Research for Writers, World Builders, and Other Types of Nerds
Finding Images
194,570 public domain images and items, including letters, photographs, illustrations, maps, and more. Looking for lots of images you can use freely? You can browse just the items that have no known U.S. copyright restrictions.
Historical newspapers, sound recordings, prints & photographs, and American history & culture collections.
Thousands of public domain, easily downloadable golden age comics. A great place to look at layouts, structure, and cover design. All comics listed are copyright free and in the public domain. Users must only register for a free account to download. Also a good resource for war time propaganda, early 1900s newspaper comics, sexism and racism in early comics, and much more.
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science.
As one of the world’s greatest research libraries, the British Library’s collections and expertise are used daily by authors, scientists, TV and film producers, businesses, genealogists and academics. With 150 million collection items the potential for product development and licensing is limited only by the imagination.
The Commons is a catalogue the world’s public photo archives. The key goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world's public photography archives. A large number of worldwide museums, archives and community collections participate. You’ll find historical photos of people, animals, nature and architecture from all over the world, from the whole history of photography.
Search millions of photographs from the LIFE magazine photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google. Public figures, notable events, cultural touchstones, iconic places.