Important History Images

Ad* Access Project
"The Ad*Access Project, funded by the Duke Endowment "Library 2000" Fund, presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines b...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

African-American Sheet Music
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Unrestricted Access

Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition: Collected Ephemera
Brown University's collections of materials on alcohol, alcoholism, temperance and prohibition are among the largest of their type in the country. This digital collection includes broadsides, sheet mu...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

American Memory
"Historical Collections for the National Digital Library." A project of the Library of Congress....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

American Memory - Photos & Prints
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Unrestricted Access

American Menu Collection, 1856-1930
Digitized collection of American menus from the New York Public Library. Search the entire collection or browse by date. Information about date and physical description is provided for each image. Sea...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

American Popular Songs Sheet Covers, 1890-1922
Digitized collection of nearly five thousand popular song sheet covers from the New York Public Library. Search the entire collection or browse by date. Information about date and physical description...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

AP Photo Archive
Also Known as: AccuNet/AP Multimedia Archive, AP Images
Image and Graphics Databases only available on this subscription. Contains over one million Associated Press photographs (with searchable captions) in two collections, downloadable as JPEG (jpg) image...   [more]
Holdings: Photos: 1826 to present. Graphics: 1999 to present. Audio files: 1920s to present.
Supplemental URLs
    new interface coming July 1, 2017

Archive of Early American Images
Nearly three thousand images from "relatively obscure books printed in Europe in the early modern period that have in them material related to the Americas" contained in the John Carter Brown Library....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

ARTstor
The ARTstor collection includes approximately 500,000 images of works of art, architecture and archaeology along with the necessary software to view the images, create personal groups of images and cr...   [more]
Supplemental URLs
    Help - technical help
    Help - general index
    Browse Penn collections in ArtStor
    Search ArtStor

Boston African Americana
Coordinated by the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston African Americana Project gathers visual and textual materials held by the Athenaeum, the Bostonian Society, Historic New England, and the Massachusetts...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

British Cartoon Prints
"Cartoons in the British Cartoon Collection at the Library of Congress were published primarily between 1780 to 1830, an era dominated by the prodigious talents and prolific efforts of such famous car...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

British Library Images Online
Collection of over 20,000 images of manuscripts, rare books, maps and more....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey
"Administered since 1933 through cooperative agreements with the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, and the private sector, ongoing programs of the National Park Service have recorded Ame...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

De Beeldbank
Databank of images from the National Archive of the Netherlands....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Densho Digital Archive of the Japanese American Experience
The Densho Digital Archive holds a wealth of visual history interviews and other materials that broadly document the Japanese American experience. These unique primary sources cover a span of history ...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Digital Scriptorium
The Digital Scriptorium is an image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts with contributions from multiple libraries including the University of Pennsylvania Rare Books and Manuscripts coll...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Digitales Bildarchiv - Institut fur Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der fruhen Neuzeit
A database of digitized images from the Middle Ages....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920
Also Known as: The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920
The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 - 1920 (EAA) presents over 9,000 images, with database information, relating to the early history of advertising in the United States. The materials, draw...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Empire online
Manuscript and printed materials pertaining to the history of colonialism, 1492-1962. Primarily British. ...   [more]
    record

Endangered Archives Programme - British Library
Digitized primary source materials collected and preserved worldwide....   [more]
Unrestricted Access
Supplemental URLs
    Endangered Archives Programme - Africa projects

Europhoto
This growing database comprises the collections of nine European news agencies from Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Denmark. It currently contains 1,000,000 images representing 10...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Evanion Catalogue of Victorian Ephemera
Catalogue to a collection of over 5,000 items of ephemera in the British Library. Images of many of the items are available online....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Freedom Summer Digital Collection
More than 25,000 pages from the Freedom Summer manuscripts -- enough to fill several file cabinets -- are available online. In them you will find official records of organizations such as the Student ...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

German History in Documents and Images
a comprehensive collection of primary source materials documenting Germany's political, social, and cultural history from 1500 to the present. It comprises original German texts, all of which are acco...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration and Cultural Exchange
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Google Image Search
Contains more than 425 million images indexed and available for viewing. Copyright restrictions may vary. Contact individual site owners to obtain the requisite permissions....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Historic Advertisements
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Unrestricted Access

Historic American Sheet Music (Duke University)
A digital collection of over 3,000 pieces of sheet music published between 1850 and 1920....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Images of America: A History of American Life in Images and Texts (Mid-Atlantic)
Also Known as: Local and Regional History Online (Mid-Atlantic)
- from Alexander Street Press
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International Mission Photography Archive
Historical images from Protestant and Catholic missionary collections, mid-19th- to mid-20th-century, worldwide. Includes photographs from Basel Mission, Catholic Foreign Mission Society of america, D...   [more]
Unrestricted Access
Supplemental URLs
    
    
    
    
    

Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive: Hearst Photographs
This collection of photographs from the Hearst Collection of the Los Angeles Examiner in the USC Regional History Collection, documents the relocation of Japanese Americans in California during World ...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

L'Histoire par l'image, 1789-1939
A rich and sophisticated database of French historical iconography, with accompanying textual analysis....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music (Johns Hopkins)
Collection of 29,000+ American popular song sheets from 1780-1960....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Life Photo Archive, 1860s-
Millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1860s to today. Includes both printed and unprinted photographs; most are now available to the public for the first time....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Medicine and Madison Avenue
This website explores the complex relationships between modern medicine and modern advertising, or "Madison Avenue," as the latter is colloquially termed. The Medicine and Madison Avenue Project prese...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Military Prints, Drawings, Watercolors and Ephemera from Brown University
15,000 individual prints, drawings and watercolors from The Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection. The artwork vividly documents all aspects of military and naval history, with emphasis on the history ...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Napoleonic Satires
Collection of several hundred British and Continental popular prints and ephemera designed to vilify Napoleon. ...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

NYPL Digital Gallery
NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, hi...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Parliament Rolls of Medieval England
Also Known as: Parliamentary Rolls
Eight million words of text, translation and introductions, recording all surviving records of English Parliaments from Edward I to Henry VII covering the years from 1272 to 1504. Includes scholarly ...   [more]

Penn Online Image Collections
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Unrestricted Access
Supplemental URLs
    Fine Arts Library Image Collection
    South Asia Image Collection
    Smith Collection: History of Chemistry
    Furness Theatrical Image Collection
    University Archives Digital Image Collection

Perseus Digital Library
Also Known as: Perseus
Perseus is an evolving digital library, engineering interactions through time, space, and language. The primary goal is to bring a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible. ...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Picture Collection Online
From the collections of the New York Public Library....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Political Americana (Cornell University)
Pop up blockers must be disabled to use database. "The collection consists of published material, ephemera, and artifacts dating to between 1800 and 1976, including ballots and slates of candidates; ...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943
Collection of 908 boldly colored and graphically diverse original posters produced from 1936 to 1943 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience
- from Black Studies Center
interdisciplinary essays written by leading scholars on the Black Experience and other related materials...   [more]

Summons to Comradeship: World War I and II Posters
About 6,000 digitized images from the collections of the University of Minnesota Library and Minneapolis Public Library....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas
"The approximately 1,200 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery."...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commericals, 1952-2004
Presidential campaign commercials aired on television between 1952 and 2004 and reproduced on streaming video....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

The Presidential Elections, 1860-1912: Cartoon's from Harper's Weekly and Other Journals
Collection of digitzed election related cartoons originally published in Harper's Weekly, Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, Vanity Fair, Puck or Judge between 1860 and 1912....   [more]

Trade Cards from Harvard University
Over 1,000 mostly 19th century trade cards that have been digitized and made available by Harvard University. Do a search for 'trade cards' and limit the search to records that have digital images. ...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Triptych: Early Advertising Cards
The Early Advertising Collection contains European and American printed advertisements dating from 1790 to 1910. The majority of the collection are trade cards of the late nineteenth century. ...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections
Digitized collections from the U. of W. special collections. Includes collections of photographs, ephemera and social documents focusing on the Pacific Northwest...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

UPI Photographs, 1907-2007
Collection of digitized photographs from UPI, 1907-2007....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Wellcome Trust Image Collection
Historical and contemporary images relating to the medical and biomedical fields....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Wilhelmine Germany and the First World War (1890-1918)
Overview: Wilhelmine Germany, 1890-1914 | I. Economic Development | II. Society and Culture | III. "Modern Life": Diagnoses, Prescriptions, Alternatives | IV. State and Society | ...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Women Working
"This is the prototype of the Open Collections Program Women Working project. This site will provide access to digitized books (over 2000), manuscripts (10,000 pages) and images (1,000) from the colle...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

World War I and II propaganda posters
The 520 items in this collection comprise a Propaganda Poster collection primarily consisting of images from 1914-1945, the start of World War I to the end of World War II. Prior to the advent of bro...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Related History Images

Cartes Postales et Cartes Anciennes: Images et Colonies 1900-1960
Archives du Senegal. 1515 images of postcards depicting people, places, and events in Senegal, French West Africa, and other African topics....   [more]
Holdings: 1900-1960
Unrestricted Access

Cigarette Cards, 19th-mid 20th centuries
Nearly 600 series (totaling thousands of individual cards) whose titles begin with the first three letters of the alphabet, from before 1900 to the mid-20th century. Viewable front and back.

[more]
Unrestricted Access

Colonial Picture Archive (German Colonial Society)
Also Known as: Bildbestand der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft in der Stadt- und Universitdtsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
Digital archive of the German Colonial Society's photographic collection: 50,000-70,000 historical photographs, 1882-1943. Regions worldwide covered in the collection include: Togo; Cameroon / Kamerun...   [more]
Unrestricted Access
Supplemental URLs
    Search interface

Digital Library of the Caribbean
"The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean c...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Eugenics Archive: Image Archive on the American Eugenic Movement
Digital collection of items documenting the American eugenics movement in the first half of the 20th century. Most of the resources are from the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Europeana
Europeana is an internet portal that acts as an interface to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Images from the History of Medicine (NLM)
This system provides access to the nearly 60,000 images in the prints and photograph collection of the History of Medicine Division (HMD) of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). Public domain...   [more]
Unrestricted Access
Supplemental URLs
    Home page
    Copyright

Index of Medieval Art
Also Known as: Index of Christian Art
Text-only database indexes thematic and iconographic content of early Christian and medieval art. The ICA locates an iconographic subject and provides extensive tabular description of the individual w...   [more]
Unrestricted Access
Supplemental URLs
    
    
    
    
    

Legal Portraits Online
[more]
Unrestricted Access

Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1820-1885
contains more than 62,500 pieces of historical sheet music registered for copyright: more than 15,000 registered during the years 1820-1860 and more than 47,000 registered during the years 1870-1885. ...   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Venice: A Database
Provides visual coverage of the architecture and cityscape of Venice....   [more]
Unrestricted Access

Wochenschau Archiv
Short clips from German newsreels, 1895-1990. Searchable....   [more]
Unrestricted Access