About the Archive

This historical image archive was made to make 20th century political images more accessible, particularly to make it easier to find rare images in high quality. If you own an image, and would like it taken down, or to be attributed in the image description, please email me at kirsvantas@gmail.com. I make no money from this archive and it is purely for education.

How to Search

To search, enter tags or groups seperated by commas. There is an auto generated list of all tags and all groups below. Images are tagged based on what you can see. Examples of tags are "Richard Nixon", "Holding Object", "Crowd", "Double Peace Signs". Some tags have aliases, meaning that you can search something different and images with that tag will still appear. An example of this is "LBJ", which has aliases "Lyndon B Johnson" and "Lyndon Baines Johnson". Searching any of those 3 tags will show you images tagged "LBJ". There is an auto generated list of all aliases below. Full stops are ignored in searches, for example, if you search the tag "John F. Kennedy" it will be treated as "John F Kennedy". Searches are exact and not fuzzed, for example, if you type "Mao Zedonf" it will not match "Mao Zedong". Searches also match whole tags, for example, if you search "hand" it will not match "handshake".

Optimizing Your Search

To get results faster, you should be tactical in how you order your search tags. The engine first checks first for groups, and if you searched any groups the image doesn't belong to it skips it. It then checks each tag you searched, and if it can't find a tag you searched on the image, it skips it. Since this is how the engine finds images, the optimal way to order your tags is as follows; Groups first, then tags in order of most to least specific. For example, "presidents, holding object, bowling ball, neutral expression, nixon".

Tagging Idiosyncrasies

A list of idiosyncrasies in how images are tagged to be aware of when searching.

All Groups
All Tags
All Aliases