Historical Primary Sources: United States: Images and Maps

The AdViews digital collection provides access to thousands of historic commercials created for clients or acquired by the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B) advertising agency or its predecessor during the 1950s - 1980s.

This project, undertaken from 1908 to 1931 to photograph human cultures around the world, resulted in 183,000 meters of film and 72,000 color photographs from 50 countries. The collection is now housed at the the Musée Albert-Kahn, and most of the images are available online.

The photographic files of one of America's earliest news picture agencies.

Approximately 650 drawings by Joseph Becker and his colleagues, nineteenth-century artists who worked for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly.

The majority of the Brady-Handy negatives are of Civil War and post-Civil War portraits, with a small collection of Washington views. The online collection shown here includes primarily original glass plate negatives.

The Work Projects Administration (WPA) Poster Collection consists of 907 posters produced from 1936 to 1943 by various branches of the WPA.

Contains more than four thousand original drawings by American book, magazine, and newspaper illustrators, made primarily between 1880 and 1910.

Contains 2,085 drawings, prints, and paintings related to the art of caricature, cartoon, and illustration, spanning the years 1780 to 1977 and includes works by 521 American and foreign artists and illustrators. Most of the images are cartoons, comic strips, and periodical illustrations drawn by American artists between 1890 and 1970.

A digitized collection of posters created by local artists and activists, collected by the Oakland Public Library since 1966.

Approximately 175,000 digitized images capturing life in America between 1935-1944. This blog post provides more information about the collection and how to access it.

Digitized collection of more than 150 comics; majority published by the federal government and others from the UN and state governments

Photographs sent by John C.H. Grabill to the Library of Congress for copyright protection between 1887 and 1982. The collection includes a visual record of railroad development, coaches and wagons, mining, smeltering, and milling, freighting, emerging cities and towns, parades, cattle roundups and branding, sheepherding, prospecting, hunting, and Chinese immigrants, as well as landscapes.

Photographs published by Lawrence and Houseworth of San Francisco, depicting major settlements, boom towns, mining operations, and points of scenic interest throughout northern California and western Nevada.

Library of Congress collections, not all images available online

Millions of Life magazine photos dating from the 1960s through the 1970s

This experimental web application allows you to browse over 1.56 million images extracted from the Chronicling America database of digitized historic newspapers using machine learning.

Contains approximately four thousand images featuring American cityscapes, landscapes, and group portraits. The images date from 1851 to 1991 and depict scenes in all fifty states and the District of Columbia.

More than 3,000 political, propaganda, and social issue posters and handbills, dating 1927-1980. Most posters are from the United States, but over 55 other countries and the United Nations are also represented.

The 525 items in this collection comprise a Propaganda Poster collection primarily consisting of images from 1914-1945, the start of World War I to the end of World War II.

Currently contains over 2 million records with 280,000 online media such as images, sound files, videos, and online collections including the Archives of American Art.

Comprised of 1,395 photographs taken by American photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) between 1932 and 1964, the bulk of the collection consists of portrait photographs of celebrities, including many figures from the Harlem Renaissance. A much smaller portion of the collection is an assortment of American landscapes.

Contains almost 90,000 digitized photographs from the history of the American West held at the Denver Public Library.

Map-based visualizations created by University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab. Topics presented so far include redlining, urban renewal, congressional elections, presidential travel, forced migration, overland trails, foreign-born population, and canals.

Historical record of the mapping of North America and the Caribbean

This series consists of published maps of most countries and world regions. Included are base and briefing base maps; maps depicting terrain, sociological, transportation, political, and economic features; maps depicting administrative, military, and treaty boundaries; maps of urban areas; and maps showing ethnic distributions or narcotics trade routes. Also included are thematic maps, charts, graphs, and organization charts relating to various topics of the Cold War, including the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and the Vietnam War.

Manuscript and published maps, many of which reflect the European Age of Discoveries, dating from the later 15th to the 17th century. Also included are 18th and 19th century maps documenting the exploration and mapping of the interior parts of the continents, reflecting the work of Lewis and Clark and subsequent government explorers and surveyors.

Library of Congress collection of digitized maps

This collection documents the history, cultural aspects and geological formations of areas that eventually became National Parks. The collection consists of approximately 200 maps dating from the 17th century to the present, reflecting early mapping of the areas that would become four National Parks, as well as the parks themselves.

A wide variety of digitized maps, with strong collections in American Revolutionary War-era maps, Boston and New England maps, and Maritime Charts and Atlases.

The panoramic map was a popular cartographic form used to depict U.S. and Canadian cities and towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known also as bird's-eye views, perspective maps, and aero views, panoramic maps are nonphotographic representations of cities portrayed as if viewed from above at an oblique angle.

A collection of “persuasive” cartography: ​more than 800 ​ maps intended primarily to influence opinions or beliefs - to send a message - rather than to communicate geographic information.

Contains 623 maps chosen from more than 3,000 railroad maps and about 2,000 regional, state, and county maps, and other maps which show "internal improvements" of the past century.

Cartographic items used by Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau (1725-1807), when he was commander in chief of the French expeditionary army (1780-82) during the American Revolution.

The Library of Congress provides an online checklist of its holdings of Sanborn maps. They have also digitized and put online some maps and provide an excellent introduction to interpreting fire insurance maps.

This Library of Congress collection of maps document the development and status of transportation and communication systems on the national, state, and local level.

More than 9,000 original drawings for editorial cartoons, caricatures, and comic strips spanning the late 1700s to the present, primarily from 1880 to 1980. The cartoons cover people and events throughout the world, but most of the images were intended for publication in American newspapers and magazines.

Digitized collection of editorial cartoons created by the influential political commentator, Herbert L. Block. The bulk of the collection dates from 1946-2001.

This assemblage of more than 800 prints made in America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encompasses several forms of political art.

Digital archive of the work Theodor Geisel did as a political cartoonist for the liberal New York City newspaper PM from 1941 to 1943,