History buffs — eras, artifacts, and the people who came before.
A Hottub for people into Historical Reenactment — find your people and start something.
A Hottub for people into Local History — find your people and start something.
The great river and its steamboats — the Mississippi and the river towns in early color.
The cradle of independence in color — Independence Hall and the old Quaker city a century ago.
Missions, mesas, and the Grand Canyon — the American Southwest in the first vivid color views.
Our team creates Hottubs — tell us what's worth gathering around near you and we review every suggestion.
The great summer resort in color — Lake George, the Adirondack peaks, and the grand mountain hotels.
Mile-high in color — Denver, Pikes Peak, and the Colorado Rockies by the Detroit Publishing Co.
Inland seas in color — Mackinac, Put-in-Bay, and the steamers of the Great Lakes.
The Bain News Service photographed everyday America, 1900–1920 — immigrants and aviators, ballgames and parades, suffrage marches and front-…
The photographs Lewis Hine made for the National Child Labor Committee — the mill kids and breaker boys whose faces helped change the law. A…
W. E. B. Du Bois’s landmark exhibit for the 1900 Paris Exposition — portraits and data charts documenting Black American life and achievemen…
The Brady-Handy studio portraits — presidents and generals, writers and reformers, the Civil-War-era faces who looked into the new machine o…
Terrestrial and celestial globes and armillary spheres — the world and sky held in the hand.
Funerary papyri — spells, scales, and the journey through the Egyptian afterlife.
The 1800s craze for drawing whole towns from above — find your city as it once was.
Detroit Publishing photochroms — a vanished America in startling, hand-tinted color.
Hand-drawn battle maps of 1776 — the founding fight, charted league by league.
Color photographs from before color film — Prokudin-Gorsky’s vanished Russia, c.1910.
Collectors and historians of armor, blades, and the craft of defense.
The Norman Conquest of 1066 told in seventy meters of embroidery — a comic strip a thousand years old.
The painted glass slide and the lantern’s beam — the projected image before the movies.
Silver kings hunting lions — the proud art of Persia in the last age before Islam.
Floors that outlived their houses — the tesserae of Roman gods, beasts, and daily life.
The painted books of the Aztec and Maya — gods, calendars, and tribute in screenfold pages.
One of America’s first woman photojournalists — schools and workers, gardens and great houses, a sharp eye on a country remaking itself.
The Harris & Ewing studio covered the capital for forty years — senators and suffragists, aviators and inventors, the daily theatre of publi…
Ansel Adams photographed the Manzanar War Relocation Center, where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. He gave the work …
The Liljenquist family’s ambrotypes and tintypes — ordinary Union and Confederate soldiers, most of them unidentified, who sat for the camer…
America’s earliest photographs — silver-plate daguerreotypes from the 1840s and ’50s, the first time ordinary people ever saw their own face…
In 1855 Roger Fenton hauled a wagon darkroom to the Crimea and made the first sustained photographs of war — the camps, the cannonballs, the…
The Gladstone Collection — daguerreotypes, tintypes, and cartes de visite of African American life across the 19th century: families, soldie…
The Matson Collection — Jerusalem and Damascus, markets and pilgrims, farmers and feast days: everyday life across the Near East a century a…
Gold coins, icons, and objects from the Eastern Roman world.
For people drawn to the American Civil War — the photographs, the people, the weight of it.
Vases, marble, and myth — the classical world of Greece and Rome.
The world of the samurai — armor, blades, and Japanese art of the warrior.
Taking the waters — Saratoga Springs and Hot Springs, the great American spa resorts in early color.
The North Star State in color — Minnehaha Falls, the lakes, and the Minnesota north woods.
For the endlessly curious about ancient Egypt — its art, its objects, its gods.
The mountain houses in color — the Catskills, where the American summer vacation was born.
Washington in the 1910s–20s — flappers, ballgames, early flight, and the roar of a new century.
The wide view — turn-of-the-century crowds, ballclubs, and cities in a single sweeping frame.
Bronze mirrors, tomb paintings, and smiling figures — the art of Italy before Rome.
Dolphins, octopuses, and leaping bulls — the sea-bright art of Bronze Age Crete and the islands.
Pilots, builders, and dreamers around the machines that changed everything.
Cartophiles charting the old world — public-domain maps, shared route by route.
Gold leaf and patient hands — Books of Hours and the art of the medieval page.
FSA photographs of 1930s–40s America — Lange, Evans, and a nation in hard times.
Assyria, Sumer, and Persia — the art of the earliest civilizations.
Ritual vessels and mirrors cast millennia ago — ancient Chinese bronze.
Maya, Aztec, and the civilizations of the Americas — for the deeply curious.
Remington, the frontier, and the myth and reality of the West.
Holbein’s woodcuts where Death calls on everyone, king to ploughman — a humane medieval leveling.
Lions, whales, and unicorns as the Middle Ages imagined them — the illuminated bestiary.
Eastern Christian art of the Nile and the Horn — Coptic textiles and Ethiopian gospels.
Carol Highsmith’s gift to the nation — every state, in vivid color, dedicated free to all.
The wet-plate negatives of Brady and Gardner — the first war photographed, frame by haunting frame.
Moche portrait vessels, Nazca color, and Inca gold — the civilizations of the Andes.
Jan Matejko’s vast canvases — the battles, kings, and turning points of a nation’s memory.
The Black pharaohs and the kingdoms of the upper Nile — the great African civilization beyond Egypt.
The sea-traders who carried the alphabet — Phoenician glass, ivory, and the purple of Tyre.
The Bronze Age empire that rivaled Egypt — the stone gods and lions of the Hittites.
Tall ships under full sail — the age of canvas and the sea, for every landlocked sailor’s heart.
Bold, urgent graphic design from the Great War — the poster as a call to arms.
The banners, marches, and faces of the fight for the vote — the National Woman’s Party.
The rare color Kodachromes of 1940s America — the Depression and war years, in living color.
The White City rises on the lakefront — Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, the fair that dazzled a nation.
Meet me in St. Louis — the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, palaces of light and the first Olympic Games in America.
The dawn of a new century in Art Nouveau iron and glass — the Exposition Universelle of 1900.
Luna Park by night, the bathers, the boardwalk — the electric heyday of America’s playground.
Roller coasters, midways, and the smell of the fair — the golden age of the American amusement park.
The man who photographed the Civil War — Lincoln, the generals, and the dead at Antietam.
Antietam’s dead, Lincoln’s last portrait, and the gallows — Gardner’s unflinching record of the war.
From the battlefield to the alkali flats — O’Sullivan photographed the war, then the unmapped West.
The geysers and canyons whose photographs helped make Yellowstone the first national park.
Down the Colorado with Powell — the Grand Canyon and the Pueblo peoples, first seen by camera.
Sherman’s campaign through Georgia — ruins, earthworks, and the scorched road to the sea.
The painted shields of the old armorials — for genealogists and lovers of the device.
Knights jousting snails, rabbits with swords — the gleeful weirdness in the margins of holy books.
Switzerland glowing in color — peaks, lakes, and villages, hand-tinted by Photoglob Zürich a century before color film.
La Serenissima before the crowds — canals, gondolas, and St. Mark’s in the first color views of Venice.
The Nile, the pyramids, and Jerusalem’s old streets — the nineteenth-century traveler’s East, in vivid photochrom.
Castles above the river, half-timbered towns, and cathedral spires — the German Rhineland in turn-of-century color.
The boulevards, the Seine, and a new iron tower — Paris glowing in early color at the turn of the century.
America in color — Yellowstone, the canyons, and the national parks as the first tourists saw them, by the Detroit Publishing Co.
The young metropolis in color — New York’s harbor, elevated rails, and first skyscrapers, by the Detroit Publishing Co.
The Emerald Isle a century ago — round towers, sea cliffs, and stone villages in early color.
Deep fjords, midnight sun, and stave churches — the Norwegian north in glowing photochrom.
Onion domes and the Volga — the Tsars’ Russia in color, a few years before it vanished.
Windmills, canals, and lace caps — the Dutch lowlands hand-tinted at the turn of the century.
Palaces, temples, and the Taj — British-era India and Ceylon in the first vivid color views.
The winter resort in color — palms, beaches, and St. Augustine’s old streets, by the Detroit Publishing Co.
New Hampshire’s grand peaks and resort hotels — the White Mountains in turn-of-century color.
The cradle of the Republic in color — Beacon Hill, the Common, and the harbor a century ago.
The French Quarter, the levee, and the riverboats — the Gulf South in early color.
The lamps that kept the coast — historic photographs of America’s lighthouses.
The lakefront metropolis — Chicago’s boulevards and the great Midwest city, by the Detroit Publishing Co.
The Golden State in color — the missions, the redwoods, and the Pacific coast at the turn of the century.
The thunder of the falls in color — Niagara and the great American cataracts, by the Detroit Publishing Co.
The boardwalk and the surf — Atlantic City and the Atlantic resorts in turn-of-century color.
The young capital in color — the Capitol dome, the Mall, and Washington’s monuments a century ago.