Gloria Gilda Deak's comprehensive documentation of over a thousand maps, drawings, and urban views, selected from the New York Public Library's notable collection of Americana, makes her work a primary reference tool in the area of American historical prints. As such it will replace Stokes and Haskell's American Historical Prints, which for over half a century has been the chief reference work in this area.
For more than four centuries, graphic artists contributed to a wealth of woodcuts, engravings, etchings, aquatints, lithographs, and chromolithographs that serve today as indispensable documents in the study of America's history. In Deak's work a continuum of these images allows us to follow the cultural shaping of America from the time of the European discoveries to the end of the nineteenth century. Of particular interest are a German woodcut of New World natives, a gouache painting of Florida Indians in 1564, scenes of the Gold Rush, and nineteenth-century bird's-eye views of American cities.