30,000 Historical Portraits from the New York PL

Historical and Public Figures: A General Portrait File to the 1920s includes “over 30,000 portraits of a wide-range of public figures, including political, religious, cultural, literary and artistic personalities, with an emphasis on the 16th through the 19th-centuries.” Research Buzz (Do you read Reasearch Buzz? It reports a lot of really interesting sources) reported on this new resource–a great example of digitizing library materials to make them available to a larger audience. Anyway, this database of pictures of people includes “original woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs, and, occasionally, photographs, but for the most part the portraits are printed pictures clipped from periodical publications from the mid-19th through the early 20th-century. ” I found 11 items when I searched for “Alexander Graham Bell,” including a diagram of his telephone. What a great resource for school reports!