The broadside collection spans the late-17th through the 21st centuries, and includes advertisements for products, services and entertainments; notices of property sales; transcriptions of public speeches; campaign announcements; calls to arms; warnings about epidemics; song lyrics and poetry. Through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, all 18,000 broadsides are catalogued in the Library’s online catalog.

At the core of this trove of ephemera is the 1945 bequest of George B. Corsa, a real estate broker who specialized in Manhattan hotel properties. His files contain brochures, floor plans, postcards, and articles clipped from hotel trade publications (1910s–1940s). The Library staff has augmented Corsa’s collection with newly-created files and more recently acquired material. Click here for a list of the 500+ files in the Corsa Hotel Collection.

The map collection ranges from the 17th century to the present and includes both printed and manuscript items. Geographic scope varies by time period, but extends from New York to the entire country. Among the manuscript maps are the unique sketches of projected battle sites of the American Revolution by Robert Erskine and Simeon DeWitt. Later surveys include regional travel and tourist guides, and a series documenting overcrowding in Manhattan in the 1890s. To access the Library’s printed maps, click here. Records for the Library's manuscript maps are available through the online catalog.

The Klingenstein Library’s extensive collection of American dining menus—largely amassed by Chicago restaurateur Arnold Shircliffe (1880–1952) and donated to the New-York Historical Society in 1954—includes approximately 10,000 examples from honoree dinners, associational banquets, historical anniversaries, holidays, hotels, restaurants, ships, trains and planes. Descriptive information is available for each menu via an on-site database.

The Klingenstein Library holds the fourth largest collection of American newspapers published before 1820; it encompasses the most complete set of colonial New York titles such as Zenger’s controversial New-York Weekly Journal. For the 19th century there are nearly complete runs of commercial dailies, and some obscure publications espousing political, religious, and ethnic viewpoints. Also present are many of the principal newspapers from Northern and Southern localities up through the Civil War. The New York City dailies continue into the 20th century for which period there are also some pictorial supplements. For more information, see the Klingenstein Library’s Newspaper Research Guide.

Books and other published materials constitute the bulk of the Klingenstein Library’s collection. These include current monographs and supporting  sources on the history of New York and the United States, as well as an array of religious tracts, city directories, atlases, rare Native American language dictionaries, contentious pamphlets of the American Revolution, pro- and anti-slavery literature, Civil War regimental histories, institutional annual reports, and travel and entertainment guides. Search for these through the Klingenstein Library's online catalog.

The Print Collections include engravings, woodcuts, etchings, lithographs and images produced by a variety of other printing processes. Items range in date from a 1546 set of playing cards to views of New York by living artists, but the emphasis is on American historical prints between 1710 and 1860. The collections are particularly strong in views of New York City. There are also a significant number of views of other American and foreign locations, and portraits of prominent figures from New York and elsewhere. Other subjects include historical and commemorative prints, newspaper and periodical illustrations, political caricatures and naval prints. Rather than constituting a fine art print collection, they are a research collection of significance to historians and to students of American printmaking.

The extensive photograph collections are particularly strong in portraits and documentary images of New York-area buildings and street scenes from 1839 to 1945, although contemporary photography continues to be collected. The bulk of these images are arranged by location, or, for portraits, by sitter. Both professional and amateur photographers (many unidentified) are represented.

The Society's architectural collections include drawings, blueprints, renderings, photographs, correspondence, and business records. Most significant are its large holdings for individual architects or firms, including (in chronological order) John McComb, Jr.; Calvin Pollard; Alexander J. Davis; John B. Snook; George B. Post; McKim, Mead & White; and Cass Gilbert. These architects were all active in Manhattan and New York City buildings predominate, but their work includes many structures outside the city. More than 150 other locally and nationally prominent architects and engineers are also represented, generally by 10 or fewer drawings.

The Society’s ephemera collections include lottery tickets, trade cards, billheads, tobacco labels, theater playbills and countless other types of material that were created for temporary use but have survived to illuminate everyday life and popular culture. A highlight is the Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Art, assembled over a forty-year period by the tireless Mrs. Landauer (1874-1960) and arranged alphabetically into 100 product categories, such as Banking, Food, Hotels, Theatrical Enterprises, and Transportation.

The manuscript collections include the papers of the powerful elite; most of the civil, religious and military figures covering the colonial era and the nation's early years up to the start of the 20th century; the papers of New York's wealthy landowners and merchants; and the diaries, correspondence, and ephemera of everyday people. Among the many prominent collections are papers of the Livingston, Beekman, Rutherfurd and Alexander families, and individuals such as Cadwallader Colden, John Jay, Horatio Gates, Rufus King, Albert Gallatin, and Aaron Burr. In addition, are several collections of prominent New Yorkers from later periods such as William Sulzer, Harmon Goldstone, activist Shirley Hayes and preservationist and journalist Margot Gayle.  
 

From small dry goods stores, commission merchants and tradesmen to large banks and shipping firms, business records make up an enormous segment of the collections and document New York’s growth as an economic center from the 17th into the 20th century. Noteworthy collections include correspondence of New Amsterdam merchant Govert Loockermans, and mercantile records of the Beekman, Hendricks and Leverich families, as well as Quaker merchant Isaac Hicks, Ogden, Ferguson and its related partnerships, Brown Brothers Harriman, John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, and the records of the American Institute of the City of New York for the Encouragement of Science and Invention.

One of the great, and growing, strengths of the department’s collections is records of churches, benevolent societies, educational groups, and art unions that have reached out to New York’s neediest populations and fostered the cultural life of the city over many generations. Within the scope of these organizations are the New York Mariner’s Church, Broadway Tabernacle Church and Society, the Ladies’ Christian Union, the New York Manumission Society, the Colored Orphan Asylum, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows, the Children’s Aid Society, the New York Foundling Hospital, the Leake & Watts Children’s Home, the Traveler’s Aid Society of New York, the Emergency Shelter, the New-York African Free School, the Public School Society, the Southern Famine Relief Commission, the Artists’ Fund Society, and the American Art Union.

Documenting the greatest triumphs of the nation and some of its darkest days, the manuscript collections contain rich sources on military history stretching from the French and Indian War through World War II. Collections are wide ranging and include the letters and pocket diaries of common soldiers, the official and private papers of commanding officers, and official documentation such as orderly books, muster rolls and regimental records. Within this vast subject are the papers of men such as Horatio Gates, Alexander McDougall, Richard Varick, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, Franz Sigel, David E. Cronin, G. Creighton Webb and James Harbord. Among the groups and organizations represented are the 7th Regiment, the United States Military Philosophical Society, the Union Defense Committee of the City of New York and the Naval and Military Order of the Spanish-American War. Of particular note is also the Naval History Society Collection which captures the history of the American Navy from the American Revolution through the Civil War and contains a collection of John Barry manuscripts as well as the papers of Gustavus V. Fox, John Ericsson, Henry A. Wise and many other significant naval figures.

The institutional archive includes records relating to the history of the New-York Historical Society from its beginnings in 1804 up until the present day. The materials include minutes, correspondence, architectural plans, photographs, and exhibition records. Many photographs from the New-York Historical Society have been digitized and can be located here.

The Klingenstein Library of the New-York Historical Society holds among its many resources a substantial collection of manuscript materials documenting American slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world. The 14 collections on this website are among the most important of these manuscript collections. They consist of diaries, account books, letter books, ships’ logs, indentures, bills of sale, personal papers and records of institutions. Some of the highlights of these collections include the records of the New York Manumission Society and the African Free School, the diaries and correspondence of English abolitionists Granville Sharp and John Clarkson, the papers of the Boston anti-slavery activist Lysander Spooner, the records of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, the draft of Charles Sumner’s famous speech The Anti-Slavery Enterprise and an account book kept by the slave trading firm Bolton, Dickens & Co.

Click here to view the full collection.

This site on Flickr highlights a selection of images from the historical records of the Children's Aid Society. The charitable organization was founded in New York City in 1853 to aid, educate and provide lodging for poor children in the city, and/or to place them in foster homes or with employers outside of the city. The entire collection has been rehoused and processed and a finding aid, or guide to the collection, can be located here. The select images portray children participating in activities at CAS facilities as well as children leaving on the "Orphan Trains." Some annual reports, personal diaries, intake volumes, broadsides and pamphlets have also been included.
 
Click here to view the full collection.
 

This digital collection consists of selected images from the New York Foundling Hospital. The Foundling opened in 1869, under the auspices of the Sisters of Charity, as a Catholic haven for abandoned babies. It was one of the principal institutions sending children to live with families in the country, in a program known today as the "orphan train." The collection documents the programs and administration of the New York Foundling Hospital, 1869–2009, and the St. Agatha Home for Children, which operated separately from the Foundling beginning in 1884, before merging into the Foundling in 1977. The collection has processed and a finding aid, or guide to the collection, can be found here. Images include photographs of Foundling facilities and activities, reproductions of pamphlets, and reproductions of notes left with children entrusted to the Foundling.
 
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Brooklyn Revealed offers a photographic tour of Brooklyn, through which visitors will learn about individual neighborhoods as well as the origin of more than 100 Brooklyn street names. The photographs, all of which come from the collections of the New-York Historical Society's Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, are paired with historical descriptions researched and written by New-York Historical's librarians. In instances where information about a specific street is inconclusive, visitors to the site are invited to submit their own ideas about how the street got its name. Visitors are also encouraged to submit the names of streets not included on the site.
 
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Typescript of over 1,400 pages with approximately 650 accompanying illustrations written and compiled by Marion Mahony Griffin (1871–1961), architect, designer, delineator and artist, with her husband Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937), architect, landscape designer and city planner. Their architectural practice spanned almost four decades on three continents. The Magic of America: Electronic Edition collates in a digital format all the texts and illustrations from the three known copies of the work, including the New-York Historical Society's copy. The electronic edition thus represents the most complete and accessible version currently available of this important architectural document.
 
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In 1787 the New York Manumission Society created the African Free School with the primary goal of educating black children. It began as a single-room schoolhouse with about 40 students, the majority of whom were the children of slaves, and taught them a variety of practical subjects. By the time it was absorbed into the New York City public school system in 1835, it had educated thousands of children, including many who went on to become notable leaders.
With the support of the Russell Sage Foundation, the New-York Historical Society has launched a comprehensive website, showcasing actual examples of students’ work from 1816 through 1826, offering an unparalleled glimpse into the little-known history of African-American life in New York City in the late-18th and early-19th centuries as well as pedagogical techniques used at that time.
 
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Two thousand images highlighting 12 collections of prints, posters, photographs, manuscripts and ephemera relating to the Civil War are featured on the Library of Congress American Memory site. This project (1998–2000) was undertaken in collaboration with NYU and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
 
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On this website, we are making available previously unpublished manuscript documents by, to, or about Alexander Hamilton; that is, all manuscripts we have located that were not published in the major collections of Alexander Hamilton's papers, including The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, edited by Harold C. Syrett (New York, Columbia University Press, 1961–1987), and The Law Practice of Alexander Hamilton: Documents and Commentary, edited by Julius Goebel, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964–1981). The images and transcripts provided here are documents from the New-York Historical Society and the Gilder Lehrman Collection.
 
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This project was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and co-administered by N-YHS and NYU. It contains digital images of historical documents that preserve the words of hundreds of eyewitnesses to the American Revolution in and around New York City. This digital archive includes the collection of maps by George Washington's cartographers, Robert Erskine and Simeon DeWitt, the Alexander Family Papers, and all broadsides published from 1776 and 1783 in the N-YHS collections.

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 The New-York Historical Society's manuscript collections contain over 2 million items of archival materials, including family papers and organizational and business records. This website presents a selection of collections that document the lives of important New Yorkers and Americans as well as average citizens.
 
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 The extensive photograph collections at the New-York Historical Society are particularly strong in portraits and documentary images of New York-area buildings and street scenes from 1839 to 1945, although contemporary photography continues to be collected. This website presents photographic prints and negatives depicting New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
Click here to view the full collection