Snowball Fights in Art (1400–1946)

What’s wondrous about browsing the images of snowball fights gathered here is how little changes across centuries and continents.

Luke Howard’s *Essay on the Modification of Clouds* (1865)

First cloud taxonomer and a poem by Goethe.

The Nature of the Beast: Charles le Brun’s Human-Animal Hybrids (1806)

Illustrations of supposed physiognomic affinities between humans and animals.

Splitting Hairs: Chinese Immigrants, the Queue, and the Boundaries of Political Citizenship

As Chinese immigration to California accelerated across the 19th century, the hairstyle known as the queue — a long, braided pony tail — became the subject of white Americans’ fascination, disgust, and legal regulation. Sarah Gold McBride explores why hair served as an index of political subjecthood, and how the queue exposed cracks in American norms regarding gender, economy, and citizenship.

Dancing Naked on the Head of a Pin: The Early History of Microphotography

In 1853, John Benjamin Dancer achieved a feat of seemingly impossible scale: he shrunk an image to the size of a sharpened pencil tip. Anika Burgess explores the invention of microphotography and its influence on erotic paraphernalia and military communications.

Manuscript of Ismail al-Jazarī’s Ingenious Mechanical Devices (ca. 17th century)

Diagrams of inventive machines from a copy of Ismail al-Jazarī’s *Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices*.

Through a Glass Lushly: Michalina Janoszanka’s Reverse Paintings (ca. 1920s)

Overlooked kaleidoscopic images of nature painted directly onto glass.

Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive

After a year of quiet labour, we are launching our new image-forward PDR sister-site!

Public Domain Image Archive