American filmmaker Julien Bryan set out to chronicle life in Poland and Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His situation became quite precarious when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, but he remained in order to document the siege of Warsaw. This site was established by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in order to bring some of his images and films to the general public. All told, the...

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 2017, the National Park Service announced that photographer Jarob Ortiz would be the staff photographer for the Heritage Documentation Programs. When the NPS announced that they would be hiring a staff photographer in 2015, they compared the position to the one that Ansel Adams held in 1941 when he began photographing national parks for the Department of the Interior. Of the 4,000 applicants,...

Noted photographer Frans Lanting opens the website dedicated to his most recent ambitious project with these words: "Seven years ago I stood at the tide line of an estuary and began a personal journey through time.� Auspicious words indeed, and this lovely exploration of what he found on this journey takes visitors on a "lyrical interpretation of life on Earth from its earliest beginnings to its...

The Getty Research Library at the Getty Institute has over 600 digitized images of Mexico from its special collections by Mexican, American, and European photographers in a multitude of photographic formats. The earliest is from 1857, and these photographic images document the history of the nation from different perspectives. To get acquainted with a timeline of Mexico starting in 1810 and going...

If you are looking to explore Japan in the year 1909 via the eyes of an informed and thoughtful Western tourist, look no further. This engaging collection from the University of Vermont Libraries' Center for Digital Initiatives brings together the photo album compiled by Katherine Wolcott and her uncle, Robert Hull Fleming. Fleming was a graduate of the University of Vermont and as part of a...

Born in 1828 in Nunda, New York, Andrew J. Russell worked as a portrait and landscape painter as a young man. In 1862, he organized a local militia unit for service in the Civil War and he learned the craft of photography along the way. Several years later in 1868, he began a project to document the construction of the Union Pacific railroad during its long march to its meeting point with the...

Imagine flying high above the Rocky Mountains in late 1939, looking downwards towards the peaks below. Now picture yourself staring down at the city of Denver around the same time, peering onto the tops of residential buildings, factories, and feedlots. Until time travel is feasible, this probably isn’t possible for most of us. Of course, for those with a penchant for the past, aerial photographs...

Millions of people fly over Florida each year, but how many of them really see anything? The University of Florida Map & Digital Imagery Library contains over 160,000 aerial photographs of the Sunshine State, and it is a tremendous resource for agronomists, ecologists, geographers, and historians. These particular aerial images were originally created to assist farmers in accurately assessing...

The New York Public Library's early efforts to collect Native American portraiture were greatly aided by gifts and purchases made by Dr. Wilberforce Eames and J.P. Morgan. Morgan was a sponsor of Edward S. Curtis's massive survey of North American Native Americans and Eames was the Library's bibliographer. This particular digital collection from the Library brings together some of these early...