In 1871, John Wesley Powell appointed seventeen year-old Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh as artist and assistant topographer for his second expedition down the Colorado River.

Search over 800 digitized photographic prints, relief halftones, postcards, negatives, tintypes and pen and ink drawings originally collected by Dellenbaugh, created between 1871 and 1934 from the Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh collection of photographs and drawings of the Colorado River region, WA Photos 271.

Our first camp, Green River. by E.O. Beman, May 1871

Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh, 1872

Today’s forecast: Snow and areas of blowing snow. High near 34. Breezy, with a northeast wind between 13 and 22 mph, with gusts as high as 37 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. Total daytime snow accumulation of 5 to 9 inches possible. The Beinecke is open for business today.

Photographs of Alaska, ca. 1931

McKecknie & Oswald, Toledo, OH, ca. 1890

Photograph of Rachel Carson as a young girl, YCAL MSS 46

Photographs of hunting, mining and scenery in Yukon and Alaska, 1894-1905

The Seasons, 1792

Walter McClintock papers, 1874-1946

Now available in iTunes and on our website, a new podcast series featuring staff of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library reading letters and manuscripts from its American literary collections.

Episode One: Mark Twain to Walt Whitman

Listen online or via Yale University in iTunes.

Explore the personal notebooks, letters, clippings, and photos relating to the life of the American nature writer and environmentalist, Rachel Carson.

The Beinecke Library is pleased to announce a new exhibition, The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn, on view at the Library from January 13 to March 27, 2010, and as a web exhibition online.

Seven lady saints, 1985

During a career that has spanned more than thirty years, American book artist and writer Erica Van Horn’s body of work has included prints and works on paper, elaborately illustrated unique books, and printed and editioned works in a wide variety of formats.

The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn highlights the Beinecke Library’s outstanding collection of Erica Van Horn’s work, representing all aspects of the artist’s development, calling special attention to several themes: the artist’s frequent exploration of the details of her life, the objects around her, the routines of her days, and her most familiar relationships; her long fascination with the ways language both describes and creates community, even as it determines individual identity and shapes personal memory; her interest in the essential elements of narrative forms and structures, in both word and image; and her frequent use and re-use of saved or salvaged materials as the raw materials of her work, documenting her creative process and making both beauty and meaning from fragments and remainders.

For five decades, the photographer David Plowden of Winnetka, Illinois, has documented America’s vanishing landscapes and artifacts, his stunning black and white photographs forming an image of life in 20th-century urban and rural America.

Marion, Kansas, 1973

Plowden, who graduated from Yale College in 1955, has written and illustrated two dozen books and provided photographs for numerous others. In 1995, the Beinecke Library acquired a major portion of his archive of prints and research materials. The Plowden archive is part of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, noted for its outstanding collection of 19th-century photography of the American West, including works by A. J. Russell, Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and William Henry Jackson.

Browse nearly 2,000 black and white photographic prints digitized by the Beinecke Library. For additional information about Mr. Plowden’s career and work visit davidplowden.com.

A 2006 web exhibition and introduction to American utopias through literary works and manuscript collections in the Beinecke Library.

From the introduction:

Utopias in America, from the first Puritan settlements to the communes of the 1960s, share the goal of removal from the heart of civilization to the wilderness in order to establish

a new social order. Communities with European roots embraced the equalizing demands and freedoms of the New World’s open frontier, even as the new country claimed the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right. Though their inspirations varied—theocracy, millenialism, socialism, theosophism, behaviorism—they all reflected the American dream of a better world, now.

Visit No Place on Earth: America and the Utopian Dream.

Journal of Magellan's Voyage, circa 1525

The World Digital Library is a cooperative project of the Library of Congress, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and partner libraries, archives, and educational and cultural institutions from the United States and around the world. The project brings together on a single website rare and unique documents – books, journals, manuscripts, maps, prints and photographs, films, and sound recordings – that tell the story of the world’s cultures. The site is intended for general users, students, teachers, and scholars.

From the Beinecke and Yale University, discover the Journal of Magellan’s Voyage, dating from around 1525, detailing Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the world in 1519-22; Illustrations of China and Its People, 200 photographs documenting the people and landscapes of 19th century China; William Clark’s manuscript map of the American West completed in 1810; an Arabic primer of calligraphy, circa 1852-1853; an illustrated manuscript with 72 full-color hand-painted images of men and women of the various castes  found in Madura, India, 1837; drawings of the Amistad captives as they awaited trial in New Haven, Connecticut, circa 1839-1840.

The WDL operates in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. The actual documents on the site are presented in their original languages.

Learn more about the WDL at the Library of Congress…

And on Wikipedia…

And on YouTube…

Early Modern Paleography, a new blog from the Beinecke Library, celebrates the beauty and complexity of early modern English handwriting, with a daily offering from the Osborn Collection of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Ranging from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, Early Modern Paleography draws from letters, poetry, commonplace books, diaries, inventories, annotations, and other strengths of the Osborn collection.

The Prioresses Tale, from Chaucer, 1532

Join us each day, starting on January 1, 2010, to puzzle, to read, to transcribe, and above all to enjoy the enduring fascination of early modern British manuscript culture.

Browse papers, artifacts, and portraits of both Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th century French political thinker, historian, and author of Democracy in Americapublished in two volumes, 1835 and 1840) and Gustave de Beaumont, his friend and travel companion.

Tocqueville. From Le Charivari, 1849 June 20