until 1830 (although, as we will see, so did other books though this was not indicated on their title pages). An 1801 copy of Punishments which was part of the library of George III is now part of the British Library collection, a gift of George IV. As with most of the books in this series there are abundant full page hand-colored engravings by J. [John] Dadley with accompanying descriptive text on the facing page in English and French.
After seeing a title page which reads “Printed for William Miller, Old Bond Street; by W. Bulmer and Co., Cleveland-Row, St. James’s. 1801.” it is not unreasonable to assume that this book was printed in 1801. The catalog entries of many libraries and special collections, not just NYPL, assume this as well. However this is not necessarily the case. A recent closer inspection of a number of books from publisher William Miller indicated as “printed” between 1800 and 1830 present a different story. This story is also complicated by the fact that most resources report that William Miller sold his publishing house to John Murray II in 1812 although the books in question still indicate William Miller as the publisher on title pages printed years later with no mention of John Murray to be seen.
The difference between the copies in the Art and Architecture Collection and the Rare Book Division is mainly the source of the books—the Rare Book Division copies are originally from the Lenox Library and the Art and Architecture copies are from the Astor Library and other sources. The Rare Book copy of The Costume of Turkey also has an original loose watercolor illustration which is tucked into the preface. Unfortunately none of the copies have the original bindings.
The inconsistencies between indicated printing date and what was likely the actual printing date became obvious on closer inspection of the books. Watermarks throughout almost all of these volumes indicated different printing dates from the information that appeared on their title pages. A watermark can be a date, name, or design device made of copper or brass wire incorporated in the paper making tray which produces an impression in “the pulp as it settles during the process of papermaking, and is visible in the finished product when held against the light” (John Carter). For example among the five copies of The Punishments of China that NYPL holds only one of the 1801 copies and the 1830 copy, both in the Art and Architecture Collection, have watermarks consistent with the date indicated on the title page. The 1804 A&A copy has watermarks dated 1816, 1818 and a watermark from papermaker J Whatman dated 1819; the 1808 RB copy has watermarks from Edmeads & Pine 1804, E & P 1807 and Turkey Mills J Whatman 1817. The second “1801” A&A copy not only has J Whatman 1822 watermarks on a few plates but a colophon at the bottom of the last text page which reads “Printed by Howlett & Brimmer, 10, Firth Street, Soho”. Complicating matters here is the fact that Howlett & Brimmer did not even open for business until 1821. The text font of this copy is different from the 1801 William Miller/W. Bulmer and Co. edition as well - obviously a later printing with type that had been reset. What is also very peculiar is that William Miller had left publishing in 1812 and by 1822 his publishing house had been owned by John Murray II for ten years. Why maintain “William Miller” on the title page especially if the type had been reset? William Miller did have a reputation as a publisher of high quality books but Murray’s reputation was good as well. In “A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of John Murray” there is a letter dated May 1, 1812 in which John Murray II discusses his purchase of the business—the lease of the house, copyrights, and stock. He writes that “Miller’s retirement is very extraordinary for no one in the trade will believe that he made a fortune… but it is clear that he has succeeded”. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography the business was sold for £3822 12s. 6d., a “considerable sum in its day”. Miller was only 43 at the time of the sale and lived for another 32 years.
It is difficult to imagine the manufacturing process for some of these books. Often different printers were used for illustrated plates and for the text pages but the watermarks in these editions are often years apart in both cases and inconsistent with the title page date. Were some printed and/or colored plates and text pages part of William Miller’s stock which had been stored for a number of years, or were these editions the product of odd lots of paper stock cobbled together and printed at a later date? An “1803” copy of The Costumes of the Russian Empire has watermarks from 1796 (W Elgar), 1809 (Edmeads & Co), 1811, 1813 (J. Whatman), 1818, and 1829. That’s six different watermarks spanning 33 years. While it was not unusual for printers to use different lots of paper for a single book, this situation seems extreme. It is especially puzzling since Philip Gaskell writes that “printers regularly bought paper from particular wholesalers, and that… they rarely used paper that was more than about two years old.” Although not foolproof—John Carter advises “caution as evidence of date” with watermark—Gaskell describes the value of watermarks, in some cases, as dating aids “to within fine limits.” I believe these are just such cases, especially when dating irregularities are also supported by colophon evidence of later printing dates.
The paper used in all of these books is wove paper, the invention of James Whatman the elder, and much of it is from the Whatman paper mill, Turkey Mills in Maidstone, Kent. (Wove paper does not have chain lines or wire lines like laid paper.) By the mid-1700s Whatman was one of the largest paper suppliers in Europe producing good quality paper. In 1759 William Balston and the Hollingsworth Brothers became the main papermakers at Turkey Mill and they were given rights to the Whatman name after 1807. The Whatman countermark the Hollingsworth Brothers used to distinguish their paper from Balston’s included the inscription ‘TURKEY MILLS’ or ‘TURKEY MILL.’
What started as a simple comparison of copies between collections turned into an open-ended bibliographic exercise with many rabbit holes to get lost in. All title page information need not be suspect, however, the lesson in all of this is that there are many paths to bibliographic enlightenment regarding dates in late 18th and early 19th century books. These factors include but are hardly limited to knowing the active years of the publisher and printer(s), and when available, the paper makers and their watermarks. Good luck.
Mason, G. H. (1800). The costume of China. London: William Miller. Printed by S. Gosnell. Watermarks: 1796 W Elgar; 1796 VF
[Mason, G.H.], (1801). The punishments of China. London: William Miller. Printed by W. Bulmer. Watermarks: 1796; E & P (Edmeads & Pine, Ivy Mill?); also Magnay & Pickering 1800 watermarks on the tissue between the plates and the text pages.
[Mason, G.H.], (“1801”). The punishments of China. London: William Miller. Printed by Howlett & Brimmer. Watermarks: 1822 J. Whatman
[Mason, G.H.], (1804). The punishments of China. London: William Miller. Title page reads: Printed by W. Bulmer, last text page colophon reads: Printed by W. Wilson, 4, Greville-Street, London. Watermarks: 1816; 1818; Turkey Mills J Whatman 1819
[Mason, G.H.], (1830). The punishments of China. London: William Miller. Printed by W. Bulmer. Watermarks: Turkey Mill J Whatman 1830; Incomplete marks: Wis…18...; …& Co…29
[Alexander, W.], (1802). The costume of Turkey. London: William Miller. Printed by T. Bensley. Watermarks: 1811 J Whatman; 1817 J Whatman
[Alexander, W.], (1803) The costume of the Russian empire. London: William Miller. Printed by S. Gosnell. Watermarks: 1811; 1813 J Whatman; 1815 W Spear; 1817 J Whatman; 1817 Turkey Mills J Whatman
[Alexander, W.], (1803) The costume of the Russian empire. London: William Miller. Printed by S. Gosnell. Watermarks: 1796 W Elgar; 1809 Edmeads & Co; 1811; 1813 J Whatman; 1818; 1829 fragment: Wis…& Co 1…29
[Alexander, W.], (1804) The costume of the Russian empire. London: William Miller. Printed by W. Bulmer. Watermarks: 1818; 1819 J Whatman; 1820 J Whatman
Hungarian Family at Ellis Island, all of whom were deported. 1905. Image ID: 417071
If you have done any family history research, such as looking for records on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org or conducting interviews with older family members, you may have pondered writing about your genealogy research. Here are 20 reasons why you should cease pondering and start writing:
You’ll feel wiser.
In 2014, ⅓ online adults used the Internet to learn more about their family history.
67% said that knowing their family history has made them feel wiser as a person.
72% said it helped them be closer to older relatives.
52% said they discovered ancestors they had not known about.
Ancestry.com, Global Study of Users, 2014
First person narratives and family histories are important historical documents.
“You are doing a service by leaving a legacy, no matter how small or large.” “The interesting stories in your life have become familiar to you… The novelty of these stories is most apparent to someone hearing them for the first time.” The Story of You: A Guide for Writing Your Personal Stories and Family History, John Bond, 2014
You are an important person. You have things to pass on, to your children, to your local history society, to unknown future generations.
Writing your family history gives you the chance to depict your ancestors how you see fit.
“You cannot write our story. You have no right.”
In 2004, Native Americans react to depictions of their ancestors in documents about Lewis & Clark. History News, Summer 2014
There is a need for diverse family histories about those who have not been represented well in history texts.
“For members of marginalized groups, speaking personally and truthfully about our lives plays a small part in erasing years of invisibility and interpretation by others.” Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Judith Barrington, 1997
There is a need for more family histories documenting female lines.
“The traditional descendants-of genealogy usually begins with the immigrant and follows descendants for some number of generations. Often they have a paternalistic bent and follow only male descendants who bore the surname….In the future we hope to see less short-changing of maternal lines and collateral lines in published material.” Producing a Quality Family History, Patricia Law Hatcher, 1996
There is a need for more family histories about families who are not affluent.
“Genealogical publishing [in the past] was accessible primarily to the affluent…. Modern genealogists are researching ancestors who are relatively recent immigrants, landless, illiterate, living on the frontier or migrating. There seems to be a trend away from idealizing our ancestors.” Producing a Quality Family History, Patricia Law Hatcher, 1996
Paiute Family in Yosemite, circa 1900. Image ID: 1690994
Family histories humanize the people you know or knew and remember for those who did not know them.
Information raises questions. Genealogy research has brought new facts into your life.
“They research and write down when and where mom and dad were married. I don’t want to say accurate facts aren’t important, but I do question priorities here. The facts, or at least the important facts, of mom and dad’s marriage were not where and when it took place but what they made of it.” For All Time: A Complete Guide to Writing Your Family History, Charley Kempthorne, 1996
It may help you understand your current family dynamics.
“I spent a year writing my story which is also my mother’s story and the story of our family. It was a most enlightening time for me, one I treasure, because it forced me to look at my life, re-shape it in many ways, and to laugh at things that I had taken so seriously before. I matured in many ways and became more tolerant and caring. It also freed me from some of my doubts and fears.” Family Focused: A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Your Autobiography and Family History, Janice T. Dixon, 1997
It will help you build or solidify a sense of family.
Cowboy writing in a notebook, 1909. Image ID: 5027900
It can be therapeutic.
“Studies show that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person’s health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory…. Writing -- and then rewriting -- your personal story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness.” New York Times, "Writing Your Way To Happiness," Tara Parker-Pope, January 19, 2015
Don’t take for granted that the lives of your ancestors are lost. Evidence of the people they have been exists somewhere and is discoverable.
“Virtually all my finds have been made from old manuscripts in public repositories and have been of the family moving, not in the company of celebrities…, but among people as little known to fame as themselves.” How to Write a Family History: The Lives and Times of Our Ancestors, Terrick FitzHugh, 1988
“It will have a wider impact than you might imagine.”
After publishing some of her family histories and donating to libraries and archives, author Penny Stratton heard from other researchers that they had found leads and data in her writings. American Ancestors, Spring 2014
Family members and even distant cousins may become more forward in contributing documents, photos, and stories for your genealogical research.
“It’s cousin-bait.” Genea-Musings, “Why Do You Write About Your Personal Research?” Randy Seaver, January 2015
You will be encouraged to archive and preserve the documents on which your family history research is based: certificates, letters, diaries, etc.
The papers of writer Tom Wolfe are now available for research in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. A description of the Tom Wolfe papers, along with an index to correspondence in the collection, is available via NYPL's Archives & Manuscripts portal at archives.nypl.org/mss/22833. The collection, which was acquired by The Library in 2014, fills over 200 boxes and will be a vital resource for the study of Wolfe's writing process, his journalism-based research methods, and the creation of his hugely successful works. Wolfe's personal papers represent an important archive that will continue to be celebrated as a public resource available at NYPL.
From his beginnings as a beat reporter for the New York Herald Tribune to his best-selling books The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe's papers document the entirety of his celebrated career as a great American novelist and pioneer of the New Journalism. Researchers will be able to access multiple draft manuscripts of Wolfe's books and articles, along with the author's outlines, research materials, and interviews that show the creation of his most famous works and the evolution of his signature style. The collection contains a rich selection of letters from major writers, editors, and cultural icons such as Hunter S. Thompson, Jann Wenner, Gordon Lish, Gay Talese, George Plimpton, and Marshall McLuhan. Wolfe's childhood creative writing sheds light on an early interest in his eventual profession, and academic work from Washington and Lee and Yale Universities shows the development of Wolfe's unique cultural perspective. The collection also includes sketchbooks and drawings with Wolfe's humorous caricatures of New York society in the mid-20th century.
A page from Wolfe's outline of The Bonfire of the Vanities, showing the detailed planning he undertook when revising the novel from its initial serialization in Rolling Stone. In the margin, Wolfe reminds himself that readers should ask "Why is [he] so anxious to get out of the building?" when first introduced to Sherman McCoy.
From February 13-27, The Library will display a selection of highlights from the collection. This exhibition, "Becoming The Man in the White Suit: The Tom Wolfe Papers at The New York Public Library," will be open to the public for a limited time on the third floor of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. In the Manuscripts and Archives Division, Wolfe's papers join other major 20th century archives, including the personal papers of Truman Capote and Timothy Leary, as well as the records of Wolfe's former publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. If you are interested in learning more about the collection or would like to discuss an archives-based project with an archivist, fill out an online registration form or stop by Room 328.
I began looking at our collection to find materials that would attract a WWI history buff as well as anyone who casually passed through the exhibit. There is no single representation of early 1900s Jewish experience; Jewish soldiers served on both sides of the Great War. What I found most interesting was the mindset of Jewish soldiers fighting for Germany at the time. They fought to establish themselves and their identity as German Jews, fighting for a nation who would aim to eradicate their families in the decades to come. We see early signs of what was to come during the Great War, starting from the Judenzählung.
Judenzählung is German for "Jewish Census," which was conducted in October of 1916 by the German Military High Command. The purpose of it was to confirm the lack of patriotism of German Jews.
"In October 1916, when almost three thousand Jews had already died on the battlefield and more than seven thousand had been decorated, War Minister Wild von Hohenborn saw fit to sanction the growing prejudices. He ordered a "Jew census" in the army to determine the actual number of Jews on the front lines as opposed to those serving in the rear. Ignoring protests in the Reichstag and the press, he proceeded with his head count. The results were not made public, ostensibly to "spare Jewish feelings." The truth was that the census disproved the accusations: 80 percent served on the front lines."(Elon, Amos. The Pity of It All. pg. 338)
While thousands of Jewish soldiers perished fighting for Germany, anti-semitism only grew after the war. In 1919, General Erich Ludendorff blamed the Berlin government and the civilian population for the German surrender in November 1918. He gave rise to the "stab-in-the-back" myth, blaming the republicans who overthrew the monarchy. Since many Jews supported the Weimar Republic and were thought to be unpatriotic due to previous claims by the Judenzählung, they became a natural scape goat. In response to accusations of the lack of patriotism, German Jewish veterans published this leaflet in 1920:
“To the German mothers! 12,000 Jewish soldiers fell on the field of honor for the fatherland. Christian and Jewish heroes fought side by side and rest side by side in foreign land. 12,000 Jews were killed in action! Furious party hatred does not stop at the graves of the dead. German women, do not tolerate that a Jewish mother is scorned in her grief.”
At its heart—pun intended—Valentine’s Day is about letting loved ones know you care about them. The words of famous besotted correspondents fill our shelves—the Rare Book Division alone holds printed copies of love letters from Henry VIII, John Keats, and Mary, Queen of Scots (assuming those casket letters weren’t forged). But if these doomed affairs don’t quite inspire you to set pen to page, perhaps you should try another source—our universal letter-writers.
Universal letter-writers were guidebooks meant to teach young men and women the art of writing and speaking fluently on a variety of subjects. The bulk of the texts are model letters, organized by theme and supplemented with guides to grammar, spelling, pronunciation, and style, as well as how to write cards of compliment or address the President of the United States (“His Excellency the President of the United States,” if you’re curious). The Rare Book Division’s copies were printed in the early nineteenth century, but later versions can be found in the library’s other collections.
The Universal Letter-Writer, 1810, with contemporary hand-colored frontispiece. Rare Book Division. New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, Tilden Foundations.
The model letters offer guidance on a bewildering array of subjects, from “To an Acquaintance to borrow a Sum of Money for a little time” to “From a Daughter to her Mother by way of Excuse for having neglected to write her” (I think I have a few drafts of that one myself) and even “From a Lady to her Friend, whose lover had basely left her and married another.” Some of them retain their original names—an 1800 edition notes that “several of the letters are taken from approved American writers”—while the sources for others remain anonymous. As I read these, I picture the early American version of Joaquin Phoenix in Spike Jonze’s Her, crafting heartfelt letters for strangers on commission. Letters on courtship and marriage are well-represented.
If it feels contrary to the nature of love letters to follow a template, the letter-writer compilers anticipated that reaction. “It would be easy to fill a very large volume with the letters of lovers without illustrating the topic of love: because every difference of circumstances and situation, however slight, makes a very material one in the commencement, progress, and effects of the passion,” says an 1810 edition. It continues with a scathing yet humorous indictment of the idea of writing love letters at all: “The letters of lovers are said to be agreeable to themselves alone; this observation is in some degree true, for the explanation of passion begins in egotism, proceeds in complaint, crimination, exculpation and compliment, and ends if fortunately, in self-gratulation, if otherwise, in self-defence. Lovers, in general, injure their cause in the eyes of the prudent by unlimited protestations, extravagant exaggerations, and absurd hyperboles; things unpardonable in any person of moderate judgment, and which must proceed either from folly or a wish to deceive.”
If, despite these criticisms, you choose to soldier on with your words of endearment, our universal letter-writers have inspiration for seemingly any situation. Here are some personal favorites of mine, with suggestions of the literary couples who might have needed them. If they strike your fancy, be sure to explore one of the library’s print or digital copies!
“I take the liberty of assuring you that you must either pull out your eyes, or I must pull out mine—that’s a fact. You must either not be so handsome, or I must be blind, that’s another.”
“...for that little rogue, Cupid, has so pinked me all over with his confounded arrows, that I look like—let me think—like what? your ladyship’s pincushion!—but this is not all;—your eyes had like to have proved more fatal to me than Cupid and all his roguery; for, Madam, while I was star-gazing the other night at your window; full of fire and flame (as we lovers usually are) I dropped plump into your fish-pond. By the same token I hissed like a red-hot horse-shoe flung into a smith’s trough.—It was a hundred pounds to a penny but I had been drowned; for those that came to my assistance, left me in this sad pickle to shift for myself; because forsooth! laughing had so conquered their sides, that they were incapable of affording me the desired aid.—Seeing some fish, (very good, I presume, when dressed) approaching me with an air that seemed to question me what business I had there, I took the liberty of catching a few of my fellow-sufferers; of which I intend to make an offering to your ladyship…”
“Letter from a Gentleman to a Lady, against the tedious Forms of Courtship” and “The Lady’s Answer, encouraging a further Declaration” (1800), a.k.a. the Benedick - Beatrice Letters
“I remember that one of the ancients in describing a youth in love, says he has neither wisdom enough to speak, nor to hold his tongue. If this be a just description, the sincerity of my passion will admit of no dispute: and whenever in your company I behave like a fool, forget not that you are answerable for my incapacity.”
“I am very little in love with the fashionable methods of courtship: sincerity with me is preferable to compliments yet I see no reason why common decency should be discarded. There is something so odd in your style, that when I know whether you are in jest or earnest, I shall be less at a loss to answer you. Mean time, as there is abundant room for rising, rather than sinking, in your complaisance, you may possibly have chosen wisely to begin first at the lower. If this be the case, I know not what your succeeding addresses may produce: But I tell you fairly, that your present makes no great impression, yet perhaps as much as you intend, on Your humble servant.”
“Letter from a Nephew to his Aunt, concerning ludicrous Treatment in Courtship” (1810), a.k.a. the Cecil Vyse - Mrs. Vyse Letter
“For some time past I have been making my addresses, in the best manner I can, to Miss Johnson, but have not the least room to boast of my success. ...I told her how happy I should think myself, if I could be encouraged to hope for the smallest share of her favor; but she made me such an odd answer as plainly demonstrated to me, that I had more of her contempt than approbation. This made me as earnest as her to wave the subject, and so we went on upon the weather for a whole week before. When we had done that, we talked politics…”
“The opportunities which I have had of conversing with you at Mrs. B’s, have at last convinced me, that merit and riches are far from being connected, and that a woman may have those qualifications necessary to adorn her sex, although adverse fortune has denied her money. I am sure that all those virtues necessary to make me happy in the marriage state, are centered in you, and whatever objection you may have to my person, yet I hope there can be none to my character; and if you will consent to be mine, it shall be my constant study to make your life agreeable, and under the endearing character of a husband, endeavor to supply your early loss of the best of parents. I shall expect your answer as soon as possible, for I wait for it with the utmost impatience.”
NOTA: hay terminología que debe mantenerse en inglés puesto que así debe escribirse en el código.
En noviembre del 2014, fui invitado a la 2a semana del libro digital organizado por la Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia. La idea era presentar los proyectos que estamos desarrollando en el NYP Labs y también, dictar un taller sobre herramientas para geolocalización de mapas. Pienso que puede ser útil compartir los contenidos de ese taller, ya que integra diversas herramientas y procesos que permiten que la cartografía digital sea, hoy en día, accesible para todos.
Se trata de un paso a paso que, utilizando herramientas de georeferenciación gratuitas, te enseñará a hacer tu propio e increíble mapa georeferenciado.
RESUMIENDO…
Esto es lo que haremos. Este tutorial asume que ya tienes un mapa digitalizado y que tienes claro qué información quieres incorporar. Usualmente, los pasos son:
Georeferenciar el mapa escaneado para poder generar la cuadrícula (“tileset” en inglés) del mapa;
Procesar los datos en GeoJSON para sobreponerlos al mapa escaneado;
Crear un mapa personalizado que servirá de referencia como mapa de la actualidad;
Integrar todos los elementos en una página web interactiva.
NOTA: Este tutorial asume que estás usando Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari o Google Chrome. Tendremos que jugar con la consola de desarrollo y no tengo instrucciones multinavegador.
El primer paso, luego de digitalizar el mapa, es agregar la información geográfica. Para esto, es necesario establecer la equivalencia entre pixeles y ubicación exacta que ellos representan. Esto se conoce con el nombre de geolocalización. Este proceso distorsionará la imagen digitalizada:
Imagen original digitalizada (encogida, por supuesto)
…Al hacerla calzar con la proyección de Mercator que es la que se utiliza en la mayoría de los proyectos que utilizan mapas digitales como OpenStreetMap or Google Maps:
Proyección Mercator de la imagen original geolocalizada
El porcentaje de distorsión dependerá de la calidad de la muestra –el mapa digitalizado–, su estado de conservación y la proyección del mapa original. Es posible que te estés preguntando ¿y cómo ocurrirá esto? Existen softwares propietarios y open-source que permiten geolocalizar imágenes de un modo sencillo. Sin embargo, el objetivo de este tutorial es lograrlo sin que tengas que instalar ningún programa que no sea tu navegador.
Para empezar, anda a: Map Warper. Esta es una herramienta web que te permite subir tu mapa digitalizado para luego, a través de una sencilla interfaz, geolocalizarlo (o “rectificarlo” para hablar como cartógrafos). En el lado izquierdo verás el mapa digitalizado y en el lado derecho, la proyección Mercator.
Así se ve la interfaz dividida para la rectificación en Map Warper
Fíjate en los marcadores de la imagen. Cada pin tiene un número y el mismo marcador se ve en ambos lados de la imagen. Asimismo, cada uno de ellos te servirá para darte cuenta que en el mapa digitalizado, el Norte está hacia el lado izquierdo, mientras que el Este está hacia arriba. Si bien, cuantos más marcadores agregues, más precisa será la referenciación; debes considerar que también será más lento el procesamiento de la imagen final. No obstante, la imagen se genera sólo una vez, así que yo no me preocuparía demasiado por eso. De lo que sí debes preocuparte es de cuántos marcadores estás dispuesto a agregar. El mapa de este tutorial, por ejemplo, tiene 101.
Una consideración final en este proceso es estar seguros que, luego de la distorsión producida por la geolocalización de la imagen, tienes una imagen de alta calidad. El proceso de distorsionar la imagen original se llama resamplear1. En las opciones avanzadas de Map Warper puedes definir si quieres que el proceso sea rápido pero de inferior calidad (seleccionando la opción “Nearest Neighbour”) o un poco más lento, pero de mejor calidad (seleccionando “Cubic Spline”):
Selecciona “Cubic Spline” en el menú “Resampling Method option”
Puedes ver el mapa final aquí. También puedes descargarlo en alta resolución en la pestaña “Export”. Sin embargo, pienso que el insumo principal que se obtiene de Map Warper es la cuadrícula o baldosas (“tileset” en inglés), como prefieran llamarlas. Y que en el fondo, es la URL que se ve aquí:
Puedes encontrar la URL del tileset en la pestaña “Export”
Y el template es: http://mapwarper.net/maps/tile/4949/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
Para seguir trabajando necesitarás esta URL así que guárdala en un lugar seguro, un bloc de notas por ejemplo, para ir dejando todos estos datos, que luego ocuparemos. Map Warper tiene un motor que utiliza la imagen geolocalizada para generar un tileset en el mapa que opera a distintos niveles del zoom. Así que sólo se nuestra la parte en la que estás trabajando 2. Esta es una baldosa o una parte del tileset de ejemplo:
Un mapa Web está hecho de millones de estas
2) Extracción de datos.
Ya tenemos el mapa. Ahora tenemos que pensar qué información queremos mostrar en él. Nuestro ejemplo utiliza este directorio de la ciudad de Bogotá de 1888, la capital de Colombia. Este documento tiene información valiosa sobre: decenas de miles de personas, cada una de ellas con su nombre completo, ocupación y dirección; docenas de ocupaciones diferentes (descritas en la página 4) y avisos publicitarios (junto con la dirección de locales comerciales y los nombres de sus dueños). Este directorio constituye un interesante retrato de la vida colombiana en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX: abogados, fotógrafos y contadores comparten páginas con talabarteros y herreros. Yo me fui por el camino aburrido y decidí buscar políticos influyentes de la época, como por ejemplo el presidente en ejercicio (página 222, primero en la segunda columna). La lista tiene los nombres de siete personas: cuatro presidentes, un vicepresidente, un ministro, y un presidente en ejercicio 3. En ella se incluye:
nombre;
cargo (El cargo más alto en el poder ejecutivo colombiano);
período de ejercicio;
página (en la que aparece en el directorio);
ocupación (de acuerdo con la tipificación del directorio);
dirección;
La URL de una fotografía de Wikimedia (en caso de existir una);
latitud, longitud (un marcador de posición del centro de Bogotá que modificaremos en esta etapa).
Puedes crear tu propia lista con otros datos que te parezcan más interesantes o más útiles. Sólo debes asegurarte de incluir una columna para indicar la “latitud” y la “longitud” y guardarla en una lista de valores separados por comas.
GeoJSON.
Hasta acá, tus datos están almacenados en una lista de valores separados por comas, pero las herramientas para geolocalización en la web, generalmente utilizan el estándar de datos GeoJSON. GeoJSON está basado en JSON que es una de las formas más populares de estructurar datos en la web. GeoJSON utiliza el concepto de “atributos” para describir los datos geográficos. Estos atributos pueden ser puntos (como en este caso) o formas geométricas complejas como líneas sencillas, compuestas o polígonos. Cada atributo es descrito por su geometría, en inglés geometry, (el punto, la línea o el polígono en sí mismo) y por sus propiedades, en inglés properties, que en el fondo son todos los datos extra que quieras asociar a ellos (en este caso, el nombre de la persona, su dirección, fotografía, etc.). Por ejemplo4:
Ahora tenemos que convertir la hoja de datos en un objeto GeoJSON y actualizar los valores de latitud y longitud, en inglés latitude y longitude, de los marcadores de posición. Para esto, utilizaremos el mismo mapa. Pero necesitaremos una herramienta que nos permita generar el archivo GeoJSON y manipularlo fácilmente.
Lo que nos lleva a GeoJSON.io. Es “una rápida y sencilla herramienta para crear, visualizar y compartir mapas”. GeoJSON.io tiene una elegante interfaz que nos permitirá crear el archivo GeoJSON que necesitamos.
Carga la página de GeoJSON.io en una nueva pestaña del navegador. Lo primero que verás será un mapa por defecto en un zoom out completo. Entonces, tendremos que intervenir un poco. Haz click con el botón derecho en algún punto del mapa y selecciona Inspeccionar elemento (o Inspect element si tienes el navegador en inglés):
Click botón derecho → Inspeccionar elemento
Al hacer esto, tendrás una visualización avanzada para desarrolladores, esto significa que podrás ver y modificar el código de la página que estás viendo (en este caso, la interfaz del mapa). GeoJSON.io incluye una interfaz para programación (API) que te permitirá también, controlar el despliegue del mapa. El núcleo de este sitio es MapBoxJS, que está construido en Leaflet, una “librería JavaScript de código abierto para el desarrollo de mapas interactivos compatibles con dispositivos móviles”. Menciono ambos asuntos porque, en la mayoría de los casos, lo que funciona en uno de ellos, funcionará también en el otro. (Es importante que leas toda la documentación antes de tomar cualquier decisión). De ahora en adelante, me referiré a Leaflet en lugar de MapBoxJS.
En la pestaña “Consola” (o “Console” en inglés) verás algo de texto y, al final, un cursor en el que podrás ejecutar el código JavaScript. También te darás cuenta que hay algunos comentarios del creador de GeoJSON.io. Escribe esto en el área que mencioné y presiona ENTER (fíjate en el GIF animado de más abajo):
Con esto, lograrás que el mapa se centre y haga un “zoom” en Bogotá, Colombia, el área comprendida por el mapa de 1891. Ahora escribe esto:
y presiona ENTER. Al hacerlo, agregarás el tileset que ya habíamos creado. Fíjate que la línea de código que acabamos de escribir incluye la URL que copiamos en el paso 1. El resultado, debiera verse más o menos así:
Una rápida “intervención” a GeoJSON.io
Ahora, puedes cerrar la ventana de consola (No la ventana del navegador).
NOTA: Será necesario que apliques este código cada vez que cargues GeoJSON.io ya que no guarda las modificaciones vía consola. Lo que sí puedes hacer es registrarte y así guardar los datos que agregaste a tu mapa.
Agregando datos a GeoJSON.io.
Ahora usaremos la versión modificada del mapa como base para geolocalizar correctamente la lista CSV de presidentes. Arrastra la lista CSV que descargaste sobre el mapa:
La magia de arrastrar y soltar en GeoJSON.io
Te darás cuenta cómo los datos inmediatamente son convertidos a GeoJSON (panel derecho) y el mapa muestra los marcadores de cada presidente (panel izquierdo). Aparecerá un pequeño mensaje verde (arriba a la izquierda) que indica que siete atributos fueron importados.
Pero… ¡El mapa de 1891 desapareció! No te asustes. Esto sólo significa que el mapa ha hecho un zoom “demasiado cerca de la tierra” y la URL del tileset no tiene imágenes a esa escala. Haz un zoom out y verás que el mapa de 1891 aparece otra vez.
Moviendo lo marcadores.
Como podrás darte cuenta, los marcadores de la lista CSV quedaron geolocalizados, uno encima de otro, en la misma ubicación, la Plaza de Bolívar en Bogotá. Así que tendremos que moverlos a su ubicación correcta. Si haces click sobre el marcador gris, verás los datos adicionales del primero en la lista (el General Rafael Reyes). Su dirección, en ese entonces, era 50, Calle 16 (el número 50 de la Calle 16). Encontrar la dirección en el mapa será relativamente sencillo ya que cada cuadra tiene la numeración de inicio y término escrita en cada esquina. Si te fijas, la numeración de las “Carreras” (vías verticales) aumenta hacia el Norte con los números pares e impares de Este a Oeste, mientras que la numeración de las “Calles” (vías horizontales) aumenta hacia el Oeste con los números pares e impares de Norte a Sur:
Como puede ser que no sepamos exactamente dónde estaba una dirección, pondremos los marcadores en su ubicación estimada. Para hacerlo, es necesario que actives el modo de edición, haciendo click en el ícono editar:
Los marcadores tendrán ahora un borde rosado y los podrás mover donde quieras. Una vez ubicados en su posición correcta, recuerda guardar, haciendo click sobre el botón “Save”:
Hay algunas direcciones más complejas que otras, pero como podrás imaginarte, esta es una tarea bastante agradable, porque literalmente, te pierdes en las calles de Bogotá de 1891. Un aspecto interesante de este mapa es que los edificios de gobierno aparecen coloreados con los tonos de la bandera colombiana. Cuando encuentres la casa de Rafael Núñez Moledo, el entonces presidente en ejercicio, notarás que su dirección coincide con uno de esos edificios del color de la bandera colombiana; esa es la Casa de Nariño.
Guardando el GeoJSON.
Ahora, tenemos que generar la versión final del archivo GeoJSON para crear el mapa interactivo. Simplemente selecciona Save > GeoJSON en el menú de GeoJSON.io. Un archivo llamado map.geojson se descargará en tu computador. Si prefieres, puedes descargar el que hice yo.
3) Haciendo un mapa del 2014 personalizado (opcional).
En verdad, lo que queremos es poder comparar cómo ha cambiado Bogotá desde 1891 a nuestros días. Entonces, lo que necesitamos es un “mapa base”, que básicamente, es lo que aparece en tu pantalla cuando cargas GeoJSON.io: un mapa (esperemos, exacto) “color vainilla” de calles del mundo actual. Puedes usar la cuadrídula estándar de OpenStreetMap o también, puedes usar un servicio como MapBox para generar un mapa completamente a tu gusto (MapBox usa datos OSM). MapBox ofrece bastantes alternativas: te deja cambiar los colores, elegir qué se muestra (calles, edificios, parques, etc.) e incluso te permite usar imágenes satelitales.
No voy a describir cómo hacer tu propio mapa en MapBox. Mejor, puedes leerlo en su excelente tutorial. Una vez que estén listos, tienen que guardar el identificador del mapa que crearon, que es algo así como usuario.k53dp4io. Puedes usar la página de proyectos de MapBox para ver todos sus mapas y copiar fácilmente el ID al bloc de notas:
NOTA: Si no quieren explorar el proceso de personalizar su propio mapa, pueden usar el ID de alguno de los ejemplos de MapBox.
4) El montaje final.
Ya tenemos todas las piezas para ensamblar nuestro mapa interactivo. Para eso tenemos:
los datos del mapa en formato GeoJSON;
el tileset del mapa de 1891;
el tileset del mapa actual o el ID de MapBox del mapa de 2014.
El prototipo del mapa interactivo lo armaremos en JSFiddle, una herramienta que permite crear y testear rápidamente código HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Revisa este breve tutorial para que te familiarices con la interfaz.
JSFiddle tiene cuatro paneles principales:
Código HTML (arriba a la izquierda);
Código CSS (arriba a la derecha);
Código JavaScript (abajo a la izquierda);
Resultado final (abajo a la derecha).
JSFiddle se encarga de ensamblar los componentes de los tres códigos en el resultado, cada vez que presionas “Run” (arriba, barra azul).
HTML & CSS.
En este ejemplo, la parte de HTML y CSS son muy sencillas. Sólo necesitamos un área rectangular en la página, en la que ubicaremos el mapa y todos sus controles.
Primero, el elemento HTML en el que ubicaremos el mapa. Escribe o copia y pega esto en el panel HTML:
Con este código, creas un elemento div cuyo identificador es map y, como te podrás imaginar, contendrá al mapa. Ahora, necesitamos darle “estilo” a este elemento (debe tener alto, ancho, altura y, si queremos, bordes y otros atributos). El estilo se controla con el código CSS. Escribe o copia y pega lo siguiente en el panel CSS:
Al hacer esto, el elemento, cuyo identificador es map, tendrá una altura y un ancho de 400 pixeles (el prefijo # significa “ID” en CSS). Por supuesto que pueden hacer el rectángulo más grande (si tu monitor es lo suficientemente grande) o aplicarle algunos otros atributos entre las llaves { } (por ejemplo: background-color: #f00; para un fondo rojo, si quieres ver el elemento sin el mapa) pero en realidad, preferiría que lo mantuvieras lo más sencillo posible.
Si presionas “Run” en este momento, no verás mucho (a menos que hayas añadido algún color de fondo o borde al elemento). En cualquier caso, ese es todo el HTML y CSS que necesitas por el momento.
Agregar el MapBoxJS.
Para visualizar el mapa y hacerlo interactivo necesitaremos de algunas piezas adicionales y un poco de JavaScript. Mencioné hace un rato Leaflet y MapBoxJS. Leaflet está incluido en MapBoxJS, así que más tarde nos ocuparemos de él.
MapBoxJS se compone de dos archivos separados: uno JS y otro CSS. Ya tenemos una idea de qué es lo que hace el CSS. El archivo JavaScript contiene toda la magia del mapeo interactivo. Estas son las URLs de los archivos en cuestión (Esta no es la más reciente versión de MapBoxJS pero no hay que preocuparse, funcionará):
En la columna de la izquierda de JSFiddle busca la sección “External Resources”. Ahora, copia estas URLs y pégalas en la caja JavaScript/CSS URI y luego presiona el botón +. Verás que algo como esto aparece después de hacerlo:
Este es tu “fiddle” una vez has agregado los dos archivos de MapBoxJS
Esto hará que JSFiddle cargue los archivos la próxima vez que hagas clic en el botón “Run”.
¡Hola mapa!
¡Ahora sí viene la parte que hemos estado esperando! Escribamos unas líneas de JavaScript para poder ver el mapa de 1891. Copia y pega esto en el panel de JavaScript:
…y presiona “Run”. Esto es lo que deberías ver:
¡Tu primer mapa web!
Gracias a Leaflet, es así de fácil trabajar con mapas web.
NOTA: No voy a entrar en detalles respecto de los diferentes aspectos de las APIs de Leaflet o MapBoxJS. Cada uno tiene sus propios tutoriales y ejemplos.
Lo que sí voy a hacer es dar algunos snippets y explicar, en términos sencillos, para qué sirven. La idea es que copies, pegues, hagas clic en “Run” y que la magia ocurra5. Luego podrás investigar, probar y resolver cómo hacer otras cosas por tu cuenta.
Trabajando con múltiples tilesets.
Habrás notado que el mapa es completamente blanco, a excepción del mapa de 1891. Esto es bueno y ocurre porque el tileset sólo tiene el mapa rectificado y nada más. Necesitamos un tileset adicional, del 2014, para poder comparar (podemos usar el ID de un mapa de MapBox, en caso de que no hayas creado el tuyo en el paso 3 de más arriba). Reemplazaremos el código JS con uno nuevo que incluirá:
Información de la fuente y/o atribución del mapa;
el tileset del 2014;
una herramineta de control que nos permitirá cambiar entre un tileset y otro.
Este código debe reemplazar el anterior código JS:
Si miras con detención este código, te darás cuenta que es bastante similar al que habíamos usado antes. La diferencia principal está en los datos de atribución y en los tilesets de MapBox (que incorporamos con su respectivo ID del mapa). La herramienta de control, son sólo dos líneas: la primera, que crea la variable “mapa base” y que soporta los tilesets (puedes agregar cuantos sets quieras); y la segunda, que crea “el control” y lo incrusta en el mapa. Veamos el control en acción:
Fíjate cómo cambia la atribución (al pie del mapa) al cambiar de un tileset a otro
¡Ya casi terminamos!
Ahora lo único que falta es que podamos desplegar nuestros datos. Leaflet hace este proceso bastante sencillo porque es soporte nativo de GeoJSON. Bastan unas pocas líneas de código… pero primero debes borrar la linea que hace zoommap.setView([4.598056, -74.075833],14). Ahora pega este código en la parte de abajo del panel JS:
Debes copiar el código GeoJSON del archivo de texto que descargaste de GeoJSON.io y pegarlo en donde dice 'pegar_geojson_aca_mantener_comillas'. Asegúrate de conservar las comillas sencillas: ''. Hecho el cambio, esa línea debiera verse como esta (por brevedad reemplacé el contenido de las “features” con un …):
Ahora, reemplacemos la función del zoom con map.fitBounds(geolayer.getBounds()). Esto hace al mapa “más inteligente”: en lugar de especificar de forma manual la longitud, latitud y el nivel del zoom, dejamos que Leaflet calcule el área que ocupa el set de marcadores con getBounds() y entregue ese valor al mapa mediante la función fitBounds(). Voilá, el zoom del mapa muestra ahora todos los marcadores. Si quieres agregar algunos más… ¡el área cambiará automáticamente!
También puedes agregar puntos u otra información adicional sobrepuesta en el control de capas. Sólo tienes que crear una variable similar a la que creamos anteriormente y actualizar el código de creación, por ejemplo:
Cuando presiones “Run” deberás ver algo así:
El mapa con datos
NOTA: Asegúrate de mover el código de creación del control L.control.layerspor debajo de donde está el GeoJSON. La variable geolayer necesita existir para poder ser añadida a as otras capas. Puedes guiarte por mi resultado en JSFiddle si necesitas más detalles.
Otra línea importante es la de la función L.geoJson() que es la encargada de regular el comportamiento de todos los atributos descritos por map.geojson. Leaflet/MapBoxJS tiene por defecto íconos azules para los marcadores, pero pueden ser modificados si quisieran. L.geoJson() también permite agregar interacción a los marcadores. Si ahora hacemos click con el botón derecho, no pasa nada.
Marcadores que cobran vida.
Me gustaría que, al hacer clic sobre un marcador, apareciera una ventana o “popup” con la información que asociamos a cada uno de ellos (en las properties de cada punto). Para lograrlo, tenemos que hacer dos cosas:
Crear una función que construya y despliegue el popup para cada punto (marcador).
Modificar el llamado L.geoJson() para que utilice esta función.
Leaflet tiene la función bindPopup(), que hace precisamente eso: dibuja una caja con un texto para un determinado layer (el término en inglés para los elementos que se dibujan en el mapa). Este texto puede incluir HTML. Copia y pega este código, debajo de todo lo que llevas hasta el momento:
Esta función showPopup() recibe un feature, la pieza de GeoJSON que contiene toda la información (geometría y propiedades), y un layer (en nuestro caso, el marcador azul). Estos dos parámetros son procesados automáticamente por la función L.geoJson(). showPopup() extrae las propiedades de cada atributo (nombre, dirección, etc.) y las articula en una cadena HTML que luego es usada para crear el popup.
Pero para que funcione, tenemos que conectar la función showPopup a algo. Para hacerlo, debemos modificar la actual línea de L.geoJson de la siguiente forma:
…solamente estamos agregando , {onEachFeature: showPopup} después de geodata. Lo que hicimos fue decirle a Leaflet que aplique la función showPopup a cada atributo en GeoJSON.
NOTA: Si nuestro GeoJSON tiene multiples tipos de atributos (por ejemplo: puntos, líneas o polígonos) es importante tener en mente que la misma función será aplicada a cada uno de ellos. Por ejemplo, los polígonos tienen un área, pero los puntos no; entonces será necesario que revisemos si el atributo sobre el que clickeamos tiene área antes de intentar usar la función fitBounds en el mapa.
Al cargar el mapa y hacer clic sobre un marcador, debiera verse así:
Se ve bastante bien y todo, pero… ¿no sería mejor ver la foto y quizás linkear a la página que corresponde del directorio?
¡Hagamos eso!
Remplacemos la función showPopup con esta:
Lo que acabamos de hacer fue agregar una cosa más para el popup: Si key es igual a “Page” linkeamos al directorio y si key es igual a “Photo” construimos un contenedor para la imagen que la despliega a 150 pixels de alto (sólo en caso de que sea demasiado grande).
Así es como se veía el Sr. Núñez:
…digno de un presidente!
Y, ahora sí, casi terminamos.
Empaquetando.
Lo último sería compilar estos tres snippets de código en una página HTML para que puedas publicar tu nuevo mapa en alguna parte. No te preocupes, para esto hay otra plantilla que tiene marcados los sitios en los que debes pegar el CSS, HTML y JS. Guarda todo el código como un archivo .html y publícalo donde quieras:
Puedes ver el mapa terminado aquí. Sólo hice algunas modificaciones mínimas al CSS para que se viera mejor en la ventana del navegador.
Ojalá este tutorial sea útil. Cuéntame si tienes algún comentario o sugerencia.
Similar a lo que ocurre con la música cuando se convierte de calidad CD a MP3. ↩
I first heard the name Bill Barvin almost by accident, when by chance a colleague remembered the existence of a large photographic collection belonging to the Milstein Division and suggested that it might be of interest to me. The Bill Barvin Location Photograph Archive turned out to be a dizzying 81 boxes of 35mm negative strips and color photos, the collection's finding aid alone 45 pages long.
William "Bill" Barvin (1952-2000) worked for over two decades as a location manager and scout for television and film, taking thousands of photos during the course of his career of New York and New Jersey streets, apartments, storefronts, and rooftops; bars, clubs, restaurants, and theaters; hotels, hospitals, laundromats, and churches. I had the great fortune of sifting through box after box of Barvin's photo files and cherry-picking some of my favorites, over 200 of which are now available online at NYPL's Digital Collections website.
Exterior street view, the Puck Building. Image ID: 5210019
Elevator shaft, the Puck Building. Image ID: 5210018
When I saw Barvin's photographs for the first time I wasn't sure what to make of them. They were the same kind of inexpensive drugstore prints that my local pharmacy used to develop, the Kodak and Konica logos reproduced on the backs. Sometimes the photos were glued directly into the manila folders in which they were organized, folded over and creased if they were too long. Most interesting to me was the fact that Barvin often glued or taped multiple photos together to create a single, wider view of a particular location site. In such cases the side-by-side alignment of the photos was always just a little bit off, with color and tone changing from one photo to the next, the perspective skewed, the edges jagged and uneven. Facades of buildings were fractured and disjointed, sidewalk curbs didn't line up correctly, the tracks of elevated subway platforms were broken. Sometimes a person or object would be abruptly cut off mid-picture, or, alternately, would appear multiple times within a single image. On one Paterson, New Jersey street, for instance, half of a car moves down the road, while, simultaneously, the same bicycle appears three different times, once as a ghostly free-floating half wheel right in the center of the frame.
Store interior, Main Street, Paterson, N.J. Image ID: 5210075
The more I looked at Barvin's strange, makeshift panoramas, however, the more my initial confusion turned to a sort of excitement. Though the photos were taken as part of his job, Barvin—who studied art and photography at Antioch College in Ohio—had created his own unique, off-kilter, cool-looking aesthetic, one that faintly echoed the fragmented perspective of early modern art as well as the grittiness of contemporary street photography. Occasionally a photograph might even hint at an ambiguous narrative, as in the case of one photo taken at a suite in the Pierre Hotel, where a mysterious dark figure stands lurking in a doorway. (I've nicknamed that one in my head "The Assassin," even though I know in reality it's just some dude showing Barvin the room and trying to stay out of the shot.)
Pierre Hotel, Suite 1616. Image ID: 5211732
Rooftop, Vernon Avenue. Image ID: 5211698
Barvin's photos of New York City in particular are also documents of a city in transition. Most of the photos in the archive date from the 1990s, a Dinkins/Giuliani era when the city was moving out of the crime-ridden '70s and '80s and yet hadn't reached its current state of luxury high-rises and gentrification. Many of the locations photographed by Barvin have been demolished or else transformed beyond recognition; the Palladium has been rebuilt as an NYU residence hall, Limelight is now a David Barton Gym. (The Upper East Side Scores location is also, sadly and to the dismay of many, now defunct, though Barvin's shots of the interior are actually some of my favorites in terms of color and composition.) As is pointed out in the NYPL Public Eye exhibition—where several of Barvin's works are currently on display—Barvin's panoramic images are also a sort of precursor to Google Street View, and it's interesting to compare the two side by side and observe what has changed or what has, surprisingly, remained the same.
Deerhead Diner, Jackson Heights, by Bill Barvin. Image ID: 5210092
Most importantly, the Bill Barvin Location Photograph Archive captures one man's relationship with his adopted city. Born in Iowa and raised in Texas, Barvin moved to New York City in the late 1970s, where he lived for most of his life in a loft in Soho. According to his wife, Lynn Cassaniti, who generously donated her husband's archive to the Library in 2011, Barvin was "passionate about New York City and knew the city and surrounding areas inside out, like the back of his hand. He loved the work he did—exploring, seeing amazing places and meeting people. He had... that Southern gift of gab that gave him entree to apartments, mansions, museums, bars and other places where he needed to convince people to allow a movie to be shot in their home or location." On screen we've all had fleeting admittance into Barvin's world without even realizing it. (The Sopranos and Law and Order are just two of the productions he worked on). Now thanks to his photography we have permanent access as well.
You can see more of Bill Barvin's location photography on NYPL's Digital Collections site.
The following titles on our Recent Acquisitions Display are just a few of our new books, which are available at the reference desk in the Dorot Jewish Division. Catalog entries for the books can be found by clicking on their covers.
The list features topics such as Old Testament commentary, a memoir of a childhood in Poland before WWII, museums and psychology, the Russian Revolution, the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinical history, Esther, Ba'al Shem Tov, Carribean Sephardim, health, Hungary, alcohol, Ukraine, ghettos, Dr. Suess, post-WWII Jewish writing, Mumbai, and gluten-free kosher cooking.
Eugène Atget (French , 1857–1927). Fort-Monjol, fille publique faisant le quart, 19e. Avril 1921 [Fort-Monjol, prostitute looking for clients, April 19th, 1921]. Albumen silver print. NYPL, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.
Eugène Atget took relatively few pictures of people. There is a series dating from about 1898 to 1900 of people in the small trades (petits métiers): the ragpicker, the organ grinder, ambulatory vendors of herbs, lampshades, plaster statues, baskets. And then there is a small series on prostitutes, from 1921. Some have claimed that Atget was commissioned to document prostitution by the painter and illustrator André Dignimont, whose generally raffish subject matter included a great many brothel scenes. As John Szarkowski points out in his book on Atget, though, he seems to have pursued the task with "an uncharacteristic lack of energy." He only took about a dozen pictures all told, and all of them were taken on a single street.
That street, which no longer exists, was rue Asselin. It was the center of a small neighborhood called Fort-Monjol, which lay in Belleville, beneath the southern tip of the Buttes-Chaumont. The city began razing the neighborhood in the 1870s and finished the job in the early 1930s. It had a troubled history. Until 1629 it had been the site of the municipal gibbet of Montfaucon, a multi-story scaffold on which fifty people could be hanged at once. Even before that, and until the middle of the nineteenth century, it lay within a vast garbage dump, serving the entire city. Until the First World War it was noted as a hangout of hoodlums, where bloody knife fights occurred daily, and also as a place where, in the words of a chronicler of the time, "every skin disease of humanity seemed to have met up: mealy psoriasis, purulent acne, flabby boils, inveterate staphylococcus and streptococcus, tumors, scabies--all flourished in the saltpeter of those stinking walls alive with vermin." By the time Atget took his photographs it had achieved a certain peace, as a rather specialized prostitution district.
Its distinction lay in the fact that its women were, at least by the standards of the time, old. Reportedly, the deadliest taunt among whores was "You'll end up at Monjol!" Nevertheless, to judge by Atget's pictures, the environment was significantly less stressful than most, in a city that then contained dozens of major venues of street prostitution. Here there were no pimps. The women, who had survived decades of hard use, sat on chairs outside their doors; at least one of them worked out of a gypsy wagon. A writer in 1927, warning his readers away, could muster as argument only the fact that the clientele was largely—he employed a racist slur—North African.
In 1921, Atget himself was 64; he would live only six more years. Could it be that he felt some kinship with the women? Certainly the pictures include some of the very rare instances of direct eye-contact in Atget's work (another is his ragpicker, who gives the photographer a look of cold contempt). One of the pictures in the series, of three women in a doorway, shows them all smiling. The woman here, younger than most (she looks no more than 50), projects toughness with her hooded stare and her vigilant cigarette. She is canted back, knees wide open, at her ease, available at a price. She shows off her elegant boot, although the distortion caused by Atget's lens makes it look as if she is keeping her chair from tipping over on the sloping cobblestones. Like the pavement, the houses behind her look somehow topographic, as if they have been hewn from stone. The afternoon will soon have lasted a century.
Gunslinger in the Church. Lobby card. Image ID: G98F842_002.
In the old movies about the Old West, when grizzled, chawing, cussing, murdering highwaymen ride into town and disturb the peace, from behind the batwing doors of the lawman’s office steps the badge-wearing, fast-shooting, strong-silent-type. The banditti are savage and lawless. The lawman is good.
The lawman might be a U.S. marshal, appointed by the Attorney General, under whose loose, vague authority the marshal operated until the Department of Justice was organized in 1870; or he might be a local sheriff, elected to office by the townspeople. Out West, where systems of order were as scarce as systems of plumbing, the marshal and the sheriff assumed the persona of the law. The distinction often makes no difference in old Western movies, but is an optimum detail in the pursuit of genealogy and local history research in the Milstein Division, where reference librarians must wrangle between the local, county, state, and federal levels in order to rope in relevant resources for patron requests.
In Silver Lode (1954), sneer-and-swagger character actor Dan Duryea plays Ned McCarty, who rides into town on the 4th of July brandishing a marshal’s “tin star” and a warrant for the arrest of local rancher Dan Ballard. Turns out McCarty is an impostor, and hellbent to avenge the murder of his brother, whom Ballard shot in self defense; but by the time Ballard is exonerated, McCarty has riled up the whole town against him, and stars-and-stripes morality devolves into mob justice. Silver Lode proves that the badmen weren’t always bad, and the lawman wasn’t always lawful.
The old High German roots of the word marshal, “master of the horse,” befit both the iconography and transit of the frontier lawman. Marshals and sheriffs had the right to deputize civilians and assemble the posse comitatus, which etymology invokes research methods in local history librarianship, the “power of the county.” For example, marriage certificates are issued at the local level in New York City, the county level in Arizona, and the state level in Virginia. Death certificates are sealed for seventy-five years in Oklahoma, but in Connecticut they are public record before 1997. In New Mexico, birth and death certificates are obtained from the state, but marriages from the county clerk. Like military pension files, census schedules and bankruptcy petitions, naturalization records are filed at the federal level, but before 1906 citizenship may also have been applied for at county courts. Deeds and land conveyances are filed at the county level, and likewise probate records, housed in the records room of the Surrogate's Court, which court is a "surrogate” of the governor’s office, dating back to colonial times when travel to the capital was distant, grueling, and slow.
Cowboy Punching Cattle on a Jackrabbit. Postcard Collection, Milstein Division.
Access to court records, whether historic or last week, will also vary by state. For example, after the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri decided against the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office immediately made public the court documents in the case. However, at the State Supreme Court in Richmond County, New York, where the grand jury proceedings against Officer Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner also ended without indictment, court documents related to the case have remained sealed. The release of the documents, in accordance with state laws, was argued before a state judge in Richmond County this past February. In the future, researchers seeking court records related to the case will be directed by local history librarians to the Richmond County Clerk, despite that grand jury proceedings since the 17th century have been kept secret. In addition, any research into the investigation of civil rights violations committed by the Ferguson Police Department would seek documents issued by the Department of Justice, which federal organization also employs the U.S. marshal.
The Milstein Division holds a handful of guidebooks in tracking legal records:
Two men standing in front of a horse and buggy. 1882-1883. Image ID: 1801431.
“When General Stephen Watts Kearny inaugurated the American system of justice in the Southwest in 1846, he introduced a judiciary long common to Anglo-American civilization.” Under the entry for “law and order,” The New Encyclopedia of the American West says that “pioneers did not create new forms of law and order; rather they continued to use two ancient English institutions: the justice court, headed by the justice of the peace; and a county, or high, sheriff, with powers to collect taxes, deputize citizens, and form a posse.” The English roots of this system are reflected in the word "sheriff," where a “shire” is the one-thousand year old ancestor of “the modern county in the United States,” and “the principal officer of the shire court was the shire reeve.” Ironically, like the U.S. marshal in Silver Lode, the Sheriff of Nottingham is portrayed as the archvillain in the folklore of the radical and righteous bandit Robin Hood. Director Allan Dwan, who helmed Silver Lode, adapted the Robin Hood tale thirty years earlier, starring Douglas Fairbanks.
Gary Cooper. Image ID: TH-04687.
In High Noon (1952) Gary Cooper plays the town marshal, basically the sheriff, though sometimes the nomenclature was scotched, and, like many early genealogical records, the verbiage more pragmatic than official. Bad Ben Miller seeks revenge on the marshal, but the townspeople, who elected the law-bringer by popular vote and attended his wedding, refuse to support him against the brigands.
When Wyatt Earp, his two brothers, and tubercular ex-dentist rifleman Doc Holliday killed Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers at the O.K. Corral, in Tombstone, Cochise County, Arizona, Earp had been deputized a U.S. marshal. Surely no heroic showdown between the good and the bad, prolific oater-epicist Larry McMurtry described the ugly gunfight as little more than a "botched arrest." Earp was later indicted in Pima County, AZ, for the vendetta killing of Frank Stilwell, whom had back-shot brother Morgan Earp in 1882. With regards to how folks like to remember the old West, it may be a sign that the NYPL catalog shows 28 entries under the subject heading Cochise County (Ariz.) – Fiction, but only 5 for Cochise County (Ariz.) -- History.
Map of Cochise County. The Oasis.
Wichita (1955) is a cinematic Wyatt Earp origin story, where the burgeoning Kansas cattle town has plenty of saloons but no medical doctor, and the current marshal is a yellowbelly, which is an advantage when the ruffian cattle drivers swoop into town, drain the supply of whiskey, and start shooting up the place. After a stray bullet kills a young boy, Wyatt Earp takes up the marshal’s badge and gun, jails the sozzled cowpokes, and bans firearms within city limits. These were the powers of the marshal, whether local or federal; and he often did not just run the jail, but sometimes also resided in the building with his family.
The Wichita City Eagle. 1873.
From the 1789 Judiciary Act, when the office of U.S. Marshal was established, to roughly the 1850s, when the territory of New Mexico was created, the marshal carried out the modern duties of the post office, FBI, and Secret Service. In the antebellum years the marshal enforced the Fugitive Slave Act and postbellum the Civil Rights Act. He was an agent of the courts, a server of subpoenas and warrants of eviction, an overseer of prisoners, supervisor of elections, collector of taxes, and, for some time, most relevant to the historian of family history, the marshal took the census. The inaugural 1790 census was compiled by 650 federal marshals, who spent 18 months trekking the 13 states and enumerated 3.9 million residents.
Presently, city marshals in the five boroughs are appointed by the Mayor and regulated by the corruption-busting Department of Investigation, but are described as neither employees of the city nor the Civil Court. Like U.S. marshals before 1896, they earn funds by a system of fees. Marshals both east and west collected fees based on court duties and service of process, in what was part of the “entrepreneurial” system of law enforcement, versus the bureaucratic and municipal system codified by the onset of the early 20th century. In addition, central authority west of the Mississippi was dwarfed by the zealous and domineering control of private industry, which also paid for security with greater dispatch than Uncle Sam. As Southern California chronicler Carey McWilliams writes in “Myths of the West,” his debunking 1931 essay, “the cattle companies captured Nevada after 1861; Montana was merely the alter ego of the Anaconda Copper Company until recent years; the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company ruled Colorado during its formative period; while in Idaho and Wyoming the Union Pacific played the villain.”
An Arizona Cowboy. Image ID: 1610053.
In the opening courtroom sequences of True Grit, the 2010 adaptation of the 1968 novel, U.S. marshal Rooster Cogburn is accused by an Ozarks counselor of exploiting his federal authority in several questionably justified shootings. Marshal Cogburn is gruff and unapologetic. The local sheriff describes him as mean, pitiless, and “double tough.” But such was the beleaguered bathos of a late 19th century U.S. marshal, that Cogburn lives in the cramped backroom of a Chinese grocery and haggles reward money with a 14 year-old girl out to avenge the murder of her father.
In the old western district of Arkansas, families of slain deputies received no compensation from the government, and marshals received no fees if they failed to capture their fugitive, no matter the travel and time expended, nor were they paid if the fugitive was killed during the act of apprehension. Pulp writers and eyepatch-clad Hollywood directors would stretch the legacy of the entrepreneurial system into the pop mythos of cheroot-smoking bounty hunters, leather-jawed freebooters, and ivory-handled guns-for-hire.
Sunset magazine. Image ID: 1258913.
New York City continues to run a Sheriff’s Office, which Alfred E. Smith once occupied as a patronage gift from Tammany Hall at $50,000. a year, in the years prior to Sheriff Smith’s garnering the NY Governorship.
Sheriff Alfred E. Smith at his desk on his first day in office. Image ID: 3997994.
In Manhattan one still finds Sheriff Street, between Houston and Stanton and bisected by the Samuel Gompers Houses to continue one block under the Williamsburg Bridge. The city named Sheriff Street in honor of Marinus Willett, a swashbuckling New York City Tory-fighter who led the Sons of Liberty radicals in sacking the British arsenal in occupied Manhattan, invaded Canada, fought under General Washington at Monmouth, and held the esteemed office of Sheriff of the City and County of New York in 1784-1788 and again in 1792-1796. In between these terms, President Washington sent Willett south to Georgia to treaty with the Creek Nation. The street runs through the old 13th Ward, in the Southeast frontier of the island where Sheriff Willett lived after the war.
Residence of the late Col. Marinus Willett, Mayor of New York in 1807-8. Image ID: 424296.
Ball, Larry D. “Frontier Sheriffs at Work.” The Journal of Arizona History. Vol. 27, No. 3, Autumn 1986.
Ball, Larry D. “Pioneer Lawman: Crawley P. Dake and Law Enforcement on the Southwestern Frontier.” The Journal of Arizona History. Vol. 14, No. 3, Autumn 1973.
Cooley, Rita W. “The Office of United States Marshal.” The Western Political Quarterly. Vol. 12, No. 1, Mar. 1959.
Dressler, Joshua (ed.) Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice. Vol. 2. 2nd ed. NY: Macmillan Reference USA, 2002.
Eichholz, Alice (ed.) Red Book: American state, county, and town sources. Provo, Utah: Ancestry, 2004.
Jordan, P.D. “The Town Marshal Local Arm of the Law.” Arizona and the West. Vol. 16, No. 4, Winter 1974.
Lamar, Howard R. (ed.) The New Encyclopedia of the American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Sankey, Michael (ed.) BRB's guide to county court records: a national resource to criminal, civil, and probate records found at the nation's county, parish, and municipal courts. BRB Publications, Inc. 2011.
View of Manhattan from Fulton Street circa 1935. Image ID: 482681
New York is a city of nicknames. The City That Never Sleeps, Empire City, The City So Nice They Named It Twice… and of course Gotham, which we’ve covered before. Today let’s just look at the Big Apple.
Before it became a moniker for the city, “big apple” had other meanings. Throughout the nineteenth century, the term meant “something regarded as the most significant of its kind; an object of desire and ambition.” To “bet a big apple” was “to state with supreme assurance; to be absolutely confident of” [Oxford English Dictionary]. The term was popular enough that you see several nods to the colloquialism in the reporting of literally large apples. For example, the Portland Advertiser reports in 1840:
Here the Commercial Advertiser places the term in quotes, possibly to highlight it in light of its common use (1848).
There are also plenty of examples of wagering or betting a big apple as a sure thing in newspapers in the 1800s. This one is from the Salem Register:
Another example from the Boston Daily Globe is an 1891 advertisement which read, “We will wager a big red apple that the prices attached to our thousand and one styles are as low or lower than the same quality of goods can be bought elsewhere.” Dozens of references to big apples and betting big apples can be found by searching digitized newspapers in Proquest Historical Newspapers, Chronicling America, and America’s Historical Newspapers.
The Oxford English Dictionary also reports its first known inference of New York in this context in 1909. Used only to imply a big and important place, “the big apple city” in context just happens to be New York. From Edward Martin’s introduction in the Wayfarer in New York: “It [sc. the Mid-West] inclines to think that the big apple [sc. New York] gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.” The editors of the OED actually address the early usage, “which, though referring to New York, is part of an extended metaphor and appears to be an isolated use.” A look at Martin’s text offers greater context. He discussed the perception of New York City from other parts of the United States with an extended metaphor as though it were the fruit of a tree of which other “lesser fruits” are jealous and embittered.
So why are apples so special in the 1800s? In Origin of New York City's nickname "The Big Apple", author Gerald Leonard Cohen explains that “nowadays apples seem to be regarded as just another fruit, neither more nor less special than pears, grapefruits, etc. However, in the 19th and presumably the early 20th century a big red apple was apparently something of special desirability,” such as the gift of an apple for a teacher as a sign of flattery. Indeed, this is true. Brooklyn Botanic Garden explains how the 19th century was the golden age of the apple: “an era known to fruit historians as the golden age of American pomology, a period running from the presidency of Thomas Jefferson to the Wright brothers' liftoff at Kitty Hawk. It was a time of unparalleled public interest in new fruit varieties, when apples, pears, and peaches were critically reviewed and rated with the enthusiasm now reserved for Hollywood movies and popular music.” Americans were seeing more apples than ever at the market and bigger, tastier specimens at that.
Variety of Apples, 1812. Image ID: 1107620
The “Big Apple” as a nickname for New York City really takes hold in the 1920s jazz era. The term, already in popular meaning as betting on a sure thing, makes its way to racetracks in the early 1920s. John J. Fitz Gerald, a reporter who wrote a regular racing column in the New York Morning Telegraph, referred to the New York racing circuit as the Big Apple—a proper noun. He is credited for popularizing the term, and in 1924 he wrote, “The Big Apple, the dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York.” Fitz Gerald’s racing term complies with the original slang definition in his usage, since he is certainly expressing that he thinks the races are to be regarded as the most significant of their kind. Fitz Gerald titled the column “Around the Big Apple.”
Within the same decade, usage of the term shows up in other papers, often meaning the city of New York and not just its racing circuits. Chicago Defender, 1922: “I trust your trip to the ‘big apple’ was a huge success…” and the New York Times uses it for the first time in an article about the slang that motion picture industry men use called “Slang of Film Men,” published March 11, 1928.
The term was popular amongst jazz musicians, and in Origin of New York City's nickname "The Big Apple", Cohen explains that when Charles Gillett, president of the non-profit New York Convention and Visitors Bureau, took interest in the phrase in the 1970s, he was inspired by its jazz connotations. Gillett ran a tourism campaign to invite tourists to New York in an era when the city’s reputation was dominated by crime, bankruptcy, and middle class flight to the suburbs. The New York Times explains in his obituary:
Skyline from World Trade Center looking north with closer view of Empire State Building, circa 1980. Image ID: ps_lhg_151
“But perhaps his greatest success came with turning the term "Big Apple" into a tourist draw. A jazz fan, he remembered that musicians in the 1920s and '30s had an expression for playing the big time after gigs in one-horse towns: "There are many apples on the tree, but when you pick New York City, you pick the Big Apple."
Gillett enlisted local celebrities to promote NYC, made Big Apple stickers and pins, and successfully recruited large organizations to bring their conventions to the city. When he retired, he received a New York State Governor's Award, with Gov. Mario M. Cuomo citing Gillett's "long and distinguished service in promoting New York as the premier travel destination in the world," and for moving the bureau into the front ranks of local travel promotion agencies. By the time he passed away in the 1990s, Gillett was celebrated for his role in changing public opinion about visiting and living in NYC. The Big Apple campaign was successfully counter partnered with other 1970s publicity such as William Doyle and Milton Glaser’s “I Love New York” campaign. A Google Ngram of the term “Big Apple” shows the growth of the term’s usage, as well as its resurgence in the 1970s and continual rise since Gillett’s campaign.
Street vendors selling hot potatoes and baked apples. Image ID: 732390F
Almost anytime, almost anyplace, provided that there is time, and provided that there's a measure of quiet. It's easier for me to say where I don't like to read. The beach, for one. Books and iPads don't benefit much from sand, the lighting isn't controllable and there are too many distractions. And the subway can be a bit too crowded and chaotic, plus I like it for music listening and people watching. But planes and trains: I love the excuse they give one to disappear into a book or magazine. And of course bed at night: there's nothing better than being under the covers, savoring the embers of the day and devouring great prose.
Different books had huge impacts at different times. In college, I remember two books that I read outside of class and that probably wouldn't have risen to the level of being taught in any of the classes I took as an English major. One was Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance. The other, not a book but a series, was Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. For a young gay man in the mid-1980s, they were crucial confirmations that there was a world out there in which many people felt as I did, in which there would be company and courtship, and in which there could and would be plenty of joy. And what literature does at its very best is to make life less lonely, to forge and point the way toward connections.
Would you like to name a few writers out there you think deserve greater readership?
I'd love to single out one: Joe Keenan, a comic writer and satirist who has written a serial trio of novels, the most recent of which was My Lucky Star. He's hilarious. These books are pure pleasure, written by someone with a wicked command of the language.
What was the last book you recommended?
It isn't a new book, but I'm a movie lover with many movie-loving friends, and I've been telling many of them to read something I found my way to only six years after it was published, Pictures at a Revolution, by Mark Harris. It's a terrific look at the change in American moviemaking in the 1960s and it tells behind-the-scenes stories of the makings of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, among other movies.
Planter’s High Hat Peanut Oil sponsored Stutchkoff’s radio comedy “In a Yidisher groseri” (In a Jewish Grocery), broadcast on Sunday afternoons in the late 1930s on WEVD radio. Ad from “Teater un radio velt”, no. 3 (November 1935).
Before his radio days, Stutchkoff worked as a translator, actor, playwright and lyricist. He began by translating plays from various European languages into Yiddish, and later wrote his own. More than 20 of his (unpublished) plays were performed in America, including titles like “Oy, Amerike!” (Oy, America!), “Di ganevte” (The Lady Thief) and “Ven Blinde Libn” (When Blind People Love). Many of these playscripts survive in his extensive archives in the Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library, and in the Library of Congress.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stutchkoff’s lyrics were published in sheet music composed by Sholom Secunda, Joseph Rumshinsky, Abe Ellstein, and Phillip Laskowsky. The lyrics appeared in transliteration in the music, with a separate Yiddish text of the original. A far cry from today’s standard Yiddish, the transliterations were, like many of their day, frequently riddled with typos and inconsistencies. These texts provide a fascinating look at Yiddish dialect and pronunciation, the use of English in Yiddish, and creative rhymes.
One of his biggest hits was “In mayne oygen biztu shehn” (In my eyes you are beautiful), with lyrics co-written by Molly Picon and music by Joseph Rumshinsky. Picon (as “Sadie”) and Leon Gold (as “Michail”) sang this duet in “Ganeyvishe libe”, (“The Love Thief”), Rumshinsky and Jacob Kalich’s “underground operetta” by Benjamin Ressler, performed at Molly Picon’s Folks Theatre, 12th Street and 2nd Avenue in 1931.
Actress/Singer/Lyricist Molly Picon and Composer Abe Ellstein; both wrote songs with Stutchkoff. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library of the Performing Arts. Image ID: nypl_the_4102
The New York Times reviewed the show on January 19, 1931, noting that the “sprightly” Picon “would blithely sing with the utmost seriousness the most absurd lyrics.”
The chorus included phrases like:
In mayne oygn bistu sheyn, sheyn vi di velt / In my eyes you are as beautiful as the world
Ikh ze in dir nit keyn khesorn, ales mir gefelt / I see no flaw in you, I like everything
Meg farrisn zayn bay dir dos neyzele / You may have a dirty nose
Megstu hobn seykhl vi an eyzele / You may have the sense of a donkey
In mayne oygn bistu sheyn, sheyn vi di velt / In my eyes you are as beautiful as the world
The song’s melody was later used for the WEVD radio theme song - you can hear a parody of it in this documentary from the Yiddish Radio Project.
Another popular song with lyrics by Stutchkoff and music by Abe Ellstein came from Stutchkoff’s 1929 operetta with the same name, “Az der rebe vil” (If the rabbi wants to). Ludwig Satz, a well-known Yiddish actor, recorded this comical title track on “Ludwig Satz at the Yiddish Theatre, Volume 2,” describing a wonder rabbi who performs ridiculous miracles, such as turning a duck into a tomcat.
Ludwig Satz. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library of the Performing Arts. Image ID: TH-49330
Jennie Goldstein, Yiddish Tragedienne. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library of the Performing Arts. Image ID: TH-16553
“Brivelekh” (Letters) was another song featuring Stutchkoff’s lyrics, with music by Sholom Secunda, from the play “Shtief Shvester” (Stepsisters) by Louis Freiman, performed at the Rolland Theatre in Brooklyn in 1931. Here, Yiddish tragedienne Jennie Goldstein sang of a heartbroken, abandoned lover who finds comfort in her old love letters. Stutchkoff honed his talent for melodrama with creations like “Bay tate-mames tish” (“Around the family table”), a stage play and long-running radio show sponsored by the B. Manischewitz Matzo Co. NYPL’s Performing Arts Library even has a few surviving recordings of the show.
Speaking of Manischewitz, who could forget Stutchkoff’s famous Manischewitz Matzo jingle, where the matzah is “always fresh and always crunchy and snaps on your teeth”? This popular song was composed by Sholom Secunda, Stutchkoff’s predecessor on the Jewish Children’s Hour, and sung by the talented young participants on WLTH radio. According to Henry Sapoznik of the Yiddish Radio Project, Stutchkoff was famous for his amazingly descriptive commercials for matzo, among other products, and you can find some on their website.
Nahum Stutchkoff center, with child on lap, with participants in the Jewish Children’s Hour, WEVD radio. The picture is signed by "Feter Nukhem" Uncle Nahum.
In 2014, the Forward Association (former owner of WEVD radio) published a collection of linguistic radio episodes, “Mame-Loshn” (mother tongue) edited by Leyzer Burko, based on NYPL’s Stutchkoff archives. It quickly became a Yiddish bestseller.
Want to experience Stutchkoff “live”? On Wednesday, March 18, 2015, at 7 pm, the Congress for Jewish Culture will present a program of readings and music at the National Opera Center, 330 7th Avenue (near 29th St.), 7th floor.
I read pretty much everywhere and always carry a book in the event that I find myself crushed by boredom while waiting on a line somewhere, but my favorite place is in front of the fireplace in the living room here, dog at my side, cat in lap, rain drooling down the windows and the fire snapping merrily.
What were your favorite books as a child?
I didn’t read much as a child, so we’d have to pull a few comic books out of the pile—Classics Illustrated comes to mind. Beyond that, I loved animal stories, Big Red and the like. My touchstone? Rikki Tikki Tavi.
What books had the greatest impact on you?
The stories and novels I read as a young man who had notions of becoming a writer himself. I was swept away by the work of writers with a large and encompassing vision, like Coover, Pynchon, Grass, Barthelme, Cortázar, García Márquez, Calvino and a host of others.
Would you like to name a few writers out there you think deserve greater readership?
Richard Lange, who, in his latest book of stories, Sweet Nothing, reminds me of Ray Carver reborn in Los Angeles. And Dana Spiotta, whose Stone Arabia (2011), is the best pop-music novel I’ve ever run across.
What was the last book you recommended?
Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy, a history of World War II in Europe. Atkinson writes beautifully, and his history unfolds with all the passion and immediacy of a good novel. And Martin Amis’ latest, the chilling The Zone of Interest.
What do you plan to read next?
Looking forward to Ishiguro’s latest and to the third and final volume of William Manchester’s magisterial biography of Winston Churchill, a narrative every bit as compelling as Atkinson’s.
Fairy tales are big again. With the release of Disney's Cinderella and the popularity of the TV show Once Upon a Time and the movies Maleficent and Into the Woods, fairy tales are in the news again. But these are not the stories you and I grew up with. These are fairy tales with a twist. They give the back story of the characters, tell what happens after "happily ever after" or people from our world are tossed into the fairy tale world. And kids are eating them up. Here's a sampling of some that you and your kids might enjoy.
For Older Kids:
The Storybook of Legends from the Ever After High series by Shannon Hale
The children of fairy tale characters are groomed at Ever After High to fulfill their destiny - to follow in their parent's footeps and become the next "Snow White" or "Cinderella" or "Jack the Giant Killer". But what if you DIDN'T want to become the next villianous evil Snow Queen?
The Wishing Spellfrom The Land of Stories series by Chris Colfer
Twins Alexis and Connor are pulled into their grandmother's book of fairy tales. They must find all the Wishing Spell ingredients, such as: a long golden hair, a glass slipper and a piece of Red Riding Hood's basket, in order to get home again. It's bad enough that they have to steal these items, but someone else is also after the wishing spell. And even stranger, characters from the bedtime stories their father used to tell them are showing up on their journey.
A Tale Dark and Grimmby Adam Gidwitz
Hansel and Gretel were not children of a woodcutter, abandoned in the forest by their stepmother. They were really the prince and princess of the Kingdom of Grimm who ran away when they found out that their father would (and did) kill them in order to bring a statue to life. So they leave in order to find a family that will truly love them. Here is their story with all the gory bits of the fairy tales left in.
And on a lighter note for the younger kids:
Fairest of Allfrom the Whatever After series by Sarah Mlynowski
Abby and Jonah get sucked through a magic mirror and step into Snow White's story. But they accidentally mess it up when they stop Snow White from eating the poisoned apple. They save her life, but now, she'll never meet her Prince!
The Wide-Awake Princessby E. D. Baker
Annie is the only one left awake after her sister pricks her finger on the spindle and sends everyone to sleep. But she'd NOT going to wait around for 100 years for everyone to wake up, so she sets out to find her sister's Prince so he can come kiss her and end the curse. How hard can it be?
When we seek to recognize and champion women in history, often we must look for the echoes of their presence. Barred by expectation or explicit prohibition from many outlets for expression and renown, they worked within the constraints of their time, often relying on their male peers to promulgate their thoughts or introduce them into literary and intellectual society. This phenomenon is perhaps not as historic as we might hope, as author Siri Hustvedt explored in her most recent novel The Blazing World (itself a reference to Margaret Cavendish’s seventeenth century utopian work).
Frontispiece to Voltaire’s Elémens de la philosophie de Neuton, 1738. Madame du Châtelet is depicted as Veritas, Goddess of Truth, and illumines Voltaire, writing below, with the teachings of Isaac Newton, left.
Madame Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, was a French noblewoman of the Enlightenment who, as Liz Lemon might say, “had it all.” She came from a wealthy family, married into a position of prominence, raised several children, and studied math, science, religion, and politics as a member of the Republic of Letters. However, in her native France, the Academy of Sciences, universities, and many intellectual gatherings excluded women. She was forced to pursue a path of independent study, bringing tutors and books to her home at Cirey. Today, she is known primarily through her relationships to famous men: translator of Isaac Newton and Bernard Mandeville, student of Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Alexis Clairaut, and lover and intellectual companion of Voltaire. In the Rare Book Division, Madame du Châtelet’s voice is preserved within our extensive collection of Voltaire material.
Madame du Châtelet’s translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia is usually held to be her greatest scholarly accomplishment. In this period, a translation was a powerful thing, as it furthered the diffusion of new ideas and fostered widespread collaboration in the arts and sciences. Du Châtelet had an enviable command of language, speaking French, Latin, Italian, and English—Voltaire claimed she learned the latter in only fifteen days. For her work with the Principia, du Châtelet did not limit herself to a word-for-word translation, but added commentary that explained, clarified, and improved upon the original text. Voltaire relied on her collaboration and thorough understanding of Newton’s ideas while composing his Elémens de la philosophie de Neuton (Elements of Newton’s Philosophy). He reserved the dedication and introduction of the book to praise du Châtelet’s efforts in both poem and prose. The introduction (translated here in the English edition, also published in 1738) begins:
“Your solid Study of many new Truths, and the Fruits of so meritorious an Application, are what I now offer the Publick for your own, and the Glory of your Sex, and for the Improvement of all such as desire to cultivate their Reason, and enjoy without difficulty the Benefit of your Enquiries.”
Letter from Voltaire to his niece Marie-Louise Mignot, 1737
NYPL also holds a letter written by Voltaire to his niece Marie-Louise Mignot, wherein he describes his relationship with Madame du Châtelet and her husband the Marquis. The du Châtelets’ marriage was motivated by social and business concerns: the merging of two powerful families. The Marquis was aware and tolerant of the relationship between his wife and Voltaire; Voltaire lived in the couple’s house at Cirey for several years. NYPL’s letter was written over three years into his residency, in December 1737.
“As long as I live,” he writes, “I live beside Madame du Châtelet, whose friendship for me merits the greatest sacrifice. Gratitude alone should tie me to her forever, and gratitude is not the only feeling that I have. The Marquis du Châtelet has the same goodness as his wife, who honors me. I have lived with her in a liaison of intimacy, of sweetness, of trust that for five years has weathered any storm.”
Both Madame du Châtelet and Voltaire would eventually assume new liaisons: du Châtelet with the poet and soldier Jean-François de Saint-Lambert and Voltaire with the same niece to whom he wrote the 1737 letter.
Madame du Châtelet’s intelligence and social rank helped her rise to prominence in a male-dominated society, but she was critical of the institutional limitations that denied such opportunities to women as a whole. She used the preface of another translation, Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, to criticize the lack of educational opportunities for women:
“Why do these creatures whose understanding appears in all things equal to that of men, seem, for all that, to be stopped by an invincible force on this side of a barrier; let someone give me some explanation, if there is one. I leave it to naturalists to find a physical explanation, but until that happens, women will be entitled to protest against their education. As for me, I confess that if I were king I would wish to make this scientific experiment. I would reform an abuse that cuts out, so to speak, half of humanity. I would allow women to share in all the rights of humanity, and most of all those of the mind.”
Jeffrey Deitch may best be known for his visionary gallery Deitch Projects, but now the artist-curator-dealer is adding a new title: writer. In honor of the release of his book Live the Art, Deitch joined us at LIVE from the NYPL with New Museum Artistic Director Massimiliano Gioni. For this week's New York Public Library Podcast episode, we're honored to present the two champions of contemporary art discussing artistic communities, cross-media creation, and spectacle.
Deitch and Gioni LIVE from the NYPL
As Deitch spoke about Deitch Project, he described the ways in which he both sought out artistic communities and created one of his own:
“I've always been interested in finding talent through communities, rather than looking for that one special, isolated genius. Look where there's a community of interest, connecting with that community, and we embrace those communities, and there are a number of them that we invited in during the year. We invited whole communities, for example, when we did the notorious NEST exhibition. A whole community came with it, and they became part of the gallery community eventually.”
Another way that he created a sense of community was by opening up the gallery world to artists working across media:
“This interesting intersection we all know about of fashion, music, art, film becoming closer and closer with the borders being blurred between this different media is something I've been interested in for a long time, and we encouraged artists who work in this area, encouraged filmmakers like Michel Gondry, who are interested in positioning themselves in the art world, giving them platforms, giving artists who want to make films platforms. So, that was part of what was interesting about being in Soho, where there are film production offices, music studios, of course all the fashion boutiques. And we invited all these people in.”
Although spectacle does often carry a negative connotation, Deitch said that he enjoys spectacle. He spoke about spectacle as a vehicle toward increasing visibility for art without requiring conventional, and sometimes slow, media mechanisms:
“I love the excitement of the spectacle, and a spectacle is something that—I like an artistic project that takes on a life of its own. I did not want to do a conventional gallery, where you put up your show and then you wait for the reviewer, you know, that you just wait for someone to endorse it. I wanted to create projects that had their own energy, that were talked about, that brought people in, and we started this very early on. One of our earliest projects, a notorious project… we didn't exactly exhibit a real dog in the gallery. We exhibited a Russian performance artist who performed as a dog for two weeks, as Oleg Kulik. I read about his notorious performances in Moscow where he appeared as a dog with collar and someone with a chain and viciously attacked the spectators at art events. Very, very controversial. And I said, we've got to get him to New York!”
You can subscribe to the New York Public Library Podcast to hear more conversations with wonderful artists, writers, and intellectuals. Join the conversation today!
The difference between the copies in the 
watermark from papermaker J Whatman dated 1819; the 1808 
ten years. Why maintain “William Miller” on the title page especially if the type had been reset? William Miller did have a reputation as a publisher of high quality books but Murray’s reputation was good as well. In “
An “1803” copy of 
just such cases, especially when dating irregularities are also supported by colophon evidence of later printing dates.
Mill and they were given rights to the Whatman name after 1807. The Whatman countermark the Hollingsworth Brothers used to distinguish their paper from Balston’s included the inscription ‘TURKEY MILLS’ or ‘TURKEY MILL.’
The papers of writer Tom Wolfe are now available for research in the 
