Research Guides: History: Images and Multimedia

Videos, multimedia and audio

Internet Archive: Moving Images
Contains thousands of digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons. Example: footage of the San Francisco earthquake (1906)

Internet Archive: Universal Newsreels
Universal Newsreels were reports shown before movies. Coverage: 1929 to 1967.

American Archive of Public Broadcasting
This is a collection of American public radio and television content dating back to the 1950s.

FedFlix
Movies from a wide range of government agencies, including the Army, Information Agency, NASA, and the National Parks Service, etc.

History in Motion
A collection within Eyewitness to History.com that includes eyewitness film clips from the past

Smithsonian Institution Collection's Search Center
Search for images, videos, sound files and more from the Smithsonian.

USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA)
A collection of thousands of video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. The interviews have been conducted in 65 countries and 43 languages. Initially a repository of Holocaust testimony, the Visual History Archive has expanded to include testimonies from the Armenian Genocide that coincided with World War I, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, the Cambodian Genocide of 1975-1979, the Guatemalan Genocide of 1978-1983, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the ongoing conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, and anti-Rohingya mass violence. It also includes testimonies about contemporary acts of violence against Jews.
Kanopy
Kanopy provides access to contemporary and classic feature films and documentaries, from the major Hollywood studios as well as independent and international filmmakers.
Vanderbilt Television News Archive
The collection indexes and abstracts evening news segments from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News. UCI only has streaming access to NBC (Aug 5, 1968 -present) and CNN (1989 - present) content.

Streaming video is limited to parts of the collection due to copyright. News segments not available streaming can be purchased through the Archive and will be loaned digitally and available for 30-days. To request, users must create an account with the Archive. More information can be found here: https://researchguides.library.vanderbilt.edu/tvnews
Black Studies in Video
A collection of seminal documentaries, powerful interviews, and previously unavailable archival footage surveying the black experience. The collection contains film covering African American history, politics, art and culture, family structure, gender relationships, and social and economic issues.
Human Rights Studies Online
Provides access to documentation, analysis, and interpretation of major human rights violations and atrocity crimes worldwide. The collection takes a case study approach, providing primary and secondary materials for each selected event, including Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Darfur, and more than 30 additional subjects. This database provides access to books, primary documents, audio, maps, images, and video and spans 1900-2010.

Online Image & Photo Collections

Calisphere
The University of California's gateway to primary resources, including digitized photographs, documents, newspaper pages, politicla cartoons, art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts related to the diverse history and culture of California. Includes material from the UC system as well as cultural heritage organizations across California.

Camio*
OCLC's "Catalog of Art Museum Images Online" - a growing collection documenting works of art from around the world, representing the collections of prominent museums

NYPL Digital Collections
Provides access to digitized images from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.

AP Newsroom
AP Newsroom contains breaking news, feature stories, photographs, graphics and audio clips produced by the AP's network of journalists, who operate across the world.
Artstor Digital Library
Now hosted on JSTOR, Artstor is a searchable database of digital images (digitized and born digital) covering many time periods and cultures and spanning areas of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, anthropology, women’s studies, and other forms of visual culture. This database allows you not only to search and view images in high resolution quality, but also the ability to download, save, and organize images.
In order to save or download images, users must create an account.
Index of Medieval Art
The collections include images and descriptive data related to the iconography of works of art produced between late Antiquity and the sixteenth century. Although the Index of Medieval Art was formerly known as the Index of Christian Art, it now includes secular subjects as well as a growing number of subjects from medieval Jewish and Islamic culture.
The Vogue Archive
An archive of American Vogue, from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, and including pages, advertisements, covers and fold-outs. This archive preserves the work of the world's greatest fashion designers, stylists and photographers and is a record of American and international fashion, culture and society from the dawn of the modern era to the present day.
Picture Post Historical Archive
The Picture Post Historical Archive comprises the complete archive of the Picture Post from its first issue in 1938 to its last in 1957 - all digitized from originals in full color.