This online collection from the San Francisco Public Library holds a sizable chunk of the library’s 250,000 historical photographs. Visitors can most effectively begin their voyage through these images by using the site’s search engine, which allows them to search by photographer, subject index, or by date. Perhaps the most novel way to search the images is to browse the photos using an interactive map of the entire city. Here visitors can find photographs of the historic Moulin Rouge nightclub in the Barbary Coast neighborhood, or move over to North Beach to explore the area’s rich bohemia. In addition to these search methods, there are a number of thematic collections that further contextualize the city’s history, including “Picture This: Family Photographs of Everyday San Francisco,” and a comprehensive collection of photos from the city’s most infamous disaster, the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906.

Cornell University's Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives holds approximately 350,000 images that document labor and management history in the 20th century. Pictures from one of the Center's major collections, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Photographs (1885-1985), are now searchable at the Kheel Center Web site, with plans for more images to be added on a continual basis. The Garment Workers collection is particularly rich in images of workers at home, in garment shops, and at strikes, pickets, and demonstrations. A search on "sewing" will retrieve about 70 images of workers in garment shops, guiding fabric through sewing machines, and teaching each other. There are many depictions of labor leaders, meetings and conventions as well. There is also a series of 40 or more photographs on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the tragedy that lead to the formation of the ILGWU. This site is invaluable for historians and other researchers interested in labor history; even if images or other primary documents are not digitized on the site, Cornell’s helpful staff will track down additional data from this large collection.

This diverse and useful site includes a variety of different primary source collections from several important California institutions. Comprehensive collections available on the site include photographs of California from the California Heritage Collection of the Bancroft Library, and sections covering important historical events like Japanese Internment and the Free Speech Movement. Navigation of the site is very user-friendly; links are fast, and pages include a variety of helpful menu fields, including having search returns available consistently. The site is valuable for browsers looking for an introduction to a topic but also efficient for an expert seeking a single object. The variety of imagery is exceptionally impressive--from political cartoons, Japanese prints, and stereographs. In each case, thumbnails are linked to high-resolution reproductions with screen and printable formats. Some projects have information for teachers wishing to link the materials to elementary and secondary education.

This small online companion of a Smithsonian Institute exhibition showcases the work of six different artists from the Ashcan School, a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. The site organizes the work of these artists into themes such as “Changing New York,” “Rich and Poor,” and “Immigration,” with each theme containing a few representative examples and a short contextual essay. While this site is certainly not meant to be a comprehensive examination of the Ashcan School, it does serve as an effective and attractive introduction to the enduring historical and cultural importance of this uniquely American art movement.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located in the heart of lower Manhattan, seeks to illuminate the experiences of immigrants in American history. The museum itself is an actual tenement building, representative of the types of living quarters most Lower East Side immigrants inhabited in the early twentieth century. This site furthers the mission of the Museum in a digital format, seeking to promote tolerance and historical perspective by presenting a deeply detailed portrait of immigrant experiences in New York City. There are many different avenues of entry to the site’s available visual and textual resources, which makes for a browsing experience that is sometimes confusing, as many pages tend to overlap. Perhaps the site’s most unique contribution is the “Virtual Tour” of 97 Orchard Street (an actual immigrant tenement and current home of the physical museum), which allows users to engage in an immersive visual experience. The tour mainly consists of flash movies that show off actual apartment interiors, accompanied by detailed histories of the specific apartment’s immigrant residents. While the focus of this site is not entirely visual (the centerpiece of the site is an exclusively textual tenement encyclopedia), this nonetheless provides an excellent introduction to the major themes and issues explored by this important American museum.