Our Collection

At the Institute’s core is the Gilder Lehrman Collection, one of the great archives in American history. More than 85,000 items cover five hundred years of American history, from Columbus’s 1493 letter describing the New World through the end of the twentieth century.

Civil War photograph collection: Brady, Gardner; Lincoln [separate inventory]

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Gilder Lehrman Collection #: GLC05111 Author/Creator: Place Written: [various places] Type: Photograph Date: 1856-1870 ca. Pagination: Order a Copy

Word processed inventory available. Approximately 2000 photographs, mostly period, from the Civil War era. Includes battles, portraits, group portraits of regiments and officers, medical photographs (3), retouched original prints or photographs with the prints made, salt prints, photographers proof prints, and 6 negatives (Lee, Longstreet, Porter, the Capitol). Places include Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Bull Run, Petersburg, Richmond, Port Hudson (La.), Edisto Island and Fort Sumter, among other military areas, and Washington, Springfield, New York, and others. Important images of Port Hudson, Knoxville (360 degree panorama) and Fort Nagley are either unique or extremely rare. Includes photographers' and artists' maquettes, some that show the effects of painting and re-photographing (mostly ex-Meserve). Many photographs are unmounted. Many with Meserve, Meredith, Handy, Ordway-Gardner (ex-Century Co.), Waud, Faux (Harpers Artist), or Fay (kept Lincoln tomb) provenance. The Ordway-Gardner prints, many with the stamp of the Century Company library, were used in printing the Photographic History of the Civil War. The Gardner-Ordway negatives went to the Library of Congress in 1943 by purchase. Some of the Century Co. photographs have research notes made concerning identification of the subjects.

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