Today there’s no question about the identity of the jolly red-suited, white-bearded, toy-carrying plump old man: It’s Santa Claus, of course. Throughout the mid-19th century, however, the identity of this famous gift giver was only just developing.

Saint Nicholas, Belsnickel, Father Christmas, the Wild Man. While all of these cultural figures are symbolic of the holiday season, none are quite the jovial character we know and love today.

So how was the iconic image of Santa born?

Several New Yorkers inspired the personality, appearance, and traditions of this holiday favorite. Through cultural influences, writings, and illustrations, John Pintard, Washington Irving, Clement C. Moore, and Thomas Nast all helped to establish a modern representation of Santa Claus.

Jolly Old St. Nick

A number of legends associate Saint Nicholas with gift giving, aiding young people, imposing honesty, and rescuing those in need. As the patron saint of children and one of the most revered saints during the Middle Ages, folklore depicts Saint Nicholas as a giver of small gifts to well-behaved children on the eve of his feast day, December 6.

Portrayed as an elderly white-bearded man dressed in red bishop’s regalia, complete with staff and miter, Saint Nicholas delivered presents to children throughout Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and parts of Germany as early as the tenth century. This saint, despite his judgmental demeanor, was highly regarded by many 19th century New Yorkers and helped spark the evolution of an American Christmas gift giver.

Saint Nicholas in New York

Following the American Revolution, interest in the Dutch colonial history of New York surged, and Saint Nicholas became a favorite anti-British symbol of New York Historical Society founder, John Pintard.

Pintard held a strong interest in Saint Nicholas, promoting him as the patron saint of both the Society and the city as a whole throughout the early 1800s. Annual Society meetings were held on Saint Nicholas’ feast day, members were issued Saint Nicholas promotional materials, and Pintard even staged (unintentionally terrifying) visits between Saint Nicholas and his family.

“To the memory of St. Nicholas. May the virtuous habits and simple manners of our Dutch ancestors be not lost in the luxuries and refinements of the present time” —Dr. David Hosack, New York Historical Society Banquet, 1809

Knickerbocker's History

This local promotion of Saint Nicholas attracted the attention of New York writer, Washington Irving.

Irving joined the New York Historical Society while writing the 1809 Knickerbocker’s History of New York. Likely inspired by Pintard, Irving featured Saint Nicholas prominently in this satirical history of the New Amsterdam Dutch, depicting him as a symbol of Dutch-American ethnic identity.

Altering the saint’s appearance from the tall, somber, commanding European image, Irving reinvented Saint Nicholas as a short, stout, merry, pipe-smoking Dutchman, dressed in traditional colonial attire. Though Irving sparked an initial transformation of Saint Nicholas, this Christmas figure was still far from the image of Santa Claus we know today.

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas

It was not until the 1822 poem, “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” when the familiar spirit of Santa Claus truly began to unfold. Written by Clement C. Moore, a professor at New York’s General Theological Seminary, this poem created an unprecedented characterization of Saint Nicholas.

Recognizable by its opening line, “‘Twas the night before Christmas,” Moore tells a story of a plump “jolly old elf” who traveled by reindeer-pulled sleigh and descended down chimneys to deliver presents to children’s stockings. A friend of Washington Irving, it is speculated that Moore’s version of Saint Nicholas was inspired by descriptions in Knickerbocker’s History of New York, and by real-life characteristics of the first governor of New Netherland and a portly Dutch neighbor of Moore’s.

Many details now synonymous with the legend of Santa Claus were first introduced in this poem, including changing Saint Nicholas’ visit to Christmas Eve instead of the Saint’s feast day or New Year’s Eve. While there lies some controversy about whether Moore was the true author of this poem, this depiction left a lasting imprint on American culture, forever changing Christmas lore.

Sinterklaas

As the Americanized version of Saint Nicholas gained distinction from his European predecessor, so did his name.

Though Sinterklaas is the Dutch phrase for Saint Nicholas, this word posed some difficulty for American English speakers and prompted an evolution of the gift giver’s title. Before Americans collectively settled on “Santa Claus,” some early naming attempts include St. Aclaus, St. Iclaus, Sancte Klaas, St. Claas, St. a claus, and Santeclaw.

A Signature Look

Interpretations of Santa’s appearance were very imaginative throughout the 19th century. Depictions ranged from thin to fat, elf-like to human man, and costumes were not standardized; No one was quite sure what this gift-giver should look like.

It wasn’t until the illustrations of Thomas Nast, a German-born New Yorker and Harper’s Weekly cartoonist, that an enduring image of Santa Claus was established.

Creating an entire world for Santa built upon the traditions described by Clement Moore and the influences of German Christmas folklore, Nast captured trademark elements of Santa’s image as his drawings evolved. A long white beard, black boots, and red suit trimmed with fur are just a few of these identifying features. Portrayed as a round, cheerful, elderly man, Nast's drawings also added some key details to Santa’s backstory: a home at the North Pole and toy-building elf assistants.

Santa's celebrity status and iconic appearance was further cemeted in roles such as Coca Cola’s longstanding advertising campaign and growing holiday commercialism. 

A figure rooted in centuries-old legends and decades-long American transformation, Santa Claus as a pop culture icon is here to stay.

Further Reading

Learn more about the history of Santa Claus through the following materials:

• Christmas in America: A History
• Encyclopedia of Christmas
• Encyclopedia of New York State: “St. Nicholas”
• Knickerbocker Santa Claus
• Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men

Find Thomas Nast’s Harper’s Weekly illustrations of Santa Claus in the HarpWeek database. Also search for articles describing early St. Nicholas and Santa Claus traditions in the America’s Historical Newspapers and Proquest Historical Newspapers databases.

While the exhibition Printing Women focuses on Henrietta Louisa Koenen’s (1830–1881) collection of female printmakers from the 16th to 19th centuries, it is only appropriate to signal women’s continuing participation in the medium as well as the Library’s longstanding commitment to acquiring and exhibiting prints made by women from around the world. To complement this earlier history, therefore, I worked with the Library’s Digital Experience Team to display online a small sampling of works by contemporary printmakers in the Library’s collection. We began reaching out to artists, asking if we could display their work on the exhibition’s web page and digitize it for our digital collections. The majority were delighted to contribute, many also provided writings about their work and the exhibition. Throughout the exhibition’s run, I will choose and present a piece by one artist every other week on the exhibition’s web page. Additionally, I will produce a blog post about their work as well as about works in the exhibition, featuring their own words when possible. 

For those who are interested in the long history of women’s involvement with the medium of print, there is much more to explore within the Library’s deep and varied holdings. The exhibition features only a smattering of Koenen’s collection (which numbers over 500 prints of which only a little over 80 are shown in the exhibition). In addition, the Print Collection not only owns large numbers of additional prints from the period in which Koenen collected, but also many, many more works from the 20th- and 21st-century.

The fifth blog post in our series is by Valerie Hammond about her piece, Blue Anemone, 2011.

"Blue Anemone, made in 2011, was the result of a special collaboration with printmaker Maryanne Simmons of Wildwood Press, but the image’s origins stemmed from a group of works I began a decade before.

I started making tracings of hands in the late 1990s, partly in response to the death of a dear friend from AIDS, whose beautiful hands I often found myself remembering. Mostly traced from women and children, each of the hand images was unique, an attempt at capturing the essence of a gesture and the fleeting moment in which it was made. Around the same time, in 1998, I was invited to teach printmaking at Yale University’s Norfolk summer program. Like many of the women in the exhibition I worked within the confines of children and family. My then­ young children came with me, and we spent time in the nearby woods, making fairy houses out of moss and ferns. I collected and pressed various fern fronds, attracted to their spindly forms and primordial origins.

I soon began assembling the ferns inside the traced hands, securing them with layers of wax, their stems and fronds echoing the body’s bones, veins and circulatory systems. Ferns, and then other plants, became both the material and “tools” for drawing, subverting traditional mark­making methodologies. Later, I introduced printmaking, drawing and photographic techniques, like the Xerox transfer process, to the compositions, in order to further manipulate and “distance” the imagery. One night, experimenting in Photoshop, I accidentally inverted some of the images: the background darkened into a deep blue and the plant material turned ghostly white. The works suddenly inhabited a space I had been searching for, straddling the indefinable boundary between presence and absence, material and immaterial, consciousness and the unconscious. For me, they became emblematic not only of those whose hands I had traced, but of my own evolving artistic process – testimony to passing time and the quiet dissolution of memory.

Simmons first invited me to make prints at her St. Louis studio in 2006. Her huge presses enabled me to work at an unprecedented scale, with unprecedented freedom, and I developed a series of large, relief­ printed lithographs from my hand tracings. While I was working at Wildwood Press, a close friend of Maryanne’s, Courtney, who at the time wore a bright pink wig, impressed me by her warmth and instant understanding of my process. My experience at Wildwood was rich and very meaningful; it was a collaborative environment among like­minded women. Years later Maryanne told me that Courtney was terminally ill. Before Courtney died, Maryanne asked her son to trace her hands, knowing that Courtney would understand why. Maryanne then sent the tracings to me and asked me to begin a piece using her hands. As I set out looking for materials I came across some ethereal blue anemones in the garden. It turned out they were Courtney’s favorite flower. She passed away before the print, Blue Anemone, was finished.

Women artists and printmakers have long been a huge influence on me. Obvious associations can be seen in Victorian botany photographs, like those of Anna Atkins, and the prints and watercolors of Maria Sybilla Merian. More immediately, I am indebted to the fearlessness of Louise Bourgeois, the political feminism of Nancy Spero, and the close friendship and collaboration I have with Kiki Smith, where we have spent many hours teaching printmaking together as well as working in various print shops together joyfully scratching on copper. "

Today we share the news of the appointment of The New York Public Library’s Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries—William P. Kelly.

The Library's Mellon Director leads the Library's four research centers and their 460 staff members—the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Science, Industry and Business Library; and the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. As Mellon Director, Bill will be charged with preserving and expanding the use of the most democratically accessible of research collections, which includes approximately 45 million items and is growing by about 150,000 books per year. He will begin his tenure in January.

Bill is both an accomplished scholar and a true leader. Most recently, he was the interim chancellor of the City University of New York, after serving from 2005 to 2013 as president of the CUNY Graduate Center. He is also currently chairman of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. At the CUNY Graduate Center, Bill has a well-earned reputation as an advocate for scholarly work, an institution builder, and a teacher and mentor.  

Given his wealth of experience from these and many additional roles he has undertaken in his career, Bill has much to contribute to The New York Public Library. He arrives to a very full plate of activity, including: recruiting a number of new curators and staff; completing the second story of underground storage underneath Bryant Park so that we can again have as many or more books as ever on site—and now well preserved; working to ensure a great outcome from the Schwarzman Building renovation, which will open up approximately 40 percent more of the building to researchers and the general public; overseeing a $20 million renovation of the Schomburg Center; and much more. For more details, please see the news release about Bill's appointment.

If you are interested in joining our e-newsletter for researchers and scholars, sign up here.

Family history is the most personal form of history.  But due to a dearth of records, in many cases it has to be written about in an impersonal way.  As genealogists and family historians know well, letters and diaries are often scarce, while birth, death, census, and baptismal records are abundant.  With slightly different goals in mind, historians confront the same lack of personal sources by turning to statistics, novels, and proscriptive literature in order to understand families in a given period.  Yet neither strategy fully captures the personal and emotional interactions that are the foundation of family life.

As The New York Public Library has started to make available digitized collections in early American history, one question I have been asked frequently is why political elites are so well represented.  Given that there are so many editions of many of their letters freely available through online databases or print at most research libraries, isn’t it just an inefficient use of resources?  One of the great virtues for historians of these particularly well-documented individuals, is that a lot of their family correspondence survives, though it is not always included in edited volumes that focus on political events.   And through these papers we can glimpse family life at an emotional level.

Silas Deane is a good example of what I mean.  Though trained as a lawyer, Deane became a successful merchant during the 1760s.  As the imperial crisis took hold, he served as a Continental Congressman.  Deane is probably best remembered for a kerfuffle in Congress over allegations that he embezzled money while serving as a diplomat in France.  Active as he was in revolutionary politics, he is unsurprisingly well represented in the multi-volume Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789.  In the late nineteenth century, the New York Historical Society also published five volumes of Deane’s papers, which covered the years from 1774 to his death in 1789.

NYPL holds a small collection of Deane’s letters, which includes five letters to his stepdaughter Sarah (Sally) Webb.  All from the late 1760s, none appear in the published editions of Deane’s correspondence.  The letters range from devastating to heart warming to utterly quotidian.  Taken together, they comprise a small archive of one father’s relationship with his stepdaughter.  

In the first letter, Deane informed Sally that her mother was very ill and he was making arrangements for her to travel home to Connecticut from Boston.  Understandably, he feared the letter “will greatly alarm you.”  Though he could not console Sally in person, he did his best in the letter, urging her to “remember [that] your Dear Mama has been very low & Dangerous before this & God has in Mercy spared her.  The same god is still able to do it” again.  As he often did, Deane signed the letter “your affectionate parent & friend." Sally’s mother, Mehitable Nott Webb Deane, died later that year.  

A year later, in the spring of 1768, Sally returned to Boston to finish her education.  Deane was sure that Sally “will make so wise an improvement of the advantages now in your hands.”   But Deane also cautioned Sally that at this “most critical, & important period of life” she would confront “a thousand byroads which lead to Ruin, & but one Path, that leads to the wish’d for stage of true Happiness.” To help her navigate this tumultuous moment, he offered ready advice, mostly about reading and writing, which he called the “two great essentials in life.”

What books Sally chose to read and how she went about reading them would bear directly on her future happiness.  Deane urged his stepdaughter to “learn to pronounce the most Difficult words, with propriety.”  He recommended that she “never read in haste but with moderation,” to ensure she understood what she read.  This was especially true of the Bible.  Ultimately, he advised her that “no Book where the Language is indecent or the subject trifling, ought to claim your present Attention” because they would do nothing to set her on the right path.

What to make of this fixation on reading habits?  Deane seemed to believe that reading would influence Sally’s character and morals, as well as how she was seen in the world. Deane’s advice on reading was tantamount to advice on living a happy, worthwhile, and fulfilling life.  

I don’t like the term founding fathers very much.  Yet we can learn a lot when we take the term literally, when we study the founders as fathers, and as family men.  Well documented as they are, founding era political elites are great fodder for historians looking to study family life in early America.  No doubt Deane’s theory of parenting differed sharply from non-elites, for whom books were not as readily available, nor as intimately connected to their sense of self.  The Silas Deane Letters are powerful nonetheless because they provide a fleeting glimpse on intimate family relations in the revolutionary era.  

Further Reading

Lorri Glover, Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).  Historians have used founding-era political elites in similar ways to study the nature of friendship in the period.  For example, Cassandra A. Good,Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

On  Silas Deane, see Liz Covart, “Silas Deane, Forgotten Patriot,” Journal of the American Revolution (Allthingsliberty.com), July 30, 2014, ; and Louis W. Potts, “Silas Deane,” American National Biography.

About the Early American Manuscripts Project

With support from the The Polonsky Foundation, The New York Public Library is currently digitizing upwards of 50,000 pages of historic early American manuscript material. The Early American Manuscripts Project will allow students, researchers, and the general public to revisit major political events of the era from new perspectives and to explore currents of everyday social, cultural, and economic life in the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods. The project will present on-line for the first time high quality facsimiles of key documents from America’s Founding, including the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Drawing on the full breadth of the Library’s manuscript collections, it will also make widely available less well-known manuscript sources, including business papers of Atlantic merchants, diaries of people ranging from elite New York women to Christian Indian preachers, and organizational records of voluntary associations and philanthropic organizations. Over the next two years, this trove of manuscript sources, previously available only at the Library, will be made freely available through nypl.org.

Evan Chesler is the Chairman of the Board of The New York Public Library, but his Library Story started long before he assumed that role. When he encountered an obstacle that nearly destroyed his dream of going to law school, he used hard work and the Library to push himself forward.

Library Stories is a video series from The New York Public Library that shows what the Library means to our users, staff, donors, and communities through moving personal interviews.

Like, share, and watch more Library Stories on Facebook or YouTube.

While the exhibition Printing Women focuses on Henrietta Louisa Koenen’s (1830–1881) collection of female printmakers from the 16th to 19th centuries, it is only appropriate to signal women’s continuing participation in the medium as well as the Library’s longstanding commitment to acquiring and exhibiting prints made by women from around the world. To complement this earlier history, therefore, I worked with the Library’s Digital Experience Team to display online a small sampling of works by contemporary printmakers in the Library’s collection. We began reaching out to artists, asking if we could display their work on the exhibition’s web page and digitize it for our digital collections. The majority were delighted to contribute, many also provided writings about their work and the exhibition. Throughout the exhibition’s run, I will choose and present a piece by one artist every other week on the exhibition’s web page. Additionally, I will produce a blog post about their work as well as about works in the exhibition, featuring their own words when possible. 

For those who are interested in the long history of women’s involvement with the medium of print, there is much more to explore within the Library’s deep and varied holdings. The exhibition features only a smattering of Koenen’s collection (which numbers over 500 prints of which only a little over 80 are shown in the exhibition). In addition, the Print Collection not only owns large numbers of additional prints from the period in which Koenen collected, but also many, many more works from the 20th- and 21st-century.

The sixth blog post in our series is by Ambreen Butt about her piece, (Untitled) Dragon Woman, 2008.

On (Untitled) Dragon Woman by Ambreen Butt

"(Untitled) Dragon Woman is one in a suite titled Daughters of the East which is part of a larger series called Dirty Pretty. The idea behind that series is one of images of beauty that carry complicated and difficult narratives, the beauty of the image making it easier to face the ugliness of the narrative. The series came about after a trip back to Pakistan in 2007 after having been away from the country for twelve years.

Daughters of the East were created in response to a specific 2007 incident in Islamabad, the military siege of Lal Masjid, the Red Mosque, which is one of the oldest mosques in Islamabad and a conservative center of teaching for both men and women. The clerics of the Lal Masjid have often been in conflict with the government administration, and in 2007 there were a series of events that left, depending on your sources, ninety people dead and hundreds wounded. Female students of Lal Masjid were active in the protests, and my prints are based on press images from that event.

In one image there is a group of women all wearing black burkas and weilding bamboo sticks. They seem very threatening, but the majority are of a very tender age, about 15 to 20 years old. They are from poor backgrounds and are the noble and darling daughters of unprivileged parents. So there is an element of delicacy, of sadness and vulnerability that isn’t readily apparent to the viewer. The girls were highly influenced by the mosque's teachings, and many died after the siege.

The first print in the suite juxtaposes two different iconographies: ladybugs and the image of clustered women in black. Each symbolizes delicacy and infestation simultaneously. Individually, a ladybug is a symbol of good luck, while a colony of them becomes something quite different and toxic. In the same way, the women are also young and delicate girls behind the black veil, but in a group they portray a different image and have a different identity. Towards the end of the suite, I celebrate the individual over the group, and give a real face to the female in the black veil. Throughout, the images are composed of systematic mark making, celebrating the mundane practice of building images that inscribe a narrative. The narrative in this small series evolves against a background of the ladybugs."

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.

• Apostasy And Jewish Identity In High Middle Ages Northern Europe: 'Are You Still My Brother?' by Simha Goldin
• At Home In Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good For The Jews by Alan Wolfe (also available as an e-book)
• Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors In Poland And Slovakia, 1944-48 by Anna Cichopek-Gajraj
• Bible's Many Voices by Michael Carasik (also available as an e-book)
• Britain, Germany And The Road To The Holocaust: British Attitudes Towards Nazi Atrocities by Russell Wallis
• David R. Blumenthal: Living With God And Humanity by Hava Tirosh-samuelson (ed.)
• From Yoga To Kabbalah: Religious Exoticism And The Logics Of Bricolage by Véronique Altglas (also available as an e-book)
• Gluten Free Canteen's Book Of Nosh: Baking For Jewish Holidays & More by Lisa Stander-Horel
• Jewish Meaning In A World Of Choice: Studies In Tradition And Modernity by David Ellenson (also available as an e-book)
• Jewish War Under Trajan And Hadrian by William Horbury
• Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism And Autonomy In Late Imperial And Revolutionary Russia by Simon Rabinovitch (e-book)
• Jews Of Italy: Antiquity by By Shlomo Simonsohn
• Lives In Common: Arabs And Jews In Jerusalem, Jaffa And Hebron by Menachem Klein
• Outsider: Albert M. Greenfield And The Fall Of The Protestant Establishment by Dan Rottenberg (also available as an e-book)
• Oxford Handbook Of The Psalms by William P. Brown (ed.) (also available as an e-book)
• Pious Ones: The World Of Hasidim And Their Battles With America by Joseph Berger (also available as an e-book)
• Religious And Spiritual Life Of The Jews Of Medina by By Haggai Mazuz
• Reorienting The East: Jewish Travelers To The Medieval Muslim World by Martin Jacobs (also available as an e-book)
• Sisterhood: A Centennial History Of Women Of Reform Judaism by Carole B. Balin (ed.)

Elizabeth De Hart Bleecker (1781-1864) began keeping a diary when she was eighteen years old.  All told, in over 400 pages of handwritten entries, Bleecker kept track of her life in New York City for seven formative years, beginning in 1799 when she was eighteen years old and ending in 1806.  As part of its ongoing efforts to digitize and make freely available large portions of its early American manuscript collections, The New York Public Library has made Bleecker’s diary available online.  The diary’s 452 images account for less than one-percent of the pictures that will ultimately make their way online as part of the Early American Manuscripts Project. However, we feel the diary is worthy of some closer analysis.  Periodically, for the next year, we will write blog posts featuring a single entry, or a series of entries, from the Bleecker diary.

Why, you might ask, are we focusing so closely on this one item? Simply put, the goal of our project is to digitize a selection of items that allow users to revisit major political events of the era from new perspectives, while simultaneously exploring currents of everyday social, cultural, and economic life. Elizabeth De Hart Bleecker’s diary captures all of this.  On top of that, the diary is a source from and about New York City in its formative era.

And historians love diaries.  They are, of course, incredible sources for understanding the diarist—their hopes, fears, and expectations, as well as the routine rhythms of their daily life.  But diaries are also invaluable for understanding much broader social, cultural, and political changes were felt at the personal level.  Historians just as frequently use diaries to bring a human element to epochal moments in history as they do to understand how people made sense of what they encountered on a day-to-day basis.   Historical diaries are often edited and annotated and then used by historians and students.  The Bleecker diary has not received this treatment.  While we are not editing it in the traditional sense, our goal in these posts is to draw attention to the wide range of historical questions and concerns on which the Bleecker diary can offer a new perspective.

About the Diary

From the monumental to the mundane, Bleecker’s diary has it all. It is neither the diary of an upper-echelon member of the political elite, nor of an ordinary New Yorker.  Bleecker was a well-to-do woman, a woman of leisure; she did not have to work.  Her position afforded her a broad view of New York and the nation at the turn of the nineteenth century.  As a woman of means, Bleecker was tapped into elite political and economic networks.  For example, the day after Alexander Hamilton was killed in a duel, his widow visited with Bleecker.  When the increasingly volatile economies of New York and the United States ruined men, and sometimes even drove them to suicide, Bleecker had the inside scoop and knew the grisly details.

Bleecker was also a woman about town.  She went to church, plays, and sideshows, and took shopping trips and drank tea with friends.  On her jaunts, she witnessed some signal moments in the history of early New York, like the laying of the cornerstone of City Hall in 1803.  While she was out and about during the seven years she kept her diary, Bleecker watched as the very nature of the City changed.  Between 1790 and 1800, the population of the city nearly doubled to a little over 60,000 from around 33,000.  It went up another 30,000 between 1800 and 1810.  New York faced serious challenges in this period as it attempted to accommodate massive population growth and regulate city life.  Bleecker bore witness.  She heard and wrote about public disturbances, crimes, and court cases, and she watched as New York officials tried to contain fires and prison breaks.  

Bleecker experienced and recorded life in New York City at a moment of great change and turmoil.  But her position shielded her from some of the more threatening aspects of life in the most populous early American city.  Epidemics of Yellow Fever periodically ravaged the City.  While poor New Yorkers faced the very real possibility they would catch the Fever and never recover, Bleecker fled the crowded and dangerous city for the more salubrious suburban environs of Bedford, in Westchester County.  Then as ever, class shaped urban life.  Bleecker’s New York was a Tale of Two Cities.

Or perhaps it was a tale of three cities.  “Negro men” and “black girls” appear throughout the diary as laborers.  Though invariably identified by their skin color, it is not always clear whether they were enslaved.  In 1799, the first year of Bleecker’s diary, New York State passed a bill to abolish the institution of slavery.  But the bill did so gradually; the last slave was not freed until July 4, 1827.  Like most everything else, slavery, freedom, servitude, and race were all in flux in early-nineteenth-century New York, as Bleecker’s diary unwittingly reveals.

As much as Bleecker’s diary can be read as an ethnography of early national New York City, it is above all an account of one woman’s life.  We have to imagine that Bleecker’s list of the most significant events recorded in the diary would include her engagement and marriage to Alexander McDonald, the births of her first two children, and the marriages and deaths of countless friends and family members.  Bleecker is a fascinating woman in her own right, and throughout this series we plan to bring that side of the diary out as well.

On September 15, 1780, Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin “abandoned the paternal mansion that so long bounded my wishes,” boarded a “small vessel,” and left her home in New York for Quebec.  So began a long journey that took this twenty-two-year-old woman through much of British Canada, first to Quebec and from there through Montreal, Fort Niagara, and ultimately to Detroit.  

Schieffelin made the trip with her new husband, Jacob Schieffelin—they were married in August of 1780—a Detroit merchant who had received a government appointment from the British during the American Revolution.  Along the way, they encountered a range of peoples: British military officials, French and English traders, and Indians, including the famed Mohawk leader Joseph Brant.  Schieffelin recounted her experiences in an extended narrative.

The bulk of Schieffelin’s narrative describes events, peoples, and places far removed from the center of the American Revolutionary struggle.  Canada remained British territory.  And though the United States technically gained control of Detroit with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, for all intents and purposes, it remained under British control until the Jay Treaty of 1795.  

Schieffelin’s narrative pulls our gaze north and west, and it also draws attention not to the citizens of the new United States, but to the many people who left the thirteen colonies at the very moment their independence was assured. Thousands of loyalists would make similar journeys in the wake of the American victory in the Revolutionary War.  Viewed from Schieffelin’s vantage, the American Revolution looks unfamiliar.  But Schieffelin’s experience is, nevertheless, fundamentally a part of that same revolutionary history.

Schieffelin’s account of her experience, a "Narrative of events and observations that occurred during a journey through Canada in the years 1780-81," was recently digitized and made available by the Library as part of the ongoing Early American Manuscripts Project.  

About the Early American Manuscripts Project

With support from the The Polonsky Foundation, The New York Public Library is currently digitizing upwards of 50,000 pages of historic early American manuscript material. The Early American Manuscripts Project will allow students, researchers, and the general public to revisit major political events of the era from new perspectives and to explore currents of everyday social, cultural, and economic life in the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods. The project will present on-line for the first time high quality facsimiles of key documents from America’s Founding, including the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Drawing on the full breadth of the Library’s manuscript collections, it will also make widely available less well-known manuscript sources, including business papers of Atlantic merchants, diaries of people ranging from elite New York women to Christian Indian preachers, and organizational records of voluntary associations and philanthropic organizations. Over the next two years, this trove of manuscript sources, previously available only at the Library, will be made freely available through nypl.org.

The United Nations commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27.

Survivors’ personal stories are a powerful primary source for learning about the Holocaust. Explore the Library’s collection of oral histories, autobiographies, biographies and memoirs of Holocaust survivors.

Oral Histories

Vladka Meed (Feigele Pelte Miedzyrzecki) was a teenager when the Nazis occupied Poland. Active in the underground youth movement, she lived as a Polish non-Jew in Warsaw, outside of the ghetto, and worked as a courier, carrying out illegal missions such as hiding people, smuggling documents, and organizing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. She was the only one in her family to survive and came to the United States in 1946, writing a memoir about her experiences. Read her interview in our Digital Collections.

Egon Loebner was an accomplished student in Czechoslovakia, who dreamed of becoming a diplomat but chose engineering because he knew he would have to emigrate due to antisemitism. He survived the ghettos, the camps Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, and lost nearly his entire family. His engineering skills saved his life many times during the war. He later came to the U.S. where he met Albert Einstein and got Einstein's recommendation to study physics, helping to develop today’s flat screen televisions. Read his interview in our Digital Collections.

Maria Rosenbloom grew up in Kolomija in a wealthy and religious family. She battled antisemitic quotas and violence to study Polish literature in Lviv in the late 1930’s. During the Second World War, she lost her husband, parents, and virtually her entire family, in an atmosphere of horrific violence and starvation. She lived as a non-Jewish Pole but her Jewish appearance frequently put her life in danger and caused her to flee. She was shot while participating in resistance activities. Working with displaced persons after the war, she eventually became a leading psychiatric social worker and teacher. Read her interview in our Digital Collections.

Aryeh Neier was born in Berlin in 1937, the child of Galician Jews. His family fled to England just a few years later, where his father was held in an internment camp on suspicion of being a possible spy, and Aryeh lived in a home for refugee children for a year. Virtually all of his relatives in Germany and Poland were killed during the Holocaust. In London, their house was bombed. After the war, the family settled in New York. Aryeh studied labor relations at Cornell and became a well-known advocate for civil liberties and human rights. A prolific author and professor, his most famous and controversial case was ACLU’s defense of the Nazis’ right to march in Skokie. Read his interview in our Digital Collections.

The above individuals were interviewed for the American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection, which includes 2,250 individuals, among them approximately 250 Holocaust survivors. Read more oral histories of Holocaust survivors online and onsite. Search the catalog using the keywords “oral” and survivor” to find more.

See NYU’s page for more collections of Holocaust survivor oral histories: Holocaust Studies: Oral Histories, Memoirs, etc.

Personal Narratives

Explore the Library’s collection of autobiographies, biographies and memoirs of Holocaust survivors.

Search the catalog:

By call number: *PWZ - then click “modify search” and choose  subject word “Holocaust”

Search for personal narratives by thematic subject heading :

• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Personal narratives
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, Jewish

Yizkor Books

The Library’s collection includes approximately 700 yizkor books, memorial books of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Yizkor books were largely written and compiled by survivors, and by landslayt (townspeople who had left before the war) and often include personal essays, memoirs and eyewitness accounts from wartime.

Search Jewish Gen’s bibliographic yizkor book database by the names of towns or cities, and check NYPL’s website for an alphabetical list of our yizkor book holdings. Read yizkor books online and onsite, and find English translations at JewishGen.

For yizkor book narratives of Holocaust survivors in Poland, see From A Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, translated and edited by Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin ; with geographical index and bibliography by Zachary M. Baker.

Additional subject headings for Holocaust research

• World War, 1939-1945 -- Jewish resistance -- Poland.
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Jews -- Rescue.
• Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Underground movements.
• Gays -- Nazi persecution
• Jehovah’s witnesses -- Nazi persecution
• Jewish Women in the Holocaust
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Children.
• People with disabilities --Nazi persecution
• Romanies - Nazi persecution

Need additional research help? Contact us at dorotjewish@nypl.org

No, this is not an advertisement for a forthcoming blockbuster movie, but it is certainly a newsworthy announcement. 

The Hunt-Lenox Globe is, without question, one of the great treasures of The New York Public Library.  Purchased in France during the 1850s by noted American architect William Morris Hunt, and subsequently gifted to NYPL progenitor James Lenox, the circa 1510 Hunt-Lenox Globe is recognized today not only as one of the oldest terrestrial globes in existence but also as the oldest-known globe to depict the Americas.

Recently, The New York Public Library received a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to scan the globe using 3D imaging.  The project was undertaken in conjunction with the Lazarus Project, an organization that provides historical researchers access to advanced imaging technology.

In order to reproduce the globe in digital form, two technologies were utilized.  The first of these, multispectral imaging, scanned the globe using multiple wavelengths of light.  The high-resolution images that result from this process possess a tremendous amount of detail and extreme color accuracy; however, they are also traditional flat, 2D depictions.  Therefore, to achieve a realistic, 3D representation of the globe, it was necessary to employ a second type of imaging: structure from motion.  Structure from motion, a cutting-edge computer process that utilizes complex mathematical algorithms, enabled the reconstruction of 3D images from the 2D scans, resulting in a realistic representation of the globe that is mostly free of geographic distortions of size and scale.

As of this writing, work on the online 3D  presentation of the Hunt-Lenox Globe continues, and it is our intention to make it available via The New York Public Library’s website in the not-too-distant future.  In the meantime, if anticipation has gotten the better of you, and you cannot wait to see the final 3D product, we would encourage you to check out the flattened, hi-res 2D images of the globe’s northern and southern hemispheres, which are featured in the Library’s Digital Collections.  If you like, you can think of these highly zoomable, manipulable images as a sort of teaser trailer for the as-yet-to-be-released 3D production.  

Find My Past is the newest addition to NYPL’s collection of genealogy databases. Available at all NYPL locations, this database holds many useful records for furthering your family history research. Here are three reasons to explore this database and continue your genealogical journey:

1. UK and Ireland Records

In addition to holding United States records, Find My Past provides access to a trove of UK and Ireland genealogy collections.

Millions of English, Scottish, and Welsh records are accessible through Find My Past, some dating as far back as 1200. Collections include parish records, censuses, passenger lists, British Army service records, birth, marriage, and death records, and more.

Also search for Irish ancestors in the largest collection of online Irish records, many of which are only available on Find My Past. Vital records, court records, land records, and military records are just some of the collections available. For more on researching Irish ancestors at NYPL, see the class: Irish Genealogy: Resources and Research Methods.

2. PERSI

Find My Past is the only place you will find the up-to-date PERSI (the PERiodical Source Index). With indexing for over 8,000 periodicals, PERSI is the largest and most widely used index to genealogy and local history magazines, newsletters, and journals—including many held at NYPL.

Genealogy periodicals are valuable (but often underused) resources. Find helpful information such as indexes and transcriptions of records, family histories, advanced research strategies, and beginner tips. Established and maintained by the Allen County Public Library, PERSI provides references to over 2.5 million articles—just search by family name and location.

While this index is useful in itself, PERSI now contains a growing number of digitized articles, providing instant access to genealogy and local history periodicals throughout the US and UK.

Learn more about NYPL’s collections of genealogy periodicals in the class: Genealogical Research with Newspapers and Periodicals.

3. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collections

Find My Past also provides access to a number of collections from the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (NYG&B), an organization devoted to New York family history research.

Collections include The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 1870-present, family Bibles, church records surveys, and NYG&B member biographies. Also browse the NYG&B’s digital book collection for family genealogies, local histories, and transcribed and indexed records such as cemetery records, coroner reports, marriage records, estate and probate records, immigration and naturalization records, and more.

Donated in 2008, the complete NYG&B library is also available at NYPL.

Discover more Find My Past collections through browsing the “A-Z of record sets” option under “Search.” Also find a variety of research guides under “Help,” and more genealogy articles via the Find My Past blog.

Keep in mind that the 1939 Register and newspapers are not included in library subscriptions.

Find My Past has replaced the former Origins database.

“You know, it’s really very peculiar. To be mortal is the most basic human experience and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn’t know how to be mortal.” —Milan Kundera, Immortality

We fear death. We don’t want to die. We hate our mortality and don’t want to be made aware of it. We repress all thought of death and live as if we have unlimited time.

For Saint Augustine, fear of death makes a happy life impossible. True happiness requires immortality. “The true life is one that is both everlasting and happy,” and “since all men want to be happy, they want also to be immortal if they know what they want; for otherwise they could not be happy.” ¹

Absent a religious belief in immortality, denial is the most common way of treating the fear of death. In the words of Pascal, “To be happy he would have to make himself immortal; but, not being able to do so, it has occurred to him to prevent himself from thinking of death.” ² And that is what diversions and distractions provide. “Diversion…This is all that men have been able to discover to make themselves happy. And those…who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare…scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase, which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.” ³

Arguments against the Fear of Death

But there are other ways of combating the fear of death. All the ancient schools of thought, Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics, thought the fear of death irrational and employed arguments to combat it. For them, philosophy was primarily therapeutic, a treatment for suffering. “Philosophy heals human diseases, diseases produced by false beliefs. Its arguments are to the soul as the doctor’s remedies are to the body.” ⁴

But what effect can reason and argument have against our emotions, especially such a powerful emotion as the fear of death? It is a mistake to think that all our emotions are simply blind urges unaffected by what we think or believe. Take anger. People get angry for a reason. I am mad because I believe I have been wronged in some way. If I discover I was mistaken my anger will disappear. Similarly, the Hellenistic philosophers thought the fear of death rests on false beliefs that rational argument could take away.

For Epicurus, eliminating the fear of death,  central to living a happy life, can be achieved through a  correct understanding of death. Epicurus’ main argument against this fear is the “no subject of harm” argument. If death is bad it has to be bad for somebody. But death cannot be bad for the living, since they are alive, nor for the dead, since they don’t exist. "[W]hen we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist." Since death affects neither the dead nor the living, there is no need to fear it. “Death, therefore…is nothing to us…” ⁵ (It must be kept in mind that Epicurus is talking about death, not dying. Dying can be experienced, death cannot.)

But like many, the poet Philip Larkin found Epicurus’ argument unconvincing:

“And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.” ⁶

A more powerful argument used by the Epicureans against the fear of death is the “symmetry” argument. This was probably first used by Lucretius, a Roman disciple of Epicurus. Lucretius argued since we do not feel horror at our past non-existence, the time before we were born, it is irrational to feel horror at our future non-existence, the time after our death, since they are the same. Or as Seneca expressed it: “Would you not think him an utter fool who wept because he was not alive a thousand years ago? And is he not just as much a fool who weeps because he will not be alive a thousand years from now? It is all the same; you will not be and you were not. Neither of these periods of time belongs to you.” ⁷

Some version of the symmetry argument has been put forth by Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca, Schopenhauer and Hume. Hume cited Lucretius’ argument to Boswell, Dr. Johnson’s biographer, when he interviewed Hume on his death bed. “I asked him if the thought of Annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought than he had not been as Lucretius observes.” ⁸

A World without Death

If our deepest wish was granted and we became immortal would it be a blessing or a curse? We fear death but life without it might be even more terrible. Would immortality leave us longing to be mortal again? Mortality might be so entwined with life that if we ceased to be mortal we would cease to be human.

What would a world without death look like? Since we have no experience of immortality we can only imagine it. To begin with, if there were births but no deaths, the world would quickly become unlivable. People would need to stop having children and the world would become a stale, static place.

What would we do with an extended or even immortal life? We could have several careers, have multiple spouses, and develop more interests, in short, more of everything. But more time is not the same as endless time. Is there any activity that we can imagine doing, not for a long time, but forever? Would we lose all interest in life if we lived forever? “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” ⁹

With unlimited time there would be no urgency to do anything. The idea of wasting time becomes nonsensical if we have time without end. That our time is limited, that our days are numbered, is the ultimate incentive to act. It is the old story of a person given six months to live suddenly trying to cram a life time of living in what time he has left. Death creates urgency.

Jorge Luis Borges imagined immortality in his short story, “The Immortal,” about a Roman army officer in quest of a river whose waters grants immortality. He finds the river and the City of the Immortals on its far bank. On the opposite side lie the inhabitants naked and shriveled in shallow pits in the sand, subsisting on snake meat, oblivious to everything, doing nothing, wanting nothing.

He drinks from the river becomes immortal. Centuries pass. Finally, in the tenth century the immortals decide to disperse to search for a river whose waters will restore their mortality. Borges offers “an ironical mirror image of the story of the Fall in which mankind was exiled from his happy immortal state to one of pain and death. The immortals embark on a quest for the river of death which will liberate them from the onus of immortality and which will again invest their lives with meaning by rendering them finite.” ¹⁰ Borges concludes that “Death…makes men precious…every act they execute may be their last…Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous.” ¹¹

In his famous essay, The Makropulos Case, Bernard Williams argues that it is good that we are not immortal because life without death would be meaningless. Given infinite time tedium would make life unbearable. (Of course, many people believe a life that ends in death is meaningless, that without the promise of immortality in an afterlife, life would be absurd.)

When Williams writes that mortality is good, he is not saying that death is not to be feared. It “could be true…that death gave…meaning to life and that death was…something to be feared.” ¹² It is good that we die, for instance, when it ends great suffering, and it is good that we don’t live too long, but death is bad when it comes too soon, cutting off the full potential of a life.

The Value of Mortality

For the bioethicist, Leon Kass, there are important virtues that arise from our mortality. “Could life be serious or meaningful without the limits of mortality? Is not the limit on our time the ground of our taking life seriously and living it passionately?”¹³ What if what is most important to us is inseparable from our mortality and finitude? If we were immortal how could we be brave or noble or any of the virtues that require risk and the threat of death? The Homeric gods, eternally youthful and beautiful, live shallow, frivolous lives.

Odysseus on his voyage home is held captive by the beautiful and ageless Calypso. He rejects the goddess’ offer of eternal life if he stays with her, wanting only to return to his mortal wife, Penelope. As Martha Nussbaum remarks, “he chooses the life of a human being, and a marriage to a woman who will…age and die… He chooses…not only risk and difficulty, but the certainty of death…” ¹⁴

Accepting Our Mortality

Epicurus argued that “a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality.”¹⁵ I would argue that we can lose or weaken our longing for immortality not by eliminating the fear of death, if that is even possible, but rather by realizing that immortality would result in profound boredom and meaninglessness. We would still hate and fear death but it would make us more accepting of our mortal condition and less likely to condemn this life or seek to flee from it.

For the psalmist learning to accept our mortality is the path to wisdom. “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”¹⁶ Or in the words of Montaigne, “All the wisdom and argument in the world eventually come down to one conclusion which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying.”¹⁷

1. Arendt, Hannah, Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 10- 11.
2. Pascal, Blaise, and T. S. Eliot. Pascal's Pensées. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958, 169.
3. Ibid., 139.
4. Nussbaum, Martha, The therapy of desire : theory and practice in Hellenistic ethics, Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1994, 14.
5. Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus.” In The Epicurus Reader: selected writings and testimonia translated and edited, with notes, by Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson; introduction by D.S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis : Hackett, c1994, 125.
6. Larkin, Philip, and Anthony Thwaite. “Aubade.” In Philip Larkin: Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1988, 208.
7. Seneca (trans. R.M. Gummere). “On Taking One’s Own Life.” In Epistulae Morales II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 175.
8. Boswell, James, and John Wain. The Journals of James Boswell, 1762-1795. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, 249.
9. Ertz, Susan. Anger in the Sky. New York, London, Harper & brothers [c1943].
10. Stewart, Jon. “Borges on Immortality.” InPhilosophy and Literature, Volume 17, Number 2, October 1993, 299.
11. Borges, Jorge Luis, James East Irby, André Maurois, and Donald A. Yates. Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. New York: New Directions Pub. Corp, 1962, 155.
12. Williams, Bernard. “The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality.” InThe Metaphysics of death/ edited, with an introduction, by John Martin Fischer. 73.
13. Kass, Leon. Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs. New York: Free Press, 1985, 309.
14. Nussbaum, Martha Craven. “Transcending Humanity.” Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, 365.
15. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus from Epicurus, The Extant Remains, translated by Cyril Bailey (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1926). 124b 1-3.
16. Ps. 90:12 ESV (English Standard Version).
17. Montaigne, Michel de, and M. A. Screech. “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die.” InThe Essays of Michel de Montaigne. London: Allen Lane, 1991, 89.

Saturday February 8, 1800 “bought a pair of shoes….  Mary & I went to go & drink tea with Jane….  Papa was oblig’d to send some watchmen down with the negro’s that were at work in our yard, to the Dock, as they had been molested by some sailors from a Schooner lying near the place where their business led them - one sailor fir’d off a Pistol, & was taken up & put in the Watch Tower, by which means peace was restor’d.”

Elizabeth De Hart Bleecker lived through a tumultuous period in the history of labor in New York City.  In 1799, the New York legislature passed a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery in the state.  Though it only applied to enslaved people born after July 4, 1799, the act surely changed the dynamics of labor in the city and beyond.  It further blurred any easy distinctions between black laborers as unfree and white laborers as free.

The abolition Act compounded developments that were already underway.   With the number of individual manumissions of enslaved people on the rise and a steady influx of recently freed people trickling in from New England and the New York countryside, the City's free Black population swelled.  They worked hroughout the city and along the waterfront alongside enslaved men—who were often hired out—and laboring whites.  Tensions brewed and sometimes boiled over, as Bleecker's diary entry attests. 

Bleecker grew up aware of the varieties of free and unfree labor in New York.  According to the 1800 federal census, her father still owned two slaves.  They lived with the family at 178 Pearl Street, a short three-block walk from the East River and the bustling New York waterfront.  On February 12th, a few days after this entry, Bleecker noted the wages her father paid to “the Negro men that were at work in the yard.”

Bleecker’s diary primarily records the quotidian daily activities of a well-heeled New York woman.  Even when it does, it also captures some of the daily lives of men and women who left a much lighter historical footprint.  

This is one of a series of blog posts related to the NYPL Public Domain Release: discover the collections and find inspiration for using them in your own research, teaching, and creative practice.

The Importance of Being Digitized

As you might have heard, the New York Public Library has recently made over 180,000 of its digitized images easily available in high resolution for use, reuse, and reimagination. My colleagues have been excitedly collecting their favorites from this public domain pool. I’d like to take my own deep digital dive and highlight one specific and exceptional text, contained in three handwritten notebooks in our Digital Collections.

They are, at first blush, modest documents. Titled A serious comedy for trivial people and authored by Oscar Wilde, the initial image is of a plain black notebook. But what you’re seeing is actually the earliest draft of Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, written by hand and with the author’s frequent emendations. You might be asking yourself: How did that end up at NYPL? or Why doesn’t that doesn’t look quite like the play I know and love?  Well, carry on, earnest Earnest reader, for these answers and more.

A Manuscript of Great Importance

Oscar Wilde first began drafting the play in August of 1894. He was pleased from the start, noting in an August letter to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, “My play is really very funny: I am quite delighted with it.” Over the next few months, Wilde continuously shaped the play, producing and editing multiple typescripts between September and December of that year. An early draft was completed at least by late October, as Wilde sent “the first copy” to George Alexander, the actor, producer, and theater manager who would eventually inhabit the role of John “Jack” Worthing in the play’s inaugural run. In January of 1895, shortly before the play was staged, Wilde quickly condensed it from four acts into three. This substantial change was done at the behest of Alexander, but not without protestation from Wilde in his characteristically dry wit: “The scene that you feel is superfluous cost me terrible exhausting labor and heartrending nerve-wracking strain,” he objected, “it must have taken fully five minutes to write.”

The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the St. James Theatre on Valentine's Day, 1895. Shortly afterwards, Wilde’s personal life took a steep downward turn, as he became embroiled in the court battles that would lead to his bankruptcy and imprisonment. When Wilde passed away five years later, his affairs were in disarray. The notebook containing Acts III and IV of the original four-act Earnest were in the possession of Wilde’s friend and literary executor, Robert Ross. Ross donated this notebook, along with other personal papers, to the British Library in 1909. The three notebooks containing Acts I and II were not included, however, having been borrowed by Ross’ associate, A.B. Clifton, sometime before Wilde’s death. These were eventually discovered in an old trunk — a plot twist worthy of Wilde himself — after the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Clifton. In 1950, the notebooks were sold at auction and passed into the New York Public Library’s George Arents Collection of Tobacciana — Jack Worthing’s cigarette case being an essential plot point in the play’s narrative.

So by a circuitous path, these three notebooks traveled from Tite Street to Fifth Avenue to, well, everywhere, since they can now be read in their entirety in NYPL’s Digital Collections. What’s more, we can get a feel for Wilde’s process and the fluid state of the text, since we have at our disposal his original draft, his subsequent edits, and the first printed edition of 1899, which can be read in full through the Literature Online database. (Those who want even more detail can also consult the typescripts that document the transmission of the text from manuscript to publication.) We can observe changes and additions, as well as the scenes and characters omitted during Wilde’s more extensive January 1895 rewrites.

An Ideal Copy

Wilde’s notebooks are an instant reward: the very first text-bearing page is one of my favorites. There is no title page — more on that later — so instead we find Wilde’s signature and a revised epigraph. Wilde changes his initial “A trivial comedy for serious people” to the more mocking “A serious comedy for trivial people.” By the time the play was performed, the line was changed back.

The next page contains the dramatis personae, which might raise a few flags for the Wilde enthusiast. Instead of the familiar Algernon Moncrieff, Lady Bracknell, and Merriman, we instead have Algernon Montford, Lady Brancaster, and Mathews. Moreover, there is an entirely new character, Thomas R. Hubbard the solicitor. Following this page is a short description of the four acts. During the January 1895 rewrites, Acts I and IV remained largely intact, while Acts II and III were condensed into one, with poor Mr. Hubbard a necessary casualty.

One of my favorite scenes in Act I is Lady Brancaster’s interview of Jack Worthing, where she judges his suitability as a husband for her daughter Gwendolyn. When he confesses to being an orphan, left in a handbag at Victoria Station as a baby, Lady Brancaster responds, “To be born, or at any rate bred in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to.” This portion has been added to the initial body of text in a series of additions on the facing page.

Lady Brancaster also reversed her position on smoking during the writing process. Wilde was himself an avid smoker, but Lady Brancaster initially disapproves. When Jack begins the interview by retrieving his cigarette case, she glares at him, prompting Jack to “look[] ashamed and replace[] it quietly in his pocket.” By the 1899 edition, the now Lady Bracknell is offering her own pro-tobacco bon mots. When Jack admits to smoking, she replies, “I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is.”

By Act II, we already have some changes to the elements of the play. First, we have a title, though not the expected one, Lady Lancing. Wilde mentioned this false title in his October 1894 letter to George Alexander, when he stated, “[The play] is called Lady Lancing on the cover: but the real title is The Importance of Being Earnest. When you read the play, you will see the punning title’s meaning.” Wilde had a practice of using false names for his plays, often a woman’s name. This was likely to prevent the disclosure of the title before the play was publicly staged. Other than a passing reference to a Lady Lancing in Act IV, the temporary title has no bearing on the substance of the play. Aside from the new title, we also see some edits to the characters; Mathews has been rechristened Merriman, and Hubbard is now Gribsby.

Both Gribsby the solicitor and Moulton, Jack’s gardener, were ultimately doomed for the cutting-room floor. Moulton had only a handful of lines, but Gribsby was present for an entire scene, where Algernon contests an expensive bill he incurred at the Savoy Hotel. “No gentleman ever has any money,” a bewildered Algernon protests, to which Gribsby replies, “My experience is that it is usually relatives who pay.” As Algernon is currently assuming the identity of Jack’s brother, Jack ends up with the bill, bitterly responding, “Personally, if you ask me, I don’t see any use in having a brother." In a later omitted part, Algernon then proceeds to dine on a whopping six lobsters for lunch — all, of course, at his dear “brother” Jack’s expense.

Whether you’re a serious researcher or a trivial one, a close read of Wilde’s manuscript promises constant discoveries and a unique glimpse into the mind of the author. Be sure to try out the “View as Book” option for a nice, page-flipping-friendly interface. I implore you quite earnestly: open that notebook and start your own digital dive!

For Love of the Footnotes

To learn more about Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, and NYPL’s manuscripts, try the 1956 and 2006 editions of the play, both with helpful introductions, commentary, and related material. The letters mentioned in this post were compiled in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde and can be found on pages 602 and 620. Plus, be sure to explore our many English and American Literature databases, such as Literature Online and Literature Resource Center—both available from home!—for biographies, full texts, and literary criticism related to Oscar Wilde and a wide variety of other authors.

Image credits for The Importance of Being Earnest notebooks: Rare Book Division. New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, Tilden Foundations. Online access to Punch is provided by HathiTrust.

With special thanks to Chava Shervington, President of the Jewish Multiracial Network.

What do prominent legal scholar Lani Guinier, bestselling writer Walter Moseley, and renowned late singer and actress Nell Carter have in common? They are all outstanding achievers who are African American and Jewish. In honor of African American History Month, the Dorot Jewish Division celebrates African American Jewish authors and achievements.

According to the Pew Forum’s 2014 survey, 2% of Jews in the United States described themselves as black, and a 2011 population survey by United Jewish Appeal (Federation) found significant racial diversity in the New York Jewish community, noting that “the large number of biracial, Hispanic, and other “nonwhite” Jewish households—particularly pronounced among younger households—should serve as a reality check for those who are accustomed to thinking of all Jews as ‘white’.”

Award-Winning Authors

Among African American Jewish authors you’ll find numerous award winners, such as author and scholar Carolivia Herron, known for her children’s book, Nappy Hair, as well as Always an Olivia, and many other works about African American and Jewish heritage and history; author and scholar Julius Lester, whose prolific works for children and adults address topics including racism, African American history, and his path to Judaism; the Antiguan-born Jamaica Kincaid, a writer of fiction and nonfiction for adults and children; Walter Moseley, a bestselling writer of mysteries and science fiction; author and musicianJames McBride (watch his NYPL performance here); professor and memoirist Carol Conaway; author and Third Wave Feminist leader Rebecca Walker; philosophy professors Lewis R. Gordon, Naomi Zack and Laurence Thomas, cartoonist and author Darrin Bell; and professor Ephraim Isaac, pioneering specialist in African, African-American and Semitic Studies.

Stirring Memoirs

The Library’s collection of memoirs by African American Jewish authors includes Yelena Khanga’s Soul to Soul : A Black Russian American Family, 1865-1992 (written with Susan Jacoby); as well as her mother Lily Golden’s My Long Journey Home; Ahuva Gray’s Gifts of a Stranger: A Convert's Round-The-World Travels and Spiritual Journeys; James McBride’s The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother; Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, Julius Lester’s Lovesong, Rain Pryor’s Jokes My Father Never Taught Me: Life, Love, and Loss with Richard Pryor (written with Cathy Crimmins), several books by and about Sammy Davis, Jr.; Carol Conaway’s essay "Journey to the Promised Land: How I Became an African-American Jew Rather Than A Jewish African American" (Nashim, no. 8, Fall 5765/2004) and filmmaker Lacey Schwartz’s Little White Lie.

Identity Studies

Use the subject heading “African American Jews” in the Library’s catalog to find scholarly explorations of of African American, Jewish and multiracial identity, including Joslyn C. Segal’s Shades of Community and Conflict: Biracial Adults of African-American and Jewish-American heritages; Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin: and Other Myths of Identity by Dr. Katya Gibel Mevorach (Katya Gibel Azoulay) and Black Jews: A Study of Malintegration and (Multi) Marginality by Jacqueline C. Berry.

Outstanding Rabbis

African American rabbis of today and tomorrow are making a difference through groundbreaking leadership: Rabbi Alysa Stanton, a professional counselor who worked with students in the wake of Columbine, is the first African American female Reform rabbi, ordained in 2009 at Hebrew Union College; Rabbi Gershom Sizomu is leader of the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda, and the first black rabbi from sub-Saharan Africa to be ordained at an American rabbinic school (Conservative movement, 2008); Rabbi Tiferet Berenbaum (formerly Gordon) was ordained at Hebrew College in 2013, and now leads Congregation Shir Hadash in Milwaukee and is on the board of the Jewish Multiracial Network.

Georgette Kennebrae, a rabbinical intern at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah and Selah Leadership Program member at Bend the Arc, and Sandra Lawson, a rabbinic intern at Meadowood Senior Living and Golden Slipper Center for Seniors, as well as a personal trainer, are both openly lesbian rabbinical students at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, with ordination set respectively for 2017 and 2018.

Rabbi Capers Funnye, famously a cousin of First Lady Michelle Obama, heads Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago and is the first African American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. Funnye underwent a Conservative conversion and hopes to unite the Hebrew Israelite community, of which he is the also the new chief rabbi, with the major denominations of American Judaism.

Community Leaders

These inspiring leaders are making a difference through advocacy and public service: Chava Shervington is President of the Jewish Multiracial Network and a legal professional specializing in corporate governance and non-profits; Jonah Edelman runs Stand for Children, an education reform group ; Dr. Ada M. Fisher is a retired doctor and GOP committeewoman; Reuben Greenberg is a retired Charleston police chief; Mona Sutphen is an author and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for President Obama, Professor Michelle Frankl (formerly Stein-Evers) is an author and founding member of the Alliance of Black Jews; and Robin Washington is a newspaper editor, columnist, media personality and producer.

Artistic Achievements

Given the incredible contributions of African American and Jewish heritage to American culture, it’s no surprise to find amazing creative professionals including the comedian and Comic Torah author Aaron Freedman, the teacher, writer, diversity consultant and performer Yavilah McCoy; the Afroculinaria specialist and kosher Jewish foodie Michael Twitty, and Erika Davis, blogger at Black, Gay, and Jewish and board member of the Jewish Multiracial Network.

Actors

Celebrated actors include TV and movie star Lisa Bonet; sisters Kidada Jones, a film actress and model, and Rashida Jones, the Parks and Recreation actress; model and TV actor Borris Kodjoe; actor and writer Yaphet Kotto; model and actress Lauren London; actress and producer Tracee Ellis Ross (of TV’s Blackish); comic actress and musician Maya Rudolph, and rising young film actor Khleo Thomas, to name just a few.

Musicians

Outstanding musicians include rapper Nissim Black, genre-bending singer and songwriter Goapele; Grammy-winning rock, folk and blues artist Ben Harper; multi-talented rock star Lenny Kravitz (another Grammy winner); jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman; Yiddish opera bass and openly gay Sidor Belarsky revivor Anthony (Mordechai Tzvi) Russell; rapper Shyne, guitarist Slash; jazz great Willie “The Lion” Smith; singer and songwriter Justin Warfield; rock and roll singer Andre Williams; hit songwriter and soul singer Jackie Wilson; and openly gay, Orthodox rapper Y-Love (Yitz Jordan).

Athletes

Sports stars include basketball’s David Blu; Jordan Farmar, Aulcie Perry, Alex Tyus; and Jamila Wideman—and even Amar’e Stoudemire is exploring his family connections to Judaism—plus baseball’s Elliott Maddox and football’s Taylor Mays and Andre Tippett.

For more African American Jewish celebrities, check out Ma Nishtana’s Black Jews You Should Know, and lists from BET, HipHopWired, and Huffington Post.

Want to learn more?

Organizational Resources

Visit the Jewish Multiracial Network for book recommendations and attend their Jews of Color Convening (co-hosted by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice) on May 1-3, 2016 in NYC.

Visit Bechol Lashon for events, speakers, and research resources on the diversity of the Jewish people.

Just For Fun

“Black and Jewish” music video by by Kali Hawk and Katerina Graham.

Monologue by humorist, filmmaker and stage artist Gina Gold.

Further Research

Baer, Hans and Singer, Merrill. African American Religion: Varieties Of Protest And Accommodation. Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press, c2002.

Baskin, April. "How to Help Combat the ‘Perpetual Stranger Status’ of Jews of Color."Union Of Reform Judaism. February 1, 2016.

Berger, Graenum. Black Jews In America. New York: Commission on Synagogue Relations, 1978.

Chireay, Yvonne, and Deutsch, Nathaniel. Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters With Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Gillick, Jeremy. "Post-racial Rabbis." July-Aug. 2009. Moment Magazine.

Gordon, Lewis. "Jews were all people of color: Center for Afro-Jewish Studies" (Philadelphia). pp. 172-181. in The Colors Of Jews: Racial Politics And Radical Diasporism. ed. Melanie Kaye/kantrowitz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

"In Jewish Color" (Forward column).

Kaufman, Ilana. Waking Up And Showing Up For Our Jewish Youth Of Color – Because Our Community Is At Stake. January 11, 2016. E-Jewish Philanthropy.

Landing, James E. Black Judaism: Story Of An American Movement. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2002.

Manishtana. "Black Jews You Should Know." Part 1. Tablet. Part 2

Markow, Lauren. "Meet Sandra Lawson, Who May Soon Be One Of Judaism's First Black, Openly Lesbian Rabbis"Huffington Post. June 1, 2016.

Shervington, Chava. "For Black Orthodox Jews, Constant Racism Is Exhausting". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. July 16, 2015.

Spivack, Miranda C. "Jews Of Color In America: A Growing Minority Within A Minority."B’nai B’rith Magazine. Spring 2016.

The Supreme Court is once again front and center in American partisan politics. We often bemoan the recent politicization of the federal courts and especially appointments to the Supreme Court, but this has been a source of political strife since the creation of the federal judiciary. It would not be unreasonable to say that the issue defined domestic politics during Thomas Jefferson’s first term as president. In fact, the judicial politics of the Jeffersonian era help explain why the Supreme Court remains such a charged issue in our own time. As part of the ongoing Early American Manuscripts Project, NYPL has recently cataloged and imaged some important sources that help tell this story. But first, some background.

The Creation of the Federal Judiciary

What will undoubtedly become clear over the coming months is how little the Constitution actually says about the judicial branch. Article III is much skimpier than the Constitution’s first two articles, which define the legislative and executive branches. The Constitution provides that there will be a supreme court, it grants Congress power to create “inferior courts,” and declares that judges shall have life tenure, but little else. From the beginning, it was clear that Congress would have significant power to shape the structure of the federal court system.

The first Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789. It established district courts in each state and a six-member Supreme Court. The Act also created three circuit courts—the forerunners to the federal Court of Appeals—that oversaw a number of the district courts. The judicial branch was a politically-volatile issue from the outset. In a letter to Pierpont Edwards—a lawyer, merchant, future U.S. Attorney and federal judge—congressman Jeremiah Wadsworth of Connecticut worried that “the bill for Establishing a Judiciary system will be attacked on all sides.” He also passed on information about whether James Madison, the powerful Virginian, would support the bill. Edwards also received intelligence from Oliver Ellsworth—another well-connected Connecticut lawyer, who served as a senator and the chief justice of the Supreme Court—that Judge Richard Law of Connecticut “thinks favorably of the judiciary system proposed.” Ultimately, the act passed without much fanfare.

The Judiciary Act of 1801

Both George Washington and the second president, John Adams, belonged to the Federalist Party. As a consequence, one party had appointed every member of the federal judiciary. Yet the judiciary became a much more charged political issue in 1800, when the Jeffersonian Republican Party won majorities in the House and the Senate. They also won the presidency for the first time--though it took until February of 1801 to decide that Thomas Jefferson would be president, and Aaron Burr his vice president.

At the beginning of Jefferson’s first term as president, Federalists’ strength in national politics was confined entirely to the judiciary. After the elections of 1800, the lame duck Federalist President, House, and Senate had clearly passed the Judiciary Act of 1801 to stack the federal courts with Federalists and entrench their power in the judiciary as a bulwark against the growing political clout of the Jeffersonians. The Act established sixteen new circuit court judgeships, all filled with Federalists. Perhaps most brazenly, it changed the number of Supreme Court justices from six to five, to take effect when the next sitting judge left office. In effect, this meant that two justices would need to retire, die, or be removed from office before the next president would have the chance to make an appointment to the court. The Act also created a number of local justice of the peace for the new District of Columbia, again all filled by Federalists.

Done so late in Adams’s term, the men appointed under this Act came to be known as the “Midnight Judges.” It is an apt moniker. Indeed, the outgoing administration did not even have time to deliver commissions--which made the appointments official--to all the appointees. A lawsuit over these undelivered commissions led to the famous Supreme Court case, Marbury v. Madison (1803), decided by Chief Justice John Marshall, the most influential of Adams’ midnight appointees.

The Jeffersonian Reaction

Federalists feared the Jeffersonians would attempt to undermine the Federalist hold on the judiciary when they took the reins of power in 1801. In a revealing letter to Noah Webster, William Cranch—one of the Midnight Judges, appointed to the D.C. circuit court—bemoaned that the “bolder spirits” among the Jeffersonians wanted to “warp and bend [the Constitution] to their view” by making “the judiciary ... dependant[sic] upon the legislature.” In essence, with “a majority of both houses, and the Executive, on their side,” the Jeffersonians needed to take some control over the legislature to prevent it from stymieing their legislative agenda.

The Jeffersonians opted to repeal large portions of the Judiciary Act of 1801, including the new system of circuit courts. Though Federal judges held these offices for life, the Jeffersonians claimed they simply eliminated the office itself.

The Jeffersonians were not finished. Led by a contingent from Virginia, they tried to impeach a Supreme Court justice, Samuel Chase. An unabashed Federalist, Chase did not hide his partisanship. As Cranch wrote in another letter to Webster, Chase’s “great crime was in declaring the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801 unconstitutional” and a threat to liberty and judicial independence, during a tirade against the Republicans he made from the bench.

The Jeffersonian-dominated Senate, though, voted to acquit. Nevertheless, Cranch maintained that the impeachment proceedings, would offer “the future historian a strong fact to elucidate the spirit of the times, and to estimate the virtue of the majority [Jeffersonians].” But his own experience in the coming years suggests otherwise. In 1806, Jefferson promoted Cranch to chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court.

The Legacy

The Chase impeachment had revealed cracks within the Jeffersonian Republican Party, between National Republicans, who valued judicial independence, and “Old Republicans” willing to sacrifice it on the altar of politics. Moving forward, the National Republicans would oversee one of the most important eras in the Supreme Court’s history.

The most consequential outcome of the Federalists’ machinations--unaffected by the Jefferson reaction--was the appointment of John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court. In 1803, Marshall issued his most famous decision. Though the implications of the case were not clear at the time, Marbury v. Madison established the principle of judicial review--that the Supreme Court determined the constitutionality of federal laws. Marshall grew increasingly bold during the administrations of James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams, offering a string of rulings that continue to shape American jurisprudence today. In the most significant case, McCullouch v. Maryland (1819), Marshall ruled that the Constitution provided Congress with broad authority to pursue its enumerated powers.

To a certain extent, modern American politics turns on differing interpretations of the legitimacy of McCullouch, and the Supreme Court wields significant power over that conversation thanks to Marbury. We might even say that one reason the federal bench is so politicized now, is because of the institutional weight it gained under the leadership of its most politicized appointee, John Marshall.

Further Reading

For more on the judicial politics of the early republic era, see Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); and Ellis, Aggressive Nationalism: McCulloch v. Maryland and the Foundation of Federal Authority in the Young Republic(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). The manuscript sources in this post come from the Thomas Addis Emmet Collection and the Noah Webster Papers.

About the Early American Manuscripts Project

With support from the The Polonsky Foundation, The New York Public Library is currently digitizing upwards of 50,000 pages of historic early American manuscript material. The Early American Manuscripts Project will allow students, researchers, and the general public to revisit major political events of the era from new perspectives and to explore currents of everyday social, cultural, and economic life in the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods. The project will present on-line for the first time high quality facsimiles of key documents from America’s Founding, including the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Drawing on the full breadth of the Library’s manuscript collections, it will also make widely available less well-known manuscript sources, including business papers of Atlantic merchants, diaries of people ranging from elite New York women to Christian Indian preachers, and organizational records of voluntary associations and philanthropic organizations. Over the next two years, this trove of manuscript sources, previously available only at the Library, will be made freely available through nypl.org.

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.

• American Christian Support For Israel by Eric R. Crouse
• Antisemitism In The German Military by Brian Crim
• Bar Mitzvah: A History by Rabbi Michael Hilton. E-book available through Project MUSE
• Belsen And Its Liberation by Ian Baxter
• British Fascist Antisemitism by Daniel Tilles
• Eating Delancey by Aaron Rezny
• Filming The End Of The Holocaust by John Michalczyk.
• Hair, Headwear, And Orthodox Jewish Women by Milligan
• Israel: Is It Good For the Jews? by Cohen, Richard. E-book available through 3M Cloud Library
• Jews, Ukrainians, And The Euromaidan by Lubomyr Luciuk
• Knaanic Language by Ondřej Bláha
• Losing The Temple by Hindy Najman
• Neighboring Faiths by David Nirenberg. E-book available through Chicago Scholarship Online
• Pioneers by S.A. An-sky
• Secrets Of The Four Temples District by Beata Maciejewska
• Sephardi Lives by Julia Phillips Cohen (ed.)
• Ten Commandments: A Short History of an Ancient Text by Michael Coogan. E-book available.
• Unwanted Legacies by Gottfried Wagner. E-book available through Project MUSE.

Álvaro Enrigue was working on his latest novel when a colleague suggested he apply to the Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Doubtful he would be accepted, Álvaro was thrilled when he was invited to join the impressive roster of Cullman Fellows for 2011-2012. As he dove into his research at the iconic Stephen A. Schwarzman building, Álvaro was deeply moved by the incredible magic of the building and resources that surrounded him.

Library Stories is a video series from The New York Public Library that shows what the Library means to our users, staff, donors, and communities through moving personal interviews.

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Now Screening highlights NYPL's recent electronic resource acquisitions.  This month: Caribbean Newspapers (1718-1876), available at any NYPL location, or while using NYPL wifi.

If you are in need of historical newspapers, NYPL has become an even better place to look.  We recently added new material to our robust online collection: America's Historical Newspapers now includes greater coverage of early American newspaper titles from 1730 to 1900, including early issues of the New York World, New York Herald, and Sacramento Daily Union and expanded runs of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Gazette, National Intelligencer, and United States Telegraph.  Even better, we have a brand new collection of historical Caribbean newspapers that document 18th and 19th century Caribbean life with over 150 different titles.

Caribbean Newspapers encompasses twenty countries during their occupation by European colonizers—predominantly British, but also French, Spanish, and Danish.  It chronicles a tumultuous time in Caribbean history: the islands increase in European economic importance and react to the independence of their American neighbor, the slave trade grows exponentially and is outlawed, and slaves are gradually emancipated in all colonies except Cuba.

Caribbean Newspapers has particularly robust coverage of Jamaica's Montego Bay slave rebellion, which began on December 27, 1831 and continued into early 1832.  Issues of the Jamaica Watchman span this entire period and track the development of the uprising, from rumor to fact to fallout.  In it April 7, 1832 issue, the Watchman covers the March 23 trial of "Colonel" Francis Gardner, one of the leaders of the rebellion.  In an editorial following an account of the trial, the Watchman's editor writes, "We have been consistent throughout, and now that the Member for Westmoreland has come over to our side, we shall be happy with him, and the other friends of humanity, to give a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull altogether, until we bring the system down by the run — knock off the fetters, and let the oppressed go free." Such strong language ran afoul of Jamaica's Constructive Treason Act of 1823, and a mere ten days later, editor Edward Jordon was on trial in The King vs. Jordon, covered in the Watchman's April 25 and 28 issues.  After a protracted argument over the makeup of the jury, where the Attorney-General prosecuting the case "challenged every one who was not of a fair complexion," Jordon was acquitted.

Events such as these are preserved in the Caribbean Newspapers database; you just might need to do some digging to find what you need.  Its interface promotes such discovery by searching (by title, date, and full text) or browsing (by place, publication, and language).  If you're searching in the more expansive America's Historical Newspapers or Readex AllSearch, also products from this vendor, you can include the Caribbean Newspapers collection in your search.  Interesting articles or full newspaper issues can be printed, saved locally, or emailed as a link for personal research use.

It's important to remember that the coverage for a particular publication may be spotty: there might be a year of one newspaper and a single issue of another.  Certain colonies—for example, Barbados, Bermuda, and Antigua—are better represented than others.  If you're looking to research a specific event, review the list of titles to see if there is coverage for the particular region and time period in which you're interested.

Another thing to keep in mind is that these newspapers record the viewpoints of the Caribbean's white colonists, rather than the slaves and free people of color that represented a majority of the population, and thus reflect an inherent cultural bias, particularly with regard to emancipation issues.  Even those sympathetic to the cause of emancipation were discouraged by events like the Constructive Treason Act and the Jordon trial.  Caribbean Newspapers' coverage of Sam Sharpe is a good example of this.  Sharpe was central to the Montego Bay rebellion.  As a powerful orator, Methodist deacon, and slave, Sharpe provided motivation and organization for the uprising and is usually credited as being its primary leader.  He was arrested and ultimately executed for his involvement in the rebellion, but not before a series of jail cell meetings with various missionaries like Reverend Henry Bleby, where he reportedly uttered the now-iconic words: "I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery!"^[1] For his words and work toward emancipation, he is revered as a key figure in Jamaican and civil rights history.  Despite this, Sharpe is mentioned only once in Caribbean Newspapers, in the Watchman's June 2, 1832 coverage of his execution and burial.  

As with all primary sources, it's important to consider the context and limitations of these documents.  To complement the viewpoints represented here, consider using other databases in our African American Studies or Latin American Studies subjects, like the Black Studies Center.  This database, also available at all NYPL library locations and while using library wifi, includes materials from NYPL's own Schomburg Center. 

To read more about Sam Sharpe and the Montego Bay rebellion (also known as the Baptist War, Christmas Rebellion, and Great Jamaican Slave Revolt), you can also browse these subjects in the library's online catalog:

• Jamaica -- History -- Slave Insurrection, 1831.
• Jamaica -- History -- 19th century.
• Slavery -- Jamaica. (including Mary Turner's Slaves and Missionaries)

First image courtesy of Readex's Caribbean Newspapers.  Second image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, with online access provided by Readex's Caribbean Newspapers.

[1] Henry Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery, p. 129, available in print, microfilm, or online.