Search Results: Authors starting with U from Ian Brabner, Rare Americana (ABAA)

Lancaster: Press of the New Era, 1912. 35pp. 9 x 6 inches. Printed wrappers. Cover soil and some light handling to pages; good. Monograph on Italian-American neoclassical artist Luigi Persico (1791-1860), noted for his sculptures and stone-carved decorations for the exterior of the U.S. Capitol. Persico lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania from 1819 to 1824 and worked as a portrait painter before moving to Washington. In Lancaster, he met Congressman (and future president) James Buchanan who helped the sculptor win his commissions for the Capitol.

New York: Strohmeyer & Wyman, Publishers, 1898. Concave card with albumen photograph with printed captions. General margin-soiling; some images lightened or lightly-foxed; very good. Rice cultivation was a significant part of South Carolina's economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, with enslaved Africans serving as the primary labor force on rice plantations. This photograph, taken around 1898, shows how these plantations continued to rely on Black labor. The stereoview's title is printed on its verso in six languages, including Russian.

[Strasburg, Pennsylvania]: Strasburg Free Press Steam Job Print [1887]. [2]pp. Broadsheet. 9½ x 4½ inches. Ceam colored wove paper. Folds and creases; two short closed tears and minor abrasions; good. Here is a broadsheet program for an evening's entertainment at Massasoit Hall in Strasburg, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania sponsored by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The W. C. T. U. was a women-led mass social reform movement that promoted abstinence from alcohol along with evangelical Christianity. In order to get their message out to the men of Strasburg, many of whom were, no doubt, Civil War veterans, and to provide an alternative to their drinking, the W. C. T. U. here sponsors a program of music from the American Civil War or other patriotic songs and tableaux. The war had ended just over twenty years earlier, but the sentimental and stirring songs still resonated. The songs here include "Battle Hymn of the Republic;" "When Johnny Comes Marching Home;" "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp;" "The Rocky… Read More

[Lincoln University, Chester County, Pennsylvania, June 3, 1895]. [4]pp. Bifolium. 7¼ x 4½ inches. Gray stiff card stock with folded parchment paper wrap around; cord tie. Illustration vignette. Lower wrapper creased; very good. 1895 Class Day program of music and oratory from Lincoln University, an historically Black university in Pennsylvania founded in 1854. The day's activities included morning and evening exercises. The program was comprised of musical grand marches (including one by John Philip Sousa) and other musical interludes; "Salutations" in Latin and Greek; various orations, including one by a "Giftorian"; a valedictory, and benedictions. Orations by the students, whose formal commencement was the following day, were on such topics as psychology, politics, astronomy, mathematics, and geology. There were also an "Ivy Oration," a "Didactical Oration," and a "Class History." The program lists the Class of '95 class officers, members of the class executive committee, ushers (all… Read More

[Lincoln University, Pennsylvania: np, 1909]. [6]ff. Program Booklet. 6¼ x 5 inches. Flexible blue suede covers with gilt stamping on upper cover. Half tone illustrations and page decorations. Some toning; a very good, clean attractive copy. Illustrated 1909 graduation program from Lincoln University, the United States' first degree-granting historically Black university. The program contains the full morning, afternoon, and evening exercises which included addresses, various student orations, and songs. Includes a complete list of the 27 members of the Class of 1909 and the names of commencement speakers and committeemen. Half tone vignette illustrations include views of University Hall, Vail Memorial Hall, and the Mary Dod Brown Memorial Chapel.

[Pittsburgh] J.S. Butler, printer. 1836. Small broadside. 7½ x 4¼ inches. Previously trimmed, light foxing, else Very Good. Rare broadside from 1836 Western University of Pennsylvania, now the University of Pittsburgh. Thirteen addresses were given on such topics as chemistry, the tendency of mobs, society and culture in America, cultivated tastes and so forth. Likely unrecorded.  "The University's buildings, along with most of its records and files, were destroyed in a widespread 1845 fire that wiped out 20 square blocks of the most valuable part of Pittsburgh." (Wikipedia)

N.p.: [E.D. Pinaud], 1898. 16pp. Stapled booklet. 2 x 1 3/8 inches Near fine. Miniature trade calendar in the form of a tiny booklet for the year 1898 from Parfumerie E. D. Pinaud of Paris, France. Each month is illustrated with flowers well known to the perfumer, such as, Roman Heliotrope, Violette de Parme and Daphne. Hair tonics, soaps, and sachet powders are advertised. All illustrated by chromolithography.

[Boston, 1790]. Platemark: trimmed at lower left, 6¾ x 4½ inches. Sheet size: 8¼ x 5 inches. Laid paper; pale foxing to margins. Lettered around the top and bottom of the oval portrait are the words: "No. V] Massachusetts Magazine [Vol. II." [AND:] "Eripuit cælo flume; sceptrumque Tyrannis." ["He snatched the lightning from heaven, and the sceptre from tyrants."] Based upon the portrait made by the royal Manufacture Nationale at Sèvres between 1778 to 1779. For the Sèvres medallions, etc., Cf. Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, 365 and Plates 12 and 14. Stauffer 1369. Holden Sale 1422. Not in Weitenkampf.

[London:] Pub:...by M. Jones, Paternoster Row, 1805. Paper window mount. Platemark trimmed: 6¼ x 3;⅞ inches. Large wove sheet with light and moderate foxing; very ample margins and with a watermarked date of 1892: 12 x 9½ inches. Unusual and scarce stipple engraved portrait of Benjamin Franklin. "Full bust, head three-quarters to left. Oval, with drapery on either side. Over the oval a representation of a kite and electric storm; at the bottom of oval a kneeling Indian girl and the Angel of Fame blowing a trumpet." (Carson) Carson Collection 1739. Not in Weitenkampf. Not in Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture.

[Paris, ca. 1847-1849?]. Platemark: 11 x 7;⅞ inches. Sheet size: 11¾ x 8¾ inches. Mounting remnant to verso; bottom edge slightly irregular; foxing. Proof? Portrait engraving by Gustave Lévy (1819-1894), signed "Gravé par Gve. Levy" and showing Franklin thrusting his right hand into the breast of his jacket. To the French, Franklin was the "New World Ambassador" and his fur cap "attracted the attention of the French public, who associated it with a similar hat worn by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau." (Page Talbot, Benjamin Franklin, In Search of a Better World) Weitenkampf 226?. Sellers, Franklin in Portraiture, Cf. Plate 43 ("probably an idealized portrait of Jean Jacques Rousseau"). Cf. Mitchell Sale 728-729.

[Likely Great Britain. ca.1840s-1860s]. Oil on Canvas. Untitled [Landscape with Pot Bank]. 62cm x 76cm unframed. (Approx. 241⁄2 x 30 inches). Professionally cleaned, conserved and re-lined (full treatment report with photo documentation available on request). Nineteenth century landscape painting documenting a "Pot Bank" or pottery manufactory, an industrial complex of buildings for the commercial manufacture of ceramics. Additionally, ten workers-men women and children, including a supervisor in an elevated loading bay-inhabit the smoke-filled scene, the soot from the kilns and chimneys rising in columns to meet a cloud-filled sky. This painting depicts three large bottle ovens or kilns for firing ceramics. On the right, there can be seen a smaller glost oven for firing glazed wares. The pot bank depicted here is typical of those seen in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England, the center of the English pottery industry. According to decorative arts and material culture scholar Prof. J. Ritchie… Read More

[New York. 1962]. 8 x 10 glossy photograph with pasted caption to verso. Some cockling; light stains to verso. This poignant image shows Elaine Bibuld and her three children, ages 6 to 10, ascending subway stairs, under a police escort in December 1962. In the early 1960s, the Bibuld family relocated from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights to Park Slope after a fire. Their children transitioned from an excellent school to one lacking in academic standards and extracurricular activities, primarily serving African American and Puerto Rican students. Elaine and Jerry Bibuld, members of Brooklyn's CORE chapter, protested this educational inequity by removing their children from the segregated school and placing them in an all-white school in Bath Beach. This act, deemed illegal, sparked a three-month-long protest, making the Bibuld case a significant focal point for desegregation efforts in the city. (Photo of the Week: An Interracial Family in 1962, accessed online) The caption reads: "Mrs.… Read More