Research Guides @ Fordham: American History: Images

Photographs

American Memory from the Library of Congress
Sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.

A picture is very often truly worth a thousand words as is the case with this iconic photograph of a migrant mother taken in California in 1936 by Dorothea Lange. It has come to epitomize the Great Depression. (Source: NARA)

Here are some excellent sources for obtaining digital images. Always be sure to check for copyright and any other use restrictions before using any image.

Archive of Early American Images - John Carter Brown Library
Nearly 7,000 images of colonial North and South America.

ARTstor
Hundreds of thousands of images of paintings, sculptures, architecture, prints and photographs. To use image viewer off-campus you need to create a user account on campus, and disable your browser’s pop-up blocker.

Civil Rights Digital Library
Compilation of digitized primary source material including film archive from two Georgia television stations, oral histories, documents and photographs.
Library of Congress - Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
More than 1.2 million digitized images including photograph, cartoons, posters, drawings and prints.
NARA - National Archives and Records Administration
Includes several online exhibits and catalog of digitized documents and photographs.
New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery
Collection of over 870,000 photographs and other images from 35 NYC agencies including mayors, WPA photos and historic map collection.
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Over half a million digital images of NYPL visual holdings - posters, prints, dust jackets, maps, photographs, etc.
Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image
Collection of over 12,000 images from various collections of rare books, manuscripts, papyri, photographs and sheet music from University of Pennsylvania.

Videos

This film, shot by the Miles brothers, was made on April 14, 1906, only four days before the San Francisco earthquake. It was taken from the front window of a moving cable car.

Video

Internet Archive
A digital library Internet sites, texts, audio, moving images and audio.
American Memory from the Library of Congress - Motion Pictures
16 collections of motion pictures including "Inside an American Factory" (1904); "The Life of a City: Early Films of New York, 1898-1906"; and "September 11, 2001, Documentary Project".
Google Cultural Institute
Collection of photos and videos representing a wide selection of worldwide historical topics from 1900 to 2000.

American History: Images

Photographs

Videos

Video

Reference & Instruction Department