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Finding images: Historical images

Use this guide to find downloadable or browsable images for papers, presentations, teaching, and research.

Featured collections

Stanford image collections

Historical image resources

The image gallery provides access to various digital collections owned by the Stanford Libraries, including the Douglas Menuez Photography Collection, the Herbert Matter Photograph Collection, the Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, and the The Reid W. Dennis Collection of California Lithographs.

Calisphere is powered by the California Digital Library and draws from the its online collections of photographs, maps, and other primary sources relating to California culture and history.  See also the Online Archive of California, where you can search the same images in the context of the archival collections from which they have been drawn.

American Memory is the Library of Congress's key contribution to the National Digital Library. The site offers various aspects of the collection, including digital reproductions, a finding aid in the form of a catalog or register, and other accompaniments. It includes collections of photographs, recorded sound, motion pictures, and manuscripts; more materials are becoming available over time.  After searching the collections, click on Gallery View to see the image results.

The New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery provides access to over 800,000 images digitized from the Library's holdings of manuscripts, posters, photographs, prints, maps, etc. Images can be browsed from within their contextual collections (e.g., After Columbus: Four Hundred Years of Native American Portraiture; “The Pageant of America” Photograph Archive) or via basic and advanced keyword search interfaces.

The Smithsonian provides access to 7.98 million catalog records with 816,516 images, video and sound files, electronic journals, and other resources from the Smithsonian's museums, archives & libraries.