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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 Repealed in 1933, this brief period in American history, known as Prohibition, created a cultural movement that defined a decade and was known for its speakeasies, mob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.

During the early nineteenth century, the Second Great Awakening swept across the United States. The Protestant religious revival offered a backdrop for three key movements that helped define the nineteenth century. Abolition, temperance, and spiritualism were seen as social catalysts to form a more perfect society.

While the identity of most portraits in the Walter collection of Indian paintings at the Morgan remains obscured, an eighteenth-century portrait (M.1074.1) identifies the subject as “Nur Jihan Begum” in Nagari script. This painting has since been interpreted as an idealized portrait, “an imaginative rendering.” Such portraits were often commissioned by the Rajput courtiers in Rajasthan.

The Morgan holds in its collection two letters handwritten by Helen Keller in 1890, one of which is currently on view in the East Room of J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library. Keller’s lifetime of accomplishments, despite having lost her sight, hearing and speech at a very young age, are already familiar to most people. Yet this letter, written when she was only ten years old, provides extraordinary material evidence of her determination to overcome barriers to communication and engage with the outside world.

While searching the Morgan collections for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI)-related materials, I came across PML 185005. I was initially puzzled that a publication credited to American writer William Faulkner appeared in my “Philippines” keyword catalog search.