BY SUBJECT OR SOURCE
Photos

PHOTOS

Ad Access
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/

This collection of 7,000 advertising images for the years 1911 to 1950 mostly from the J. Walter Thompson collection at John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History in Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. Thumbnailed and searchable. Its especially good for transportation and cosmetics advertisements.
(28 Jul 2001)

America Hurrah: San Francisco Earthquake of April 18, 1906
http://americahurrah.com/Earthquake/eqIndex.htm

A compilation of photos and official reports from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
(9 Feb 2004)

American Memory (Library of Congress)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html

The U.S.A. Library of Congress has produced an amazing collection of 80,000 largely-American photos, a large proportion of them urban, plus maps, "birds-eye" views and documents in their American Memory collection. While it is well indexed and easy to obtain copies, the collection is so huge that the search function is often overwhelmed. Clearly the best place to look for iconography. The site contains images, plans and documents for both the Historic American Building Survey and Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER). There are special collections that cover architectural photography; African-American materials; baseball; the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photos from the 1930s and 1940s; a number of early twentieth-century records and early films (many depicting urban streets, parades and the like); photos from the Loeb Library at Harvard University documenting American architectural and landscape design 1850-1920; and hundreds of city maps and panoramic views culled from the Library's collection of 4.5 million items.
(28 Jul 2001; updated 7 Aug 2002)
Review of The American Memory website done for H-Urban on February, 1997 by Eric Schneider, University of Pennsylvania.

Art Crimes: The Writing on the Wall
http://www.graffiti.org/

Susan Farrell put together this collection of graffiti from over 100 cities. The collection is global, but strongest for the U.S. and Europe. Many of the works depicted no longer exist in real space.
(28 Jul 2001)

Charles Cushman Collection, Indiana University
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/cushman/

18,000 online color images, many urban with an emphasis on California, Illinois (especially Chicago) and Indiana. A number of European cities are also included. At this writing, the search function by location was not working.
(8 Aug 2002)

Chicago Landmarks (by the City of Chicago)
http://www.ci.chi.il.us/Landmarks/index.html

The Chicago Landmarks Commission of the City of Chicago assembled this easy-to-navigate, beautifully phtographed site, that contains interactive maps; tours; a useful style guide; and a database for over 17,000 buildings of historic significance. The building database identifies architects (where possible), and includes descriptions and photos of major buildings. The links page is very limited, with no connections to primarily historical websites.
(28 Jul 2001).

Cities and Buildings Website
http://content.lib.washington.edu/cities/index.html

Over 5,000 contemporary images of cities and buildings ranging from New York to Central Asia, from African villages, to the Parc de la Villette maintained by the University of Washington.
(28 Jul 2001; updated 8 Aug 2002)

The Cleveland Memory Project
http://www.clevelandmemory.org/

A site at Cleveland State University with e-books, lots of photos, and virtual exhibits.
(9 Feb 2004)

Digital Image Collection, New York Public Library
http://digital.nypl.org/photo.htm

Thousands of photos including these special collections: Small-Town America Stereoscopic views from the Robert Dennis Collection; Images of African Americans from the 19th Century; Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, 1935-1938; Lewis Wickes Hine: Construction of the Empire State Building, 1930 - 1931; Lewis Wickes Hine: Work Portraits, 1920 - 1939; Performing Arts in America, 1875-1923; and A Hudson River Portfolio.
(28 Jul 2001; updated 8 Aug 2002)

Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/index.html

Much of the collection, drawn from the Hartman Center for Advertising History at Duke University, is dedicated to the industry itself. Urban historians will find the large collections of billboard photos and postcards especially interesting.
(9 Feb 2004)

The Great Buildings Collection
http://www.GreatBuildings.com/

This site put together by Architecture Week documents a thousand buildings and hundreds of leading architects, with 3D models, photographic images and architectural drawings, commentaries, bibliographies, web links. Extremely well-indexed.
(28 Jul 2001; updated 8 Aug 2002)

Images Canada: Picturing Canadian Culture
http://www.imagescanada.ca/index-e.html

The site is a gateway to 75,000 images of Canadian culture archived in numerous cultural institutions throughout the country. Holdings are especially strong for Toronto and western cites.
(30 Aug 2001; updated 8 Aug 2002)

Images from New York Album published 1883 by Wittemann Bros.
http://www.preserve.org/nyalbum/nyalbum.htm

Several dozen photos from an album designed for tourists by New York lawyer David Goldfarb for the non-profit Preserve and Protect, Inc. preservation society.
(9 Feb 2004)

Minnesota Historical Society: Visual Resources Database
http://collections.mnhs.org/visualresources/

This very rich database includes nearly 173,802 images (as of July 1, 2002), mostly photographs, including 32,000 of the Minneapolis area alone.
(28 Jul 2001; updated 8 Aug 2002)

Ohio Memory: An Online Scrapbook of Ohio History
http://www.ohiomemory.org/index.html

This site contains photographs and documents on the history of Ohio, drawn from more than 4,700 collections within more than 330 institutions, including over 26,000 digital images with detailed bibliographic information. Unfortunately the search function is pretty dysfunctional.
(9 Feb 2004; updated 27 Mar 2004)

Prelinger Archives (Internet Library)
http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php

This Internet Library site includes downloadable public domain documentary films, including General Motors Around the World (1927) with scenes of GM activity in Japan, Sweden, Australia, Egypt, Belgium, Peru, Spain, Brazil and other nations; Germany: A Family of the Industrial Ruhr (1958), an examination of the varied activities in the life of an average working man's family in a German industrial city after World War II; Seeing London (ca. 1925), a tour through central London; and English Children: Life in the City (1949), which covers "typical" events in the daily life of an English urban family just after World War II.
(9 Feb 2004)

Queens Local History Collection
http://www.queenshistory.lagcc.cuny.edu/queenshistory/

This local history collection houses 2000 photo images and a hundred oral histories, in addition to providing finding aids for documents relating to the political, social and industrial history of Queens.
(6 Jun 2001)

Review of Blaxploitation
http://www.blackvoices.com/feature/blk_history_98/blaxploitation/

A short history of the 1970s genre with filmography, links and audio clips.
(9 Feb 2004)

The Ricksha Arts of Bangladesh
http://ricksha.org/

This site is rather interesting and documents an overlooked part of urban transportation. Authored by Joanna Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., a Cultural and Social Anthropologist, the site contains numerous photos of highly decorated rickshas in Bangladesh's cities, a map and text on regional decorative styles, and a bibliography with links. The contents of the site are drawn from Kirkpatrick's anthropological field visits to Bangladesh between 1975 and 1998.
(3 May 2002)

Selected Murals in Downtown Los Angeles, Environs of USC, and the South Central Area
http://www.usc.edu/isd/archives/la/pubart/LA_murals/USC/

Extensive archive of photos of Los Angeles murals and graffiti taken by Ruth Wallach (who also maintains the page), hosted by the University of Southern California Libraries.
(26 June 2003)

Social Life of Cities
http://www.yale.edu/socdept/slc/

A collection of contemporary photographs prepared by Professor Joseph Soares, a sociologist at Yale University, illustrating aspects of public space, collective memory, urban design, and architecture in Boston, New York, New Haven, London, Paris, and medieval German cities.
(28 Jul 2001)

Toronto City Archives
http://www.city.toronto.on.ca/archives/index.htm

Beginning on this home page, you can access growing image databases the City of Toronto is putting online. Crisp images document the many facets of Toronto as a historical urban site. Additional research links of value to urban scholars are clearly identified.
(16 Aug 2002)

The Urban Landscape
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/diap/

This set contains about 1,000 images from the Digital Image Access Project Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, mostly southern with a strong emphasis on Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. There are over 150 postcard images from roughly 1900-1960. The site is poorly maintained with numerous dead links.
(16 Nov 2001)

US Steel Gary Works Photograph Collection, 1905-1971
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/steel/

Presented by the Indiana University Library Program and the Calumet Regional Archives, the US Steel Gary Works Photograph Collection provides access to more than 2,200 digital images documenting the creation of the world's largest steel mill during the height of America's industrial revolution.
(3 May 2002)

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