The following definitions in this resource have been compiled from CCAHA Disaster Recovery bulletins: Salvaging Books, Salvaging Art on Paper, and Salvaging Photographs.
About two decades after the American Civil War, President Grover Cleveland appointed a board to evaluate the state of the country's coastal defenses. That body, led by Cleveland's Secretary of War William Crowninshield Endicott, was known as the Endicott Board, and it eventually issued a report that...
The 1830s were a dynamic time in photographic experimentation. On either side of the Atlantic, scientists and amateur hobbyists alike traded techniques and guarded discoveries as they sought to capture the world around them in a still image. The first widely-used method of photography was introduced...
The most famous photograph of Sigmund Freud depicts the psychoanalyst standing with his signature cigar in a stark, chiaroscuro contrapposto. Perhaps fittingly for Freud, the portrait was actually taken by a relative: his son -in -law, a man named Max Halberstadt. Halberstadt —who’d married Freud’s...
Eastern State Penitentiary opened in 1829 and immediately set itself apart from other prisons of the time: instead of punishing inmates through physical abuse, Eastern State instituted a Quaker-inspired system of isolation meant to push prisoners toward reflection and change. For decades, Eastern...
Because of the constraints of photography in the art form’s early days, photographs of the Civil War tended to be either posed portraits, camp scenes, or—most haunting of all—images of a battle’s aftermath. Taken days or even weeks after the violent events had passed into history, the aftermath...
When photographer Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882) accompanied Lieutenant George Montague Wheeler on his “United States Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian” between 1871 and 1874, he crossed California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, and New Mexico with a portable darkroom, pulled...
Walk through West Philadelphia toward 39th Street and Woodland Avenue, and you’ll come across a landscape set apart from the industrial and residential areas that characterize much of the city. The Woodlands cemetery looks the same as it did in the 1840s, when Eli K. Price decided to build it on a...
