Digital History>Reference Room>Historically Significant Images in American History

Historically Significant Images in American History

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Ad*Access
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/
Collection of over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955.

Emergence of Advertising in America
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/
Searchable database of more than 9,000 images in the collection of the Duke University Library.

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African Americans (also see Slavery)

African American History Through the Arts
http://cghs.dade.k12.fl.us/african-american/index.htm
A student-created site that includes images from traditional African art, Africans in European art, pre-Civil War art, images since Reconstruction, and the Twentieth Century.

Digital Schomburg: Images of African Americans from the 19th Century
http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/images_aa19/
A selection of visual resources dealing with the Civil War, Reconstruction, cultural expression, education, family, labor, and religion.

Photo Tour of the Civil Rights Movement
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/mlk/movement/PT/phototour.html
Images from the national civil rights movement and events that happened in the Seattle area.

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Architecture

Great Buildings Collection
http://www.greatbuildings.com/
Documents a thousand buildings and other structures, such as bridges, with images, drawings, and downloadable 3-D models

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Art

AICT: Art Images for College Teaching
http://www.mcad.edu/AICT/html/index.html
Royalty-free art resources for educators.

Art History Resources on the Web
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHLinks.html
Links to art history resources on the Internet.

Visual Resources Collection, University of Michigan
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/histartvrc/
The Visual Resources Collection from the University of Michigan contains nearly two million images.

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Books and Pamphlet Images

Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/dp/pennies/home.html
Over 8,000 individual items, including major dime novel series (such as Frank Leslie's Boys of America, Happy Days and Beadle's New York Dime Library) and story papers like the New York Ledger and Saturday Night.

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Canada

CanPix Gallery
http://www.nelson.com/nelson/school/discovery/images/ncddimag.htm
A searchable database of over 3,500 pictures and audiovisual resources in Canadian studies.

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Civil War

TreasureNet Historical Image Collection
http://www.treasurenet.com/images/
Historical photographs and prints dealing with the Civil War and westward expansion.

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Daguerreotypes

America's First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/daghtml/daghome.html
More than 650 photographs dating from 1839 to 1864, including many portrait daguerreotypes produced by the Mathew Brady studio.

Daguerreotypes at Harvard
http://preserve.harvard.edu/exhibits/daguerreotype/intro1.html
A collection of images from Harvard's libraries, museums, and archives.

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Ethnicity

Ethnic Images
http://www.balchinstitute.org/
A variety of multimedia exhibits from the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, including ethnic images in advertisements, comics, and toys and games, as well as on Chinese Americans, Italian Americans, Japanese Americans, and Polish Americans.

19th Century Images, with commentary by Roland Marchand
http://historyproject.ucdavis.edu/imageapplication/MarchandMinor.cfm?Major=IM
Images illustrating the experiences of a variety of 19th century immigrant groups as well as nativist reactions. This is part of a larger collection of images on variety of topics in U.S. history, which is located at: http://historyproject.ucdavis.edu/imageapplication/MarchandMajors.cfm

HarpWeek
http://immigrants.harpweek.com/ChineseAmericans/4ItemsByIndex/AntiChineseTopPage.htm
Images and texts dealing with the Chinese American experience, 1857 through 1892, in the pages of the popular magazine Harper's Weekly.

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Federal Government Images

American Memory
http://memory.loc.gov
Collections of images on such topics as the Western United States, woman's suffrage, the Texas border, the Spanish American War, small town life in the Middle Atlantic states, the San Francisco earthquake, Presidents and First Ladies, prairie settlement in Nebraska, New York City, Jazz, the natural environment, and the Great Plains.

National Archives
http://www.nara.gov/exhall/exhibits.html
Online exhibits offer images of essential documents, along with photographs and posters.

Picturing the Century
http://www.nara.gov/exhall/picturing_the_century/home.html
Photographs from every decade of the 20th century.

USDA Historical Photos
http://www.usda.gov/oc/photo/histfeat.htm
A selection of images taken during the Farm Security Administration era, 1937-1943.

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Holocaust

Simon Wiesenthal Center
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/pages/
Extensive collection of images dealing with the Nazis and the Holocaust.

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Maps

Antiquarian Maps
http://web.reed.edu/resources/library/maps/
An easy to use collection of historical maps.

David Rumsey Collection
http://www.davidrumsey.com/
More than 2,000 high resolution maps, primarily from the 18th and 19th centuries, with zoom-in capabilities.

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Medicine

National Library of Medicine
http://wwwihm.nlm.nih.gov/
Access to the nearly 60,000 images in the prints and photograph collection of the History of Medicine Division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. The collection includes portraits, pictures of institutions, caricatures, genre scenes, and graphic art in a variety of media, illustrating the social and historical aspects of medicine.

History of the Public Health Service
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/phs_history/contents.html
A photographs illustrating the history of the Public Health Service.

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Music

Historic American Sheet Music
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sheetmusic/
More than 3,000 images of sheet music published in the United States between 1850 and 1920.

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Paintings

Early American Paintings
http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/Early_American/
Early American paintings from the Worcester Art Museum.

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Photography

American Photography: A Century of Images
http://www.pbs.org/ktca/americanphotography/
The companion site to the PBS documentary.

American Museum of Photography
http://www.photographymuseum.com/
A virtual museum of the history of photography.

Masters of Photography
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/index.html
Images for non-profit, educational use.

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New Deal

New Deal
http://newdeal.feri.org/library/index.htm
An extensive collection of images of the 1930s sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

American from the Great Depression to World War II
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html
More than 113,000 photographs from the collections of the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information Collection.

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Political History

Images of American Political History
http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/
More than 500 public domain images.

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Portraits

Early American Digital Library
http://earlyamericanimages.com/
Copyrighted engravings of maps, portraits, and battles.

National Portrait Gallery
http://www.npg.si.edu/inf/index.htm
The site includes exhibits on American presidents and on notable women.

Portrait Gallery: University of Texas
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/portraits/portraits.html
An extensive selection of public domain portraits of historical figures from the Perry-Castañeda Library, University of Texas at Austin.

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Radicalism

American Radicalism
http://digital.lib.msu.edu/Exhibits/Collection.cfm?ID=1&SectionID=1&DBaseID=1
Scans of images from Michigan State University's American Radicalism collection.

Free Speech Movement Archives
http://www.fsm-a.org/
Photographs documenting the history of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley.

Red Scare
http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/redscare/
Images of the period from the Armistice in November of 1918 to the collapse of hyper-inflation in mid-1920 arranged by subject and chronology.

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Science and Technology

Science Service
http://americanhistory.si.edu/scienceservice/
Images representing 20th century scientific research in period periodicals.

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Slavery

Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/cwc/BeyondFaceValue/index.htm
Images of slavery on Confederate currency.

The Face of Slavery
http://www.photographymuseum.com/faceof.html
Images of 19th century African American life.

Images of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
http://gropius.lib.virginia.edu/SlaveTrade/
An extensive collection of images of Africa, the slave trade, and slavery compiled by Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite, Jr.

Slavery in the Western Hemisphere
http://cghs.dade.k12.fl.us/slavery/default.htm
A student-produced collection of images of slavery in the Americas.

Virginia Runaways.
http://www.uvawise.edu/history/runaways/
A digital database of over 2,000 runaway and captured slave and servant advertisements from 18th-century Virginia newspapers compiled by Tom Costa.

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Southwest

Images of the Southwest
http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/images/library-images.html
Multimedia exhibits documenting the history of the American Southwest drawing upon the collection of the University of Arizona Library.

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States

California Heritage Collection
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CalHeritage/
Over 28,000 images illustrating California history and culture from the University of California at Berkeley's Bancroft Library

Colorado Digitization Project
http://www.cdpheritage.org/
Links to Colorado museums and archives offering historical images.

Early Illinois Women
http://www.rsa.lib.il.us/~ilwomen/
Images of women pioneers, women in public life, women and work, and women during wartime.

Florida State Archives Photographic Collection
http://www.dos.state.fl.us/fpc/
Over 80,000 online images documenting Florida's history.

Image Repository: Hawaiian Newspapers, War Records, and Trust Territory
http://128.171.57.100/
An extensive collection of photographs drawn from newspapers and archives documenting Hawaii's history.

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Trials and Court Cases

Famous Trials
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/ftrials.htm
in-depth accounts of America's most famous trials from the 17th century onward, presented by the University of Missouri - Kansas City School of Law and Prof. Douglas Linder, including extensive images, cartoons, and photographs.

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World War I

Images of the Great War
http://www.westfront.de/

World War I: Trenches on the Web
http://www.worldwar1.com/

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World War II

African American Images During World War II
http://webgopher.nara.gov/11/inform/dc/audvis/still/aframww2/
Photographs from the National Archives.

America from the Great Depression to World War II
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html
More than 113,000 photographs from the collections of the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information Collection.