As one of nineteenth century America’s most prominent early photographers, Mathew Brady produced an extraordinary amount of portraits, usually of famous individuals. This site offers a great deal of information regarding these portraits, from an overview of the photographic processes used by Brady and his biography to an extensive annotated list of his sitters. One particularly engaging feature is the site’s recreation of the famous 1861 Frank Leslie's engraving of the “Gallery of Illustrious Americans” (Brady’s own portrait gallery), which is linked to pages with reproductions of the actual images used. The site’s main strength, however, lies in the sheer amount of information offered, from specific data on individual images to contextual essays and an extremely helpful interactive glossary about early photography.
*Note: As of 6/16/08, much of the site’s Flash features were not working.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin ignited a storm of controversy and helped place antislavery sentiments at the center of American politics in the years leading up to the Civil War. This site from the University of Virginia uses primary documents to provide the historical context surrounding the publication and public reception of this important work of American literature. Users can engage this material in three different modes (Search, Browse, or Interpret), which allows for an easy exploration and discovery of the specific types of documents one might be looking for. The “Browse” function provides a simple menu of the comprehensive categories of information surrounding Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The “Pre-Texts” section, for example, offers thorough accounts of the social, cultural, and political elements at play in the three decades before Stowe’s novel was published, including detailed and visually-supplemented summaries of key developments in Christianity, Sentimentalism and, of course, antislavery. In addition to this temporal context, the site includes responses to the novel from all kinds of written and visual media, from newspaper reviews to movies and plays produced into the 1930s. For anyone interested in the historical impact of this seminal novel, this site provides a deeply detailed analysis of the world that Uncle Tom’s Cabin reflected and attempted to change.

Part of the Smithsonian Art Museum’s larger “Helios” online photography project, this digital exhibit collects images from the first one hundred years of photographic technology in the United States. The site includes more than 175 nineteenth- and early twentieth-century daguerreotypes and photographs with image details, curatorial discussions, and audio commentary. Users can access the photographs through a variety of hyperlinked portals located within introductory essays and ephemeral information. The “gallery” section of the site includes an index of all the artists featured, along with thumbnails of their available work. There are many useful and fascinating bits of information embedded in this site, along with the core set of photographs which are fascinating in their own right, but the site’s design is sometimes frustratingly redundant. Nevertheless, anyone interested in early American photography will find this site a good starting point for exploration.

The materials in this online collection are drawn from twelve archival collections housed at the New-York Historical Society. Images on the site include stereographs, over 70 photographs from an album, sketches from 3 different collections, posters, etchings of caricatures, and hundreds of envelopes with printed or embossed decoration related to Civil War events and personalities. Items from manuscript collections include letters, photographs, and papers regarding a competition sponsored by William Oland Bourne for left-handed penmanship, the first and only issue of The Prison Times handwritten by Confederate prisoners in Fort Delaware, 32 letters written by Sarah Blunt, a nurse in hospitals at Point Lookout, Maryland and Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, and 3 letters by Walt Whitman. Since the New-York Historical Society contains one of the oldest and most comprehensive research libraries on American History in the world, this site houses an impressive collection of Civil War related ephemera. While substantial contextual information is lacking, the diversity and value of these primary visual sources will engage even the most casual visitor.

This site serves as a visual companion to a traveling exhibition and book of the same title (America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War). As such, it delivers rich historical analysis written by Dewitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney, Director of Historical Documentation at the Chicago Historical Society. Reconstruction, one of the most complex eras in American history, is broken down into easily-understood categories such as “Black and White Responses to Slavery” and “The Politics of Reconstruction,” and on each of these pages users will find well-chosen images that not only reflect the historical context offered, but serve as effective springboards for discussions of history and visual analysis. Anyone familiar with the historiography of Reconstruction will recognize Foner’s well-known “free labor” theory of the era, which is presented here with unusual clarity and economy. This site is not particularly overflowing with images, but it nonetheless serves as an excellent introductory exploration of a complicated historical moment.