For sale: A unique snapshot of US history

Photographers from Brown Brothers hauled their cameras from Ellis Island to Broadway to Yankee Stadium to snap pictures of street urchins and socialites, hard hats and mobsters, athletes and entertainers, capturing nearly every aspect of New York City life in the first six decades of the 20th century.

Now, the more than 1 million photographs and negatives that the company compiled are up for sale.

While the collection includes tens of thousands of images of the Big Apple, the bulk of the photographs capture "every conceivable historical personality and event and place" across the United States and beyond from the turn of the previous century through the 1950s, said Eric Caren, a prominent historic documents collector who has been contracted to sell the collection.