PBA Galleries

Original journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition

Harry S. Truman Memoirs inscribed to David D. Lloyd

Twain's Following the Equator 1st edn

Mark Twain Life on the Mississippi 1st Edition

US Army Quartermaster letter copy book 1881

Lightbourn's Annual for the US Virgin Islands

Edward Vischer's Drawings of the California Missions, Jeanne Van Nostrand

Acts of the Virginia Assembly 1850s

The Code of Virginia 1849

Leters of Fages & Serra.

North American Wild Flowers by M.V. Walcott

Walker's Manual of California Securities 1911

Edward Wallace The Oregon Question & International Law

Told by the Pioneers WPA Oral History Project

Washington, D.C. 1869 Awaiting President Grant’s Inauguration

Washington, D.C., 1826 Army Lt. hates the pretentious capital city

Washington, D.C., 1829 Famous Hotel in Andrew Jackson’s Washington

Original issues of The Wasp

Daniel Webster Autograph Letter Signed

Booklets by Carl Wheat

Scarce guide to jurors 1868

Wiltsee Gold Rush Steamers of the Pacific

Winterbotham's View of the US with the rare DC map

Milwaukee Business Directory 1858

Dinner Menu & photo of Railway Guns 1919

Patriotic WWII sheet music

Scrapbook on atomic energy Washington elections etc

World War II V-Mail file

Photos of WWII Invasion of Germany

Wright's Campaign against the Indians

1795 Philadelphia Patrician seeks Black “servant” in slave-free state

1800 Free Black woman given justice in the Northwest Territory of Ohio

1807 Boston ad for Mississippi runaway slave, with rare picture

1817 First congressional report on “African Colonization"

Slavery laws of U.S. 1827

1828 Andrew Jackson’s “Negro Speculations, Traffic in Human Flesh”

1835 US diplomat in Cuba gives lukewarm aid to imprisoned Black sailors

1838 Abolition Of Slavery in the South American colony of British Guiana

1839 Important legal letter of the famed Amistad slave trials

The Liberty Bell - Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair

1844 Anti-slavery Newspaper of the first American Peace Movement

1844 Slaves ‘permitted’ to join Baptist church, North Carolina

1844-45 American Unitarian Ministers debate Slavery

1846 1st African-American M.D. debunks myth of slave longevity

1849 Opposes radical pro-slavery legislation in Georgia

1850 Superb Virginia letter on insubordinate slaves, by Calhoun’s alter ego

Naval, Africa, anti-slavery, Andrew Foote

1850 Young Virginia slaves to be sold on the Richmond auction block

1853 Anti-Slavery Missionary in Kentucky

1853 “Colored Slave Lunatic” from Virginia jail to Asylum

1856 Before Dred Scott: Abolitionist tried for aiding slave escape

Inscribed to Richard Henry Dana Jr. 1856 anti-slavery work

1857 Alabama farmer paid $7.50 for “catching a negro” fugitive slave

1857 Maryland white man arrested for “conspiring” to lynch jailed slave

1859 Charleston dealer in “Negro Goods” for plantation slaves

1859 Last American Slave Ship

1860 First African-American M.D. mobilizes New York Blacks for voting rights during Lincoln election; only known copy

HIstory of Slave Trace 1860

1860 White Woman jailed in Georgia for aiding escape of Black Slave - her lover

1862 Slave Emancipation celebrated at Wisconsin School for the Blind

1864 Giving shelter to “contrabands”, freed slaves, in Civil War Illinois

1864-66 Inside the Freedmen’s Bureau: Letters from a Massachusetts clerk in North Carolina

1869 New York teacher of “Darkies” in Tennessee: “…rebels are all quiet”

Carte-de-visite photograph of 1st Black voter, IL

1872 Buffalo Soldier Discharge in Indian Territory, signed by Indian Wars hero

872 Missionary Doctor at “Colored” Hospital, New York City

1874-96 Virginia's Hampton Institute and its Jubilee Singers

Famed Fugitive Slave as the first African-American Magician

African-American, music, Virginia

Black Minstrels, African-American, Music

1885-1899 John Brown Grave and Frederick Douglass Monument

Rare 1886 defense of Black Freemasons

A mystery surrounds the virtually unknown career of Leroy Nicholas Darlington Pickett, one of the few “serious” African-American composers of the late 19th century. As noted in the 1882 listing above, Pickett was Director of “Donovin’s Original Tennesseans” a popular Black Minstrel troupe, before composing three songs: Copies at the Library of Congress of his Forest Roamer (1883) and Among the Lilies (1884) show the drawing of a theatrically-handsome Black man. The sheet music of this 1887 Waltz, possibly his last composition, written while working with the younger DeLany at Wilberforce, omitted Pickett’s picture and gave no hint that the composer was Black. That same year, according to British press reports, a man calling himself L.N.D. Pickett came to England as organist and singer of a Black troupe of Jubilee singers. In 1891, this man was arrested for sending “libelous, menacing letters” to a white woman, a well-known London singer whom he had never met, threatening, “I will either marry you or kill you.” When brought to trial, the defendant entered a plea of insanity and listed his given name as Charles. The outcome of the sensational trial was not reported, but Pickett supposedly returned to America that year, never to be heard from again, entirely forgotten by history – not even mentioned in Monroe Trotter’s 1878 book on Black musicians. Like all of Pickett’s published compositions, this sheet music, of special interest because of the association with Delany and Wilberforce, is very rare.

1891 Confederate General’s “Faithful Slaves

Black Singing Troupe, San Francisco

1897 Black British Minister records “horror” of Negroes in America

1899 Most respected African-American civil servant in Washington

1900 Annotated photo of ex-slave who became a wealthy Ohio Black leader

1900 Black Indiana Poet Praises Black Musician

(1905 Advertisement for rare ‘Voice of Negro’ literary magazine

2 pp. letter from Robert Lee Brokenburr

African american

1910 Williams’ Jubilee ‘Colored Singers’ Song Book

1911 Black master Photographer at Tuskegee

1913-36 “Negro Buildings” at Fairs and Expositions

1913-44 Atlanta University, from Emancipation anniversary to United Negro College Fund

1916 Encyclopedia of African Methodism, signed by eminent Black sociologist

From Slavery to Wealth: The Life of Scott Bond

3 NAACP calendars from 1917, 1956, and 1975

1918-19 First African-American movie project

1925 On Trail of Negro Folk Songs, co-author’s association copy of a musical classic

1926-41 “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance on Black Theater in Theatre Arts Monthly

1927 Black Novelist on Negro Life in the Harlem Renaissance

1928 'Father of Black History' Carter Woodson

1929 California Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs fights “prejudice, segregation, humiliation”

1929 Early African folk tales by an influential French novelist and poet

1930 Black author’s history of largest attempted Slave Escape in US History

1930 Negro Membership In American Labor Unions, scarce Urban League study

1931 French risqué magazine features Negro Jazz-age entertainers in Paris

1931 Young Louis Armstrong photograph