American Art, Design, and Visual Culture
National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution
The Index of American Design consists of approximately 18,000 watercolor renderings of American decorative arts objects from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. Produced as part of a Works Progress Administration project from 1935 through 1942, this visual archive reflects the expanding interest in American material culture that began to emerge at that time.
American Memory, Library of Congress
The Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress holds more than 4.5 million items, of which Map Collections represents only a small fraction, those that have been converted to digital form. The focus of Map Collections is Americana and Cartographic Treasures of the Library of Congress. These images were created from maps and atlases and, in general, are restricted to items that are not covered by copyright protection. Map Collections is organized according to seven major categories: Cities and Towns, Conservation and Environment, Discovery and Exploration, Cultural Landscapes, Military Battles and Campaigns, Transportation and Commerce, and General Maps.
New York Public Library Digital Library Collection
This website of selected original and rare resources aims to provide students, scholars, and general audiences with direct access to a representative range of nineteenth-century materials for the art and culture of the Hudson River and its region. The prints, maps, photographs, guidebooks, histories, and literature digitally assembled here are drawn from the collections of The New York Public Library.
Small-Town America: Stereoscopic Views from the Robert Dennis Collection
American Memory, Library of Congress
This collection contains 12,000 photographs of the Mid-Atlantic states New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut from the 1850s to the 1910s, from the Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views at the New York Public Library. The views show buildings and street scenes in cities, towns, and villages, as well as natural landscapes. They also depict agriculture, industry, transportation, homes, businesses, local celebrations, natural disasters, people, and costumes.
America's First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views 1839-1863
American Memory, Library of Congress
The Library's daguerreotype collection consists of more than 725 photographs dating from 1839 to 1864. Portrait daguerreotypes produced by the Mathew Brady studio make up the major portion of the collection. The collection also includes early architectural views by John Plumbe, several Philadelphia street scenes, early portraits by pioneering daguerreotypist Robert Cornelius, studio portraits by black photographers James P. Ball and Francis Grice, and copies of painted portraits.
Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University
This collection presents over 9,000 images, with database information, relating to the early history of advertising in the United States. The materials, drawn from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, provide a significant and informative perspective on the early evolution of this most ubiquitous feature of modern American business and culture.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920
American Memory, Library of Congress
This collection of photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company Collection includes over 25,000 glass negatives and transparencies as well as about 300 color photolithograph prints, mostly of the eastern United States. The collection includes the work of a number of photographers, one of whom was the well known photographer William Henry Jackson. A small group within the larger collection includes about 900 Mammoth Plate Photographs taken by William Henry Jackson along several railroad lines in the United States and Mexico in the 1880s and 1890s. The group also includes views of California, Wyoming and the Canadian Rockies.
Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University
This online database contains over 600 health-related advertisements printed in newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1958, as well as 35 selected historical documents relating to the creation and influence of health-related advertisements. The collection represents a wide range of products such as cough and cold remedies, laxatives and indigestion aids, and vitamins and tonics, among others. The images are drawn from the collections of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, with the bulk of the ads originating in the J. Walter Thompson Company's Competitive Advertising File.
By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943
American Memory, Library of Congress
The By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943 collection consists of 908 boldly colored and graphically diverse original posters produced from 1936 to 1943 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Of the 2,000 WPA posters known to exist, the Library of Congress's collection of more than 900 is the largest. These striking silkscreen, lithograph, and woodcut posters were designed to publicize health and safety programs; cultural programs including art exhibitions, theatrical, and musical performances; travel and tourism; educational programs; and community activities in seventeen states and the District of Columbia. The posters were made possible by one of the first U.S. Government programs to support the arts and were added to the Library's holdings in the 1940s.
America From the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-45
American Memory, Library of Congress
The images in the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection are among the most famous documentary photographs ever produced. Created by a group of U.S. government photographers, the images show Americans in every part of the nation. In the early years, the project emphasized rural life and the negative impact of the Great Depression, farm mechanization, and the Dust Bowl. In later years, the photographers turned their attention to the mobilization effort for World War II. The core of the collection consists of about 164,000 black-and-white photographs. This release provides access to over 160,000 of these images; future additions will expand the black-and-white offering. The FSA-OWI photographers also produced about 1600 color photographs during the latter days of the project.
American Memory, Library of Congress
The development of early American animation is represented by this collection of 21 animated films and 2 fragments, which spans the years 1900 to 1921. The films include clay, puppet, and cut-out animation, as well as pen drawings. They point to a connection between newspaper comic strips and early animated films, as represented by Keeping Up With the Joneses, Krazy Kat, and The Katzenjammer Kids. As well as showing the development of animation, these films also reveal the social attitudes of early twentieth-century America.
American Memory, Library of Congress
The Gottscho-Schleisner Collection is comprised of over 29,000 images primarily of architectural subjects, including interiors and exteriors of homes, stores, offices, factories, historic buildings, and other structures. Subjects are concentrated chiefly in the northeastern United States, especially the New York City area, and Florida. Included are the homes of notable Americans, such as Raymond Loewy, and of several U.S. presidents, as well as color images of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. Many of the photographs were commissioned by architects, designers, owners and architectural publications, and document important achievements in American 20th-century architecture and interior design.
American Memory, Library of Congress
The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) are among the largest and most heavily used collections in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies including examples as diverse as windmills, one-room schoolhouses, the Golden Gate Bridge, and buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. As of March 1998, America's built environment has been recorded through surveys containing more than 363,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 35,000 historic structures and sites dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian: Photographic Images
American Memory, Library of Congress
The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis is one of the most significant and controversial representations of traditional American Indian culture ever produced. Issued in a limited edition from 1907-1930, the publication continues to exert a major influence on the image of Indians in popular culture. Curtis said he wanted to document "the old time Indian, his dress, his ceremonies, his life and manners." In over 2000 photogravures plates and narratives, Curtis portrayed the traditional customs and lifeways of eighty Indian tribes. The twenty volumes, each with an accompanying portfolio, are organized by tribes and culture areas encompassing the Great Plains, Great Basin, Plateau Region, Southwest, California, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska.
The Urban Landscape Digital Image Access Project
Special Collections, Manuscripts, and Rare Book Library, Duke University
This website contains 1,000 images of town- and cityscapes.
Adflip: The World's Largest Archive of Classic Print Ads
Adflip LLC
This website offers a searchable database of classic print ads from 1940 to the present.
The Commercial Closet: The World's Largest Collection of Gay Advertising
Commercial Closet Association
This site contains over 750 worldwide television and print advertisements spanning more than 30 years that reflect Western society's changing views of the gay community.
Art Crimes: The Writing on the Wall
This expanding e-gallery of graffiti art gathers together the illegal and temporary art found in cities around the world.