History & Biography

This companion volume to the exhibition on view at the Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library features essays by the distinguished editors as well as by Alain Touraine, J. C. Davis, Krishan Kumar, and other leading European and American scholars of utopian thought and literature. Elegantly designed and richly illustrated with over 300 images from the collections of The New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this book explores the long tradition in thought and art envisioning the "perfect place," from classical antiquity to the present. Also included are an extensive bibliography of utopian literature, a bibliography of secondary 

Blacks were among the founding fathers and mothers of pioneer colonial settlements in the future boroughs, and they have remained integral players in the teeming daily drama of New York City. The Black New Yorkers: The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology recreates this unique relationship between a people and a city, and through it chronicles the worldwide African American struggle for freedom and human dignity. This richly produced volume offers a monumental assembly of powerful images and engrossing text that narrates the African American odyssey from colonial times to the present day. Resonant with tales of trial, courage, and triumph, vibrant 

In the years following the Russian Revolution, the Soviet government confiscated a significant portion of the personal wealth and palace property of the Romanov dynasty. During the 1920s and 1930s, much of that confiscated wealth and property was sold off by a government motivated by both ideology and financial need. The New York Public Library was one of the few institutional buyers of the nationalized books and manuscripts from Russian Imperial collections. A Dark Mirror catalogues and indexes for the first time more than 600 titles from the Library's collections that have an incontrovertible Imperial provenance. In addition, the 

In this visionary look into the future, based on a series of lectures delivered at The New York Public Library, Freeman Dyson argues that technological changes fundamentally alter our ethical and social arrangements and that three rapidly advancing new technologies--solar energy, genetic engineering, and world-wide communication--together have the potential to create a more equal distribution of the world's wealth. Written with passionate conviction about the ethical uses of science, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet is both a brilliant reinterpretation of the scientific process and a challenge to use new technologies to close, rather than widen, the gap between rich and poor.