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Amidst the soft ambiance of the North Room, formerly Belle da Costa Greene’s office, the ancient western Asian cylinder seals stand as witnesses to history. Each seal is a window into the past, revealing the sophisticated artistry and profound symbolism cherished by the people of Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers.

On the front page of La Nation on April 15, 1896, Siegfried Bing (1838–1905), the famous Parisian dealer in Japanese fine and decorative arts, was described by an anonymous critic as a man with foresight—a man driven by the desire to demonstrate the value of the overlooked and undiscovered.

In the late eighteenth century, the Swiss dealer Peter Birmann assembled a monumental album of 475 miniatures, which he had removed from illuminated manuscripts. Named after the man to whom he sold the album, Daniel Burckhardt-Wildt (1752–1819), it remained in private hands for nearly two hundred years.

There’s an old adage in the theater that says plays are not written, they are rewritten. For most of the twentieth century that rewriting happened on the road during two-week stints known as tryouts. These trial runs, in cities like Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, gave new productions time away from the critical spotlight to get their acts together and avoid landing belly-up on Broadway.

Belle da Costa Greene achieved unparalleled status as a library director, collector, and curator during her lifetime. As scholars continue to uncover the complex layers of Greene’s life, two main aspects have risen to the forefront of her legacy—her position as the personal librarian of financier J. Pierpont Morgan, along with the luxuries and challenges this position provided, and her Black ancestry, complicated as it was by her decision to pass as white.

This essay serves as an expansion on the fall 2024 installation in the Rotunda that displays materials from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The objects on view provide a glimpse into the intersecting worlds of astrology, politics, and abolition during the Civil War years in America.

In 1974, the Morgan purchased a large collection of materials related to the painter Édouard Manet from the American scholar Mina Kirstein Curtiss. Curtiss had acquired them in Paris in the 1950s from Lucienne Tabarant, the daughter of the art historian and journalist Adolphe Tabarant, who published an early catalogue raisonné of Manet’s work, Manet: Histoire catalographique (1931), as well as other important texts on Manet and on the Impressionists.

In late 2023, the Morgan Library & Museum acquired Codex Lippomano (PML 199044) from the Sotheby’s auction of the T. Kimball Brooker collection. This manuscript is the earliest known example of a plaquette binding from the Italian Renaissance, integrating Classical antiquity and Islamic decorative styles within an Italian structure.

Reform movements took root as the Second Great Awakening swept across the United States. From abolition and temperance to labor and women’s rights, there was a call for the nation to be remade. By the 1840s, the political landscape was shifting and innovations in science were reinvigorating American culture.

In 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the sale and transport of alcohol. Repealed in 1933, this brief period in American history, known as Prohibition, created a cultural movement that defined a decade and was known for its speakeasies, mob runners, and bootlegging. The roots of Prohibition can be traced to 1826, and the founding of the American Temperance Society.