Germany, Bremen, 1813-1866; Cologne, 1275-1774.

The collection assembled by H. J. Vinkhuijzen (1843-1910), a Dutch physician, and presented to the Library by Mrs. Henry Draper in 1911, consists in its entirety of over 32,000 pictures, from many sources, mounted in 762 scrapbooks. (The digital presentation will ultimately include them all.) The collection is remarkably diverse, depicting costume as various as the rough wool garments of Bronze age Etruscan warriors, the robes of Ottoman Turk court officials, and the elaborate uniforms of the preening armies of 19th-century Europe, the collection's special strength. The aesthetic quality of the images varies. There are prints seemingly cut from 17th-century festival books along with 19th-century chromolithographs, original watercolor compositions of some artistic merit, crude pencil drawings, and occasional photographs. Dr. Vinkhuijzen's usual strategy was to extract plates from illustrated books and magazines. He colored some of the printed images, and when printed images were lacking, drew others by hand. Some of the unsigned watercolors found in the collection may also be by him. He arranged his collection as loose images in boxes according to his own classification system; this organization is retained for browsing the digital collection. (Mounting the plates in scrapbooks was apparently accomplished by others after Dr. Vinkhuijzen's death.) The New York Public Library comprises simultaneously a set of scholarly research collections and a network of community libraries, and its intellectual and cultural range is both global and local, while singularly attuned to New York City. That combination lends to the Library an extraordinary richness. It is special also in being historically a privately managed, nonprofit corporation with a public mission, operating with both private and public financing in a century-old, still evolving private-public partnership. Last year, over 16 million New Yorkers visited the library, and over 25 million used its website. The NYPL Digital Gallery provides free and open access to over 640,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including not just photographs but illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and more. Digital projects and partnerships at NYPL are managed by the Digital Experience Group, a 21-person team of programmers, designers and producers dedicated to expanding and enhancing all points of computer and Web-mediated interaction with the library's collections, services and staff.

In 50 AD, the Romans founded Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (Cologne) on the river Rhine and the city became the provincial capital of Germania Inferior in 85 AD and one of the most important trade and production centers in the Roman Empire until it was occupied by the Franks in 462. By the end of the 12th century, the Archbishop of Cologne was one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1288, Cologne gained its independence from the archbishops and became a Free City within the Holy Roman Empire. The Free Imperial City of Cologne must not be confused with the Electorate of Cologne which was a state of its own within the Holy Roman Empire. Cologne's location at the intersection of the major trade routes between east and west as well as the south-north was the basis of Cologne's growth. By 1300 the city population exceeded 50,000. Cologne lost its status as a free city when all the territories of the Holy Roman Empire on the left bank of the Rhine were incorporated into the French Republic and Napoleon's Empire. The Cologne Cathedral, started in 1248, abandoned in 1560, was eventually finished in 1880 not just as a place of worship but also as a German national monument celebrating the newly founded German empire and the continuity of the German nation since the Middle Ages. By World War I, Cologne had grown to 700,000 inhabitants. During World War II, the Allies dropped 44,923 tons of bombs on the city, destroying 61% of buildings, causing 20,000 civilian casualties and wiped out the central part of the city. In 1945 architect and urban planner Rudolf Schwarz called Cologne the "world's greatest heap of rubble". The reconstruction lasted until the 1990s.

Nothing Found.