[Seattle, Washington] "Seattle in 1878" Seattle city panorama photograph documenting the early urban landscape of Seattle only a few decades after its founding and before the city’s transformation into a major Pacific Northwest commercial center. The image records Seattle in 1878 when the settlement remained a small timber port dependent.....
Industrial Extraction and Scientific Farming in the Interwar Midwest: Ruhm’s Phosphate & Chemical Company (Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee). Photograph album documenting phosphate mining, processing, fertilizer application, and Illinois farm yield demonstrations. Circa 1928. Oblong black album (11 x 7½ inches) containing 77 silver gelatin photographs (majority captioned in typed slips, several.....
[Midwest][Urban Development] Photo Archive documenting the construction of one of the first McDonalds franchise locations in Wisconsin. The archive chronicles the development of roadside land on South Hastings Way into a branded fast food franchise in 1958-1960, a direct record of how postwar commercial urbanization reached west central Wisconsin through.....
Harlem press photographs dating from the 1940s through the 1960s document social, political, and cultural life in one of the most influential African American urban communities in the United States. During the mid twentieth century Harlem functioned as a major center of Black cultural and political activity, continuing the legacy.....
[Environmental Policy] [Glen Canyon] Archive of federal and regional Colorado River Basin materials documenting how the river was successively treated as scenic terrain, engineered water infrastructure, and regulated recreation landscape across the mid twentieth century. The group centers on Glen Canyon and the broader basin as federal agencies, development planners.....
7th Avenue Original Subway construction album documenting cut and cover excavation, timber bracing, and utility rerouting in Greenwich Village, New York City, in 1914, a ground-level record of the Dual Contracts expansion that extended the IRT south along Seventh Avenue Extension and Varick Street to meet rising transit demand on.....
New York Public Service Commission investigator F.G. Daniell documenting the infrastructural failures behind the October 21, 1913 double boiler explosion at the Richmond Light & Railroad Company plant at Livingston, Staten Island, which killed fireman Daniel Sullivan, engineer Francis Hannan, and another worker, completely cutting electric service and trolley operation.....
[Mining][Labor][Steel] Iron mining photographs of Inland Steel Company workers at Greenwood Mine, southwest of Ishpeming, Michigan, documenting the labor system that linked Upper Peninsula ore extraction to steel production in Chicago during the central decades of twentieth century industrial expansion. Greenwood Mine gave the Inland Steel Company, one of Chicago's.....
Southern cotton commerce documents spanning 1815 to 1850 recording the shipment, pricing, and commercial circulation of cotton during the formative decades of the antebellum cotton economy. These records document the infrastructure of the American cotton trade connecting southern ports such as Savannah and New Orleans with northern commercial centers including.....
[Ecology] U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Public Health Service's Advanced Waste Treatment Research series, issued 1960–1964, which document the federal government's first sustained research program addressing the inadequacy of conventional sewage treatment in an industrial and chemically complex society. Issued following the 1961 amendments to the Federal Water.....
New Deal-era western construction and industrial expansion across California, Oregon, and Washington, recorded in an extensive family photo album with inscribed dates, locations and details. The album records the surge of dam, bridge, road, harbor, and flood-control work that followed Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal public works programs. The photographs record.....
United States military weapons and ammunition development documented in a group of photographs produced during the Cold War era at or associated with the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Missouri, circa late 1960s to early 1970s. The plant was established in 1941 to manufacture and test small caliber.....
[Labor Organizing] Ford River Rouge plant press photographs documenting labor conflict, picketing, and union organization at the largest industrial complex in the United States from the early UAW recognition battles of 1941 through the major Ford walkouts of 1949 and 1967. The River Rouge plant in Dearborn employed tens of.....
Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom, University of Chicago Press, 1962. First edition., the foundational statement of free market political economy that shaped late twentieth century American libertarian and conservative thought. In this work Friedman argues that “competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary.....
[Labor Organizing] United Auto Workers and CIO labor photograph archive documenting strike action, union leadership, and collective bargaining negotiations during the expansion of organized labor in the American automobile industry, 1938-1949. The archive traces the period immediately following the 1935 Wagner Act, when unions gained federal legal protection for collective.....
Fire department photo album, ca 1912, a visual record of early motorized firefighting that documents the transition from horse drawn apparatus to mechanized emergency response in California. The album centers on a small town department identified by the uniform insignia “CCFD,” capturing a moment when motor vehicles were beginning to.....
[Texas History][Industrial Disaster] Texas City Disaster photo archive, documenting search and recovery work, emergency relief, and widespread damage after the Grandcamp and High Flyer explosions, the 1947 catastrophe that became the deadliest industrial accident in United States history and a defining early test of the Federal Tort Claims Act. The.....
[Environmentalism][Agriculture] Archive of six manuscripts and printed works concerning water rights, water supply, and environmental regulation in the United States and Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The materials chronicle the evolving legal protections governing access to water resources, including industrial use, agricultural supply, municipal control of waterways.....
Whitney, Asa. A Project for a Railroad to the Pacific, 1849, a programmatic proposal that advances one of the earliest sustained arguments for a transcontinental railroad linking the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States. Written at a moment when westward expansion intensified following the Mexican American War and.....
Photographer not identified. Archive of press photographs documenting urban homelessness in the United States, 1930s to 1960s, a visual record of poverty, relief infrastructure, and social control across the Great Depression and postwar decades. The images capture men living on the margins of urban society, including scenes of soup kitchens.....
Bibb Manufacturing Company workers, machinery, and safety campaigns inside the Star Mill and No. 2 Mill complexes in Macon, Georgia, photographed between 1966 and 1969, capturing a Southern textile workforce in the years immediately following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the federal desegregation orders that opened previously segregated.....
Brea Chemicals construction and early operations archive documenting the transformation of open Orange County foothill land into a Union Oil chemical manufacturing complex producing ammonia, nitric acid, ammonium nitrate, dry ice, and related fertilizer products. In 1953, The Petroleum Engineer reported that Homer Reed, president of the newly organized Union.....
California photograph and postcard scrapbook, 1920s–1950s, documents the development of regional identity, tourism, and youth leisure culture during a period of rapid population growth and national attention to the American West. The album captures informal social life alongside curated views of California’s built and natural environments, including missions, urban centers.....
Clearwater, Florida photo archive by George Fulmer documenting a Gulf Coast city in the early postwar Sunbelt boom: downtown storefronts, automobile traffic, tourism businesses, beauty shops, laundromats, pharmacies, loan offices, civic buildings, youth music programs, local entertainments, and everyday commercial life. George Fulmer, identified here through the studio sleeves and.....
Los Angeles Terminal Annex grand opening photo archive, 1940, recording the ceremony and early operation of the post office facility that served as Los Angeles’s central mail processing plant from 1940 until 1985. Built at 900 North Alameda Street near Union Station, the Terminal Annex opened as a major postal.....
