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This photograph shows kindergarten teachers and pupils in a yard of the orphanage on Pushkinskaya Street in Brest-Litovsk, Poland (Yiddish, Brisk; present-day Brest, Belarus). After World War I and the Russo-Polish War that followed (1919-20), there were tens of thousands of Jewish orphans in Poland. The Joint Distribution Committee of American Funds for the Relief of Jewish War Sufferers (later the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, both names abbreviated as JDC) was formed in 1914 to send aid, including food, clothing, medicine, funds, and emergency supplies, to the stricken Jews ...

This atlas of portolan charts of the old and the new worlds consists of 16 double leaves made from fine white parchment, bound in costly red morocco leather (made from fine goatskin) with gold ornaments in oriental style. The important Portuguese mariner, cartographer, and painter Fernão Vaz Dourado is thought to have made the atlas in 1580, near the end of his life. It belongs to a class of late-16th-century cartographic masterpieces, which reflect the period's rising demand for cartographic works that were both visually impressive and useful for practical navigation. The atlas was comm...

This lithograph is a partial view of the Fairmount Waterworks, on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, one of America's earliest municipal water-treatment systems. Powered consecutively by steam engines, waterwheels, and pumps that lifted water to reservoirs on a hill (Faire Mount), the waterworks and its beautiful setting were a tourist attraction from the beginning. They are seen here from the forebay, the reservoir from which the water was drawn to run the equipment. The plant was designed by Frederick Graff, and the result was an innovative engineering success and beautiful buildings ...

This print shows two sculling barges on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Each barge has a crew of eight and a coxswain. In the background are Peter's Island and the Columbia Railroad Bridge. A boat house is on the shore of the island and a train is seen exiting the covered bridge. The Columbia Railroad Bridge, one of the oldest railroad bridges in the United States, was completed in 1834 after being commissioned by the state legislature for the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. The bridge spanned the Schuylkill River below Belmont Mansion in Fairmount Park. This print was used as ...

John Lewis Burckhardt (1784-1817) was born Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in Lausanne, Switzerland. His accounts of his travels in the Middle East in the early 19th century are among the earliest modern European descriptions of Syria, Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan. Upon finishing university studies in Switzerland, he went to England to enroll in Cambridge University, where he studied Arabic and Islam in order to prepare himself for a career as an explorer-adventurer. As his acquaintance Muhammad 'Ali Basha, ruler of Egypt, said of his adventurism, he possessed the "travelling madness." Burc...