Library Acquisitions Reveal How History Is Recorded—and What It Leaves Out

Key Takeaways 

• Six manuscript, book, and photo acquisitions span histories from Edo-period Japan and Arctic exploration to early America, English criminal justice, colonial Mexico, and experimental photography in Los Angeles. 
• The acquisitions illuminate how history is documented, interpreted, and artistically expressed, revealing systems of scrutiny, environmental change, power, creativity, and human ambition across time and place.  
• Works range from an Edo-period Japanese manuscript and early Arctic photographs to personal letters, legal records, and experimental X-ray images—each offering a distinct lens on the past.  
• The acquisitions were made possible through the Library Collectors’ Council, a group that has contributed more than $8 million toward building the Library’s holdings since 1997.

The Huntington Library has acquired six extraordinary works—spanning Edo-period Japan, Arctic exploration, early America, English criminal justice, colonial Mexico, and experimental photography in Los Angeles—that offer new ways of seeing how history is recorded and remembered. 

The acquisitions were made possible thanks to the generosity of The Huntington’s Library Collectors’ Council. Since 1997, the group has contributed more than $8 million toward building one of the nation’s most significant research library collections. 

Together, the works reflect an expansive view of the past. Presented by curators grounded in deep historical context, they illuminate not only what happened, but how it was documented, interpreted, and preserved. 

“In word and image and artifactual presence, these materials capture ideas, individual and community lives, historic and quotidian events, and the natural world as it was,” said Sandra Brooke Gordon, Avery Director of the Library. 

Dutch and Chinese Merchants in Edo-Period Japan 

The illustrated Japanese manuscript, Nagasaki hyōsho zu–Karafune hyōsho zu (Illustrated Record of Nagasaki–Illustrated Record of Chinese Ships), dazzles with color and detail. The two manuscript volumes, containing 70 single or double-page gouache plates, offer detailed descriptions of Dutch and Chinese merchants’ compounds in Edo-period Nagasaki.  

“This book blends wonder and curiosity with a documentarian’s instinct, along with a quiet undercurrent of scrutiny,” explained curator of Pacific Rim Collections Li Wei Yang. Created in 1807 by Harufusa Tazawa, a little-known government official, the manuscript meticulously depicts the tightly controlled foreign enclaves of Nagasaki during Japan’s era of enforced isolation. Dutch traders, confined to the manmade island of Dejima, and Chinese merchants, restricted to their own walled quarter, were subjected to constant observation. 

The manuscript offers a pictorial record of architecture, trade logistics, and such intimate cultural details as European dining practices, surgical procedures, and the presence of Javanese servants—figures often overlooked in historical accounts. It also documents religious policing, including the practice of fumi-e, in which Japanese people suspected of being Christians were required to step on icons to prove that they were not Christian. 

For Yang, the work reveals a deeper truth: early modern Japan did not simply close itself off from the world—it engaged with it selectively, through systems of “careful containment and visual regulation.”  

The manuscript joins the Library’s growing Pacific Rim holdings on early modern cross-cultural exchange in East Asia. 

Photographing the Arctic 

William Bradford’s 1873 The Arctic Regions is a monumental record of an artistic expedition to the western coast of Greenland. The lavish volume includes 140 original albumen silver prints taken by master photographers John B. Dunmore and George B. Critcherson. Produced under extreme conditions aboard a ship equipped with a makeshift darkroom, the photographs depict glaciers, icebergs, ships in polar seas, and Inuit life with unprecedented clarity. At a time when most audiences knew the polar regions only through imagination or engraving, these images offered something radically new: observational truth. 

Yet the work is not purely visual. Its accompanying text, written by marine painter and expedition visionary William Bradford (1823–1892), guides readers through the images, animating them with movement and narrative.  

The book, said Daniel Lewis, Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology, is “a work of rhetorical joy.” Together, text and photographs create a layered record of exploration at the intersection of art and science. 

Lewis noted that the book carries an added resonance today. Many of the glaciers it depicts have receded or disappeared entirely. “You can’t see these things anymore,” he said, underscoring the volume’s value as a unique environmental record.  

Ambition and Ruin in Early America 

A cache of 44 letters from would-be English entrepreneur William Herries (1748–1811) tells a story of restless ambition and spectacular failure. 

Totaling some 200 pages, the letters chart the journey of a scion of a prominent British merchant family who set out in 1804 to make his fortune in the newly expanded United States. What emerges is not the story of a famous person, but something rarer: the voice of someone history nearly forgot. 

“Failures seldom get to tell their own stories,” said Olga Tsapina, Norris Foundation Curator of American History.  

Herries’ letters teem with life. He dines twice with Thomas Jefferson, observes the fragile politics of the early republic, and schemes relentlessly—proposing urban developments, trade networks, plantation enterprises powered by enslaved labor, and even building his own city. He encounters figures like Aaron Burr and John Jacob Astor, moves through cities and frontiers, and ultimately stakes everything on a plantation venture in Spanish-controlled Louisiana. It collapses. 

By 1811, Herries was ruined, blaming betrayal, circumstance, and miscalculation. His final letters, written in a trembling hand after a stroke, mark the end of a life defined by motion and aspiration. 

Tsapina said the collection is invaluable to historians because it provides a rare, granular account of transatlantic networks, early American expansion, and the precarious lives that unfolded beyond the official record. 

Records of a 17th-Century English Jail 

A collection of 42 loose manuscript “calendars” listing prisoners held in a Staffordshire jail between 1661 and 1689 is the largest known systematic run of such records for any English jail of the period. 

The documents are stark, offering an unparalleled view of how justice functioned on the ground. They record accusations of witchcraft, murder, theft, bigamy, and infanticide, often in vivid detail. “It is unusually late to see witchcraft charges in England, but the rest of the accused crimes listed were as common in their society as they are in ours,” said Vanessa Wilkie, William A. Moffett Senior Curator of Medieval Manuscripts and British History, noting the “shocking continuity” between past and present. 

The documents also illuminate a legal system different from our own. Prisoners were presumed guilty, and incarceration itself was not a punishment; instead, sentences ranged from whipping to execution. 

For historians, the value lies in the details: names, charges, and the identities of those who enforced the law in a place without a professional police force. It is, Wilkie suggested, a rare chance to reconstruct the lived reality of the justice system beyond formal court records and legal statutes. 

The newly acquired documents join The Huntington’s collection of Anglo-American legal history—one of the largest and most sophisticated in the world—which ranges from a rare draft of Magna Carta to 20th-century Los Angeles County Court records.  

A Conquistador’s Accusation 

Written in 1588 by the Spanish soldier Martín de Herrera, the unpublished, 60-page manuscript report is both a personal vendetta and a political indictment—a sustained attack on Álvaro Manrique de Zúñiga, the Viceroy of New Spain (Mexico), whom Herrera accuses of corruption, tyranny, and betrayal. 

Associate Curator of California and Hispanic Collections Diego Godoy did not shy away from the document’s tone. The manuscript, he said, is “a shot of pure, concentrated venom.”  

Yet it is precisely this intensity that makes the document so valuable. Herrera’s accusations—whether exaggerated or not—offer insight into the fractures within the Spanish Empire: tensions between local elites and centralized authority, between personal ambition and imperial control. 

The narrative is almost cinematic. Herrera, once a respected conquistador, was stripped of his property, pursued by authorities, and imprisoned in Havana, Cuba, where he composed his defense. The viceroy he attacked was ultimately removed from power, though later partially exonerated. 

For scholars, the manuscript reveals how narratives themselves could function as tools of power in the early modern world. 

The document joins others by conquistadors in the Library’s collections, including those in the Pizarro-de la Gasca collection, and by such colonial administrators as José de Gálvez and Juan Ruiz de Apodaca. 

Floral X-Ray Photographs 

A collection of 53 botanical X-ray photographs by Dr. Dain L. Tasker (1872-1964) offers a body of work that blurs the line between science and art. 

Created by the Los Angeles medical practitioner primarily in the 1920s and 1930s, the botanical photographs were produced using X-ray technology rather than a camera. Instead of capturing the surface of flowers, these images reveal their internal structures: veins, ribs, and hidden geometries rendered in luminous detail. 

“These works stand precisely at the point where science, art, and visual culture meet,” said Joel Klein, Molina Curator for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 

Tasker, a doctor by training and chief radiologist at Wilshire Hospital, approached photography experimentally. Influenced by artistic circles in Los Angeles, he began to see the X-ray machine not just as a diagnostic tool, but as an instrument capable of producing entirely new forms of visual expression. 

The resulting images are striking—simultaneously clinical and poetic. Preserved in a handcrafted copper-and-wood album, the collection offers insight not only into the finished works but also into Tasker’s creative process. 

For Linde Lehtinen, Philip D. Nathanson Senior Curator of Photography, the acquisition reflects The Huntington’s unique strengths: its ability “to connect botanical knowledge, artistic practice, and local history within a single institutional framework.” 

Since its founding in 1997, the Library Collectors’ Council has added immeasurably to the vitality and strength of the Huntington Library. Their work supports one of the world’s great independent research libraries, founded in 1919, which today holds more than 12 million items spanning the 11th through the 20th centuries. The Council’s collective giving has enabled the purchase of scores of rare books, manuscripts, and other bibliophilic treasures that inform the work of researchers and enlighten visitors to the Library’s exhibition halls. 

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About The Huntington 

The Huntington, a world-renowned cultural and educational institution, provides transformative experiences for a community of the curious. Founded in 1919 by Henry E. and Arabella Huntington, it supports research and promotes public engagement through its expansive library, art, and botanical collections. By cultivating dynamic scholarship, creating innovative programs for students and lifelong learners, and sharing its extraordinary resources, The Huntington invites all on a journey of discovery, insight, and connection. Only 12 miles from downtown Los Angeles, The Huntington is located at 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, California. Learn more at huntington.org.