In 1926, the United States celebrated its sesquicentennial, and a number of special projects were organized to document the country's people, history, culture, and folkways. One such project was "The Pageant of America: A Pictorial History of the United States", published by Yale University Press from 1925 to 1929. Professor Ralph Henry Gabriel edited the work, and all told, it contained 15...

In 1983, the Smithsonian American Art Museum began collecting photographs. Today they have over 7000 images and this website offers a wonderful exploration of but a few of their holdings. The title of this collection refers to Walt Whitman's belief that photography was a quintessentially American activity, rooted in everyday people and ordinary things. The visual delights here are divided into...

This digital collection tells the fabulous story of the Fort Collins area through photographs, artifacts, maps, books, and much more. The project came to fruition via a collaboration between the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery and the Poudre River Public Library District. On the site, visitors can make their way through the Research Collections, which are a great place to start. Here they will...

Cornell University Library's seven-millionth volume is an 1865 edition of Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, containing one-hundred original photographic prints, mounted on boards and accompanied by letterpress-printed captions. Thirty prints are presented at this Web site, which combines the best of historical photography, digitization, and hyperlinked navigation. The images are...

Herbert Randall was born in Massachusetts and lived in Michigan before opening his own professional photo shop in New Haven, Connecticut in 1894. He was a student of the built environment, a poet, and was also fascinated with the history of the Nutmeg State. This nice collection from the Connecticut State Library brings together 141 black and white photographs that Randall took around New Haven...

This fine digital collection showcases over 80 photographs taken by Fort Worth Star-Telegram news photographers of President John F. Kennedy during his fateful trip to Texas in 1963. It's part of a massive collection that includes over 200,000 photographs and this sampling provides a unique look into presidential and cultural history. Visitors can read the introduction to the site to get started,...

A project from the Yale Digital Humanities Lab (DH Lab), PixPlot uses 21st-century technology to explore a large collection of 19th- and 20th-century images, the Meserve-Kunhardt Collection at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Amassed by Frederick Hill Meserve, "a collector and distributor of photographs from 1897 to his death in 1962," the collection has a bevy of materials...