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This circa 1840 print shows the view looking east down the inclined plane cut into Belmont Hill (Fairmount Park) for hauling railroad cars from the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia to Columbia on the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad. Two men watch the cars being hauled by cables from within the plane. The covered Columbia Railroad Bridge over the Schuylkill, completed in 1834, is visible in the background. In the foreground is a heavily wooded landscape, with the cityscape in the distance. The plane connecting the river with the rail line was part of a system of railroads and canals built ac...

This view of Podil (also known as Podol) is from Souvenir of Kiev, an early 20th-century album showing the main sites of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine and at that time one of the most important cities of the Russian Empire. The name Podil derives from an old Slavic word meaning "lowlands." Established before the city expanded into the surrounding hills, Podil stretches along the Dnieper River. It was where Kiev's trade, commerce, and industry originated and where craftsmen, merchants, and fishermen sold their wares. This image shows the area with its factories, churches, and homes...

This speech to the people of Senegal by Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) was delivered the day after his election as the first president of the newly independent republic. Senghor was born in what was then French West Africa. He was sent at a young age to a Catholic mission school, where he embraced French and European culture, but also felt the loss of his mother tongue and the pain of being torn from his African roots. He won a scholarship to pursue literary studies in France, beginning in 1928. In the 1930s and 1940s, he worked in France as a professor of Latin and French literature. W...

This satirical watercolor by the Italian artist Raffaello Jonni is part of a series of 79 original drawings by Jonni preserved at the Alessandrina Library in Rome. It portrays a hand trying to grab a safe labeled "Trieste" that is carried by Franz Joseph I (1830--1916), the aged emperor of Austria-Hungary. The hand represents a powerful Italy that is seeking to acquire Trieste, historically part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, during World War I, its main point of access to the sea. The Italian irredentist movement had been campaigning for the city's annexation since at least...

Historia general de las cosas de nueva España (General history of the things of New Spain) is an encyclopedic work about the people and culture of central Mexico compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499--1590), a Franciscan missionary who arrived in Mexico in 1529, eight years after completion of the Spanish conquest by Hernan Cortés. Commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, the manuscript consists of 12 books devoted to different topics. Book XI, the longest in the codex, is a treatise on natural history. Following the traditional division of knowledge common to many European e...