Spotlight at Stanford

Green Library Exhibit supporting the Black Lives Matter movement

This online exhibit is a companion to the physical exhibit in Green library. It highlights stories that represent the various types of vile attacks that have terrorized Black Americans for centuries.

An exhibition that examines the 19th-century roots of information graphics.

The Art and Design of Expression in Historic Maps

An exhibit highlighting the symbologies, and other design elements, found within historic maps.

Manuscripts in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

Parker Library on the Web is a digital exhibit designed to support use and study of the manuscripts in the historic Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Movements for Change

Movements for Change contains iconic images of the movements for civil rights and social justice by Watsonville, California photographer Bob Fitch, spanning the period 1965-present, and includes images of Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Dorothy Day, among others.

This website provides map-related resources for National History Day participants.

Work & Social Justice

This site showcases the David Bacon Photography Archive at Stanford and provides a digital companion to the 2020 Green Library exhibit of Bacon's work titled "Work and Social Justice." Bacon's photography documents the lives and social movements of migrants, farm workers, and communities impacted by globalization. His work spans multiple geographic regions including the United States, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Iraq with an emphasis on California and the US/Mexico Border.

Detailed city plans created or published by the Army Map Service during World War II.

The World of a Renaissance Reader

Spearheaded by history professor Paula Findlen, the exhibition draws on Stanford’s Special Collections and the collections of the David Rumsey Map Center and the Lane Medical Library to reveal the authors and texts that shaped Leonardo’s world and influenced his ideas, reading habits, and understanding of books in the age of Gutenberg.

by Esther Burgos-Bordonau, Ph.D.

The Casado García-Sampedro Piano Roll Collection is a group of 54 standard piano rolls from Spain. It is representative of a private roll collection that might be found in the home of a Spanish family in the 1920s and 1930s containing Spanish, Latin American, and other popular music of the time.

Data and More from Stanford's Cutting Edge Researchers

This collection includes research outputs from Stanford-associated researchers on the wide variety of topics and fields under investigation at Stanford University, including statistics, engineering, biology, chemistry, social sciences, humanities, medicine, physics, geosciences, and the environment.

The Rodolfo Lanciani Digital Archive

The "Fondo Rodolfo Lanciani" is currently housed at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte at Rome’s Palazzo Venezia. Assembled over the course of Lanciani’s lifetime, the collection is akin to a “paper museum” whose size and scope compare to that of the famous seventeenth century antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo.

This collection focuses on mining maps throughout the western United States with an emphasis on detailed claims, locations, and bird's eye views. These materials highlight issues such as land use, resource extraction, settlement patterns, and the opening of the West.

California and the West

Special Collections holds a significant set of materials by or relating to Carleton Watkins, noted 19th century Western photographer. Especially noteworthy are three albums of mammoth albumen prints, Photographs of the Pacific Coast, Photographs of the Yosemite Valley, and Photographs of Columbia River and Oregon. These items can guide us towards an understanding of the aspirations of Watkins, his peers and supporters, and his era. Originally owned by Mary "Mollie" Latham, wife of California Governor and Senator Milton Slocum Latham, the albums came into the possession of Timothy Hopkins, an early trustee of Stanford University, who in turn gave them to the University.

The Stanford Photograph Collection contains over 16,000 images of Stanford scenes including photographs of and relating to the Stanford family, views of the campus and individual buildings, photographs of students and student life activities, and photographs of faculty and administrative staff. The majority of photographs are black and white gelatin prints but nineteenth-century albumen prints mounted on boards are also represented. The collection spans the late 1890s through the 1990s.

100 years of field mapping

From the very start of Stanford University, geology students were sent into the field to learn mapping. John Casper Branner and John Flesher Newsom taught field mapping to budding geologists first on the campus and then in the Santa Cruz mountains. In 1903, an official course was inaugurated called, "Field Geology," taught by geology and mining professors Dr. Branner and Dr. Newsom. Summer field trips took place every year until 1987.

Oakland and San Francisco transit history in photographs

Local history as seen in selected photographs from the 1870s through the mid-1930s, taken or collected by William Gardiner, a Key System employee and early rail fan. Includes rare images of street cars, workers, bridges, the 1906 earthquake, construction, roadwork, and a variety of street scenes.

Iconography from the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

This digital archive features over 5,000 images of the French Revolution. This project is a collaboration between Stanford Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Cette archive numérique contient plus de 5000 images de la Révolution française et fait partie d’une collaboration entre les bibliothèques de l’Université de Stanford et la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).

Contact Sheets: 1976 - 1987

A digital exhibit featuring the complete archive of over 3,600 contact sheets of Andy Warhol's black and white photography from 1976-1987. The images in the collection document Warhol's daily life and feature candid portraits of celebrities and artists of the era including: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Truman Capote, Jimmy Carter, Martha Graham, Halston, Keith Haring, Debbie Harry, Bianca Jagger, Grace Jones, Jackie Kennedy, Liza Minnelli, Dolly Parton, Robert Rauschenberg, Elizabeth Taylor, Diane Von Furstenberg, and more.

This exhibit features historical photographs of Wang Jingwei 汪精卫, the head of state of what came to be known as the Wang Jingwei regime (formally "the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China") based in Nanjing in Japanese-occupied China, from 1940 to 1945. While including a relatively small number of images, this collection provides some unique insights on Wang Jingwei and his associates in a series of military and diplomatic events.

‘Where Is My Story?’ Asked by victimized-survivors of political conflict and mass violence, this question reverberates across South Asia. This Archive is witness to systemic disfigurements, displacements and possibilities of the post/colonial condition in South Asia in the latter half of the 20th century and 21st century. It is a gathering place of counter-memory, a digital and physical repository of materials relating to political conflict, social and gendered violence, human rights crimes and people's resistance.

A Summer School of Science

With the financial support of Timothy Hopkins, the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory was established in 1892 on a treeless plateau in Pacific Grove, California. For the next twenty-five years, the seaside laboratory offered summer instruction to visiting students from the Pacific slope and laboratory space to visiting scientists from around the globe. This exhibit tells the history of those twenty-five years.

A collaborative effort by Stanford and Cambridge to convert analog ice sheet observations for digital analysis

This project is a collaboration between Stanford University and the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at Cambridge University in the UK to digitize the nearly 1,000 rolls of optical film gathered in the late 1960s and 1970s as part of an Antarctic airborne geophysical survey.

SUPRA

The Piano Roll Archive presents Stanford Libraries' historic piano roll collection in digital form. The archive includes archival digital images and audio file emulations of the performances providing one possible interpretation of the coding on the rolls.

Between 1865 and 1869, thousands of Chinese migrants toiled at a grueling pace and in perilous working conditions to help construct America’s first Transcontinental Railroad. The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project seeks to give a voice to the Chinese migrants whose labor on the Transcontinental Railroad helped to shape the physical and social landscape of the American West.

Maps of Tokyo spanning the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This exhibit features cartographic representation of Tokyo from 1832 to 1946, showing over a century of changes and including historical maps georeferenced onto current geographic data.

The Charles N. Huggins Project

The Great Jazz Revival of the 1940s ignited popular interest in early New Orleans Jazz in a widespread movement, as much a social phenomenon driven by a dawning awareness of black culture in America as a music revolution. Fans rejected the commercial swing band sound of the day for high-energy hot jazz of the 20s, a music which had disappeared from the cultural landscape. A group of young San Francisco musicians, led by Lu Watters and Turk Murphy, are at the heart of the story documented in the Collection.

Photographs from the Ernest Nash Fototeca Unione Collection

This digital archive features over 1,295 photographs of Roman buildings, monuments, and sites taken by Ernest Nash throughout the mid-20th century. These pictures were digitized in partnership with the American Academy in Rome, which houses the Fototeca Unione, founded by Ernest Nash in 1957.

This exhibit commemorates the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. It highlights materials from the Stanford Libraries including pictures from the Alfred A. Hart photographs, maps from the David Rumsey Map Center, and materials from Special Collections.

A digital library of reference works

This is a collection of over 100 rare book catalogs and bibliographies with additional resources for scholars, collectors, and booksellers. Previously a subscription service at Rarebooks.info, Stanford Libraries has brought the materials into catalog and makes this rich resource publicly available.

Connecting the past, present and future of the automobile through the Road & Track collection

This exhibit showcases Stanford University materials related to the history and future of the automobile, currently drawn from the Road and Track Archive, held at Stanford University Libraries.

Exhibit documenting the history of women at Stanford.

Oral Histories of Semiconductor Technology

Welcome to Silicon Genesis, a unique collection of oral history interviews with pioneers of the semiconductor industry. You will find streamed video recordings of these interviews, along with transcripts, here.

Voices of a Movement

The artists’ and critics’ interviews presented here chronicle the founding years of the feminist art movement in the 1970s. Created by artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson as she developed her groundbreaking documentary, !Women Art Revolution, this archive provides the first-person histories of the pioneering individuals who challenged the ways in which women were considered by the reigning art establishment.

SLAC Director and Professor Emeritus

Highlights from the Wolfgang Kurt Hermann Panofsky Papers, 1932-2008 at the Archives, History and Records Office of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

The History and Meaning of Stanford's Insignia

This exhibit explores the historical elements underlying the design and adoption of Stanford's symbols. Most prominently featured are Stanford's coats of arms and other heraldic symbols; the Stanford Seal, which includes the German motto “Die Luft der Freiheit weht;” and the Palo Alto tree ("El Palo Alto").

A digital collection of African Maps at the Stanford University Libraries

The Maps of Africa at Stanford Libraries is a growing collection buoyed significantly by the acquisitions of the Dr. Oscar I. Norwich and Caroline Batchelor Collections. The maps featured here are a subset of the maps that are available.

A collection of some of Stanford’s rare and antiquarian books

These items are part of Special Collections' efforts to digitize and make more accessible books with unique or noteworthy features.

A recreation of Stanford Libraries' 1998 website

This site is the recreated website version of “Sunset Magazine: 1889 -1998,” a volume published on the one-hundredth anniversary of the magazine by Stanford University Libraries.

This project has grown out of a book by the same name: South Africa, Greece, Rome: classical confrontations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). The aim of both is to bring together instances of South Africa's engagements with ancient Greece and Rome.

Travel-related ephemera from the 17th through the early 20th century.

The study of travel is often associated with maps. And yet, many of the most precious Japanese maps were never used by travelers. This collection of prints represents materials collected by travelers or produced for travelers. It spans a period of time in which there was dramatic change in modes of travel, printing, and viewing geographic space.

At the Stanford Libraries

The Douglas Menuez Photography Collection contains a sample of images from the complete archive of award-winning documentary photographer Douglas Menuez. The archive includes Menuez's editorial photojournalism and fine art documentary work as well his commercial projects. Included in the archive are more than 250,000 photographs documenting the rise of Silicon Valley.

Public records from international criminal tribunal proceedings (1948-present)

The Virtual Tribunals Project enables research and scholarship in the area of human rights and international criminal justice. The materials in the collection are the output of temporary or permanent criminal tribunals which hear and decide cases arising from violations of international criminal law during times of violent conflict and mass atrocity.

A guide to building Spotlight at Stanford exhibits

Documentation and examples to support building Spotlight at Stanford exhibits. Describes how to create feature and about pages, browse category pages, and illustrates the use of the different standard and exhibit item widgets that are available. Additional information is provided via FAQ and Spotlight Community pages.

Conductor, composer, and pianist, Mario Paci (1878-1946) is best known today for transforming the Shanghai Town Band into one of the finest orchestras in East Asia, the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, now called the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. 作为指挥家，作曲家，钢琴家，梅百器(1878–1946) 今天最为人所知的业迹， 就是将一个上海城镇乐队变为东亚地区最优秀的管弦乐团之一的上海 工部局乐团，也就是后来的上海交响乐团

A Dime Novel Series

This collection of Dime Novels provides scholars the complete text of a selective sample from one of Stanford Libraries collection's series, Secret Service.

Baltic video testimonies at Stanford Libraries

This exhibit sheds light on the history of the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, by sharing video testimonies of the Baltic people. The testimonies touch on the Second World War in the Baltic region, the Nazi and Soviet occupations and repressions as well as the story of the Baltic refugees. The exhibit also showcases stories told by the more recent generation, the "digital nomads," who have migrated to Silicon Valley. The testimonies in this exhibit thus reflect on the past, present, and the future of the Baltic states.

Pioneers in the prevention of mass violence

Genocide need not happen ever again. This documentary explores three different genocides -- the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and the more recent Rwandan genocide --to show that we can learn the warning signals often preceding genocide, and see the possibilities for intervention and prevention.