 Hi, I'm Leon Miller, a curator with Tulane University Special Collections, a division of Tulane University Libraries. I'd like to share with you this carnival costume design from the 1892 Proteus Parade. It's not only a lovely little work of art, but also a working design, because you can see holes where the costumee and purists tacked it to a wall so the shop could refer to it while creating the costume. These costume designs from this period are full of life and color, but this design is monochromatic. He's just green with green arms and legs, green face paint and even green hair, and he looks kind of worried. What is this little green guy and what's he upset about? It turns out he's one of five green peas in a pea pod, being attacked by giant caterpillars. There's our little guy right in front, recoiling from a caterpillar that is lunging straight at him. Here are the four other costume designs from that 1892 Proteus float. People talk about things being as alike as peas in a pea pod, but note how each pea is completely different. Each costume was custom designed for the wearer and has its own body type, color scheme, different materials, different wings, different faces and facial expressions. So the designer was making each costume a unique character. This parade had 98 riders, so the designer created not only 18 floats and 98 costumes, but 98 individual unique characters for each rider to perform. That's a level of creativity we can hardly imagine today. Special Collections preserves more than 5,600 original Carnival float and costume designs from before World War II, comprising the largest collection in the world of designs from the Golden Age of Carnival. And all 5,600 of them are freely available to everyone online via the Tulane University Digital Library at digitallibrary.tulane.edu.