Over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements covering five product categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda - dated between 1911 and 1955.
The cigarette card series in this digital presentation comprise just the beginning of the Library's extensive, international collection of tobacco cards, which now numbers more than 125,000 individual items, including more than 3000 complete sets.
Cigarette or tobacco cards began in the mid-19th century as premiums, enclosed in product packaging. They were usually issued in numbered series of twenty-five, fifty, or larger runs to be collected, spurring subsequent purchases of the same brand. Typically, these small cards feature illustrations on one side with related information and advertising text on the other. (This digital presentation enables both views.) The height of cigarette card popularity occurred in the early decades of the 20th century, when tobacco companies around the world issued card sets in an encyclopedic range of subjects. After a slump during the First World War, popularity resumed, with new emphasis on film stars, sports, and military topics. Plants, animals, and monuments of the world remained perennially favorite themes.
Approximately 700 daguerreotypes, with the majority of the images being portraits, though the collection does include a few early architectural views, outdoor scenes, and copies of works of art.
an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944.
Search or browse about 10 million photos from the Life photo archives. "In addition to housing some of the most important images taken by LIFE photographers, the LIFE photo archive also includes the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; the Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; Hugo Jaeger Nazi-era Germany 1937–1944; DMI red-carpet celebrity shots; Pix, Inc. personalities; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen."
The Look Magazine Photograph Collection is a vast photographic archive created to illustrate Look Magazine and related publications produced by companies founded by Gardner Cowles. The cataloged portion of the collection totals some four million published and unpublished images made by photographers working for Look, most dating 1952-1971. With its coverage of U.S. and international lifestyles, celebrities, and events, the collection offers insight into the magazine's photojournalistic documentation of aspects of society and culture--particularly American society and culture--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Cowles Communications donated the bulk of the archive to the Library of Congress in 1971, after Look magazine ceased publication.
Over 32,000 images
Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).
This site contains links to over 1200 digitized photographs and images recorded during the Siege and Commune of Paris cir.1871. In addition to the images in this set, the Library's Siege & Commune Collection contains 1500 caricatures, 68 newspapers in hard-copy and film, hundreds of books and pamphlets and about 1000 posters. Additions are made regularly. The originals are located in the Charles Deering McCormick of Special Collections in the Deering Library at Northwestern University.
Nearly nine hundred images by American photographer William Henry Jackson. In addition to railroads, elephants, camels, horses, sleds and sleighs, sedan chairs, rickshaws, and other types of transportation, Jackson photographed city views, street and harbor scenes, landscapes, local inhabitants, and Commission members as they travelled through North Africa, Asia, Australia, and Oceania.
