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...

Finding high-quality online resources about Afghanistan can be a struggle, and that's why it's refreshing to learn about the Afghanistan Analyst site. Created and maintained by Christian Bleuer, a PhD student at The Australian National University, the site contains collections of links and resources arranged into headings such as "Listservs", "Blogs", "Experts and Researchers", "Libraries", and a...

The goal of the Afghanistan Digital Library at New York University is "to retrieve and restore the first sixty years of Afghanistan's published cultural heritage." This period, from 1871 to 1930, is of great importance as the earliest publications from this time frame are very rare and decades of war have not helped the situation. A team of scholars working at the National Archives in Kabul and...

Get a first-hand look at women's lives in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban by following a team of female journalists. These 14 young women, some still teenagers, trained as camera operators and video journalists at the AINA (http://www.ainaworld.org/) Afghan Media and Culture Center in Kabul between July 2002 to August 2003. They used their new skills to document the harsh lives of rural...

In 1988 while Afghanistan was in the grips of a civil war, government and National Museum officials were concerned that the historical artifacts and works of art in the Kabul museum might be damaged or looted. In order to protect these treasures they were hidden in the Central Bank treasury vault at the presidential palace. In 2003, during a period of relative stability after the U.S. military...

The website for the National Gallery of Art exhibition - Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul - primarily consists of an interactive timeline of artifacts from Afghanistan dating from the Bronze Age, 2200 - 1900 B.C. through the 2nd century A.D. For example, view gold bowls from Tepe Fullol, a site discovered in 1966, providing the first evidence of Bronze Age Culture in...

The title of the group blog, Africa is a Country, is tongue-in-cheek, as its subtitle - "Not the continent with 54 countries" - clarifies. The blog was founded by Dr. Sean Jacobs, a professor of International Affairs at the New School who grew up in apartheid South Africa. Authored by Jacobs and a team of scholars, journalists, and artists, Africa is a Country features a broad collection of...

Spatial data analysis is an important tool for geographers, planners, sociologists, and others, and this well-designed site by the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University will be a real boon to anyone with an interest in Africa. As the introduction to the project notes, this site helps interested parties "accumulate both contemporary and historical data supplied by researchers and...

Based at the East Central Georgia Regional Library, the African American Funeral Programs collection consists of over 1,000 funeral programs dated from 1933 to 2008. Most of the programs are from churches in Augusta, Georgia, and the surrounding area, with a few outliers coming from New York and Florida. These materials are tremendously important historical resources, as most programs contain a...