Smithsonian Images

The Smithsonian Institute has made available 36 major sets of images from their massive collection. The topics covered are as varied as the Smithsonian Museum is itself. Each set is in a folder, label with a title and how many images in each set.

Some of the more intriguing topics are Timothy H. O’Sullivan, who first worked with Matthew Brady, the famous Civil War photographer. O’Sullivan was also one of the photographers to have taken images of the dead body of John Wilkes Booth in 1865. Between 1867 and 1874 O’Sullivan traveled the western portion of America capturing the wonderful scenes on film. With the 15 image in this set are a few from the Civil War. You can click on each image to enlarge and there are additional details below the photo.

Another great set of images is titled “People and the Post” about America’s post office service. Here are images from mail being delivered to the front door, to it be transported by the early airplanes to the types of vehicles used to haul mail around the country side or in a city. There are some 200 images in this set.

Check out the “North American Indian” set of photos. There are 22 of these digitized in the set done by Edward S. Curtis. The images cover from the late 1800s into the early 20th century. You can view a thumbnail image and then enlarge it by clicking on it. A description with location and dates is also shown.

The Smithsonian also has a great image collection of “Women in Science” with nearly 300 photos. These women cover from medicine to agricultural science to engineering and to physics. Place your mouse cursor over the thumbnail image and the name and birth-death dates appear. Enlarge the image and more details are below.

Some 400 images are in a set titled “Portraits of Artists”. These images from the nineteenth and early twentieth-century show the formal portraits of artist along with their private lives with their studios, homes and families. Again there are additional details below each enlarged image.

With just these few explained, there are many others to view. Plus view the full Smithsonian photo collections at Online Media Images for the Smithsonian.

Photo: US Mail wagon with its horse that collected the mail from mailboxes on the streets in 1890.