Spotlight at Stanford

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Survivors and their Memories

On August 15, 1947 British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent ended and the region was divided into a Hindu majority India and a Muslim majority Pakistan. Following this great Partition where approximately 14 million people found themselves on the wrong side of the newly formed borders, one of the largest mass migrations in human history occurred. It is estimated that more than 1 million people lost their lives in the ensuing violence. This exhibit contains video interviews from survivors of Partition.

Chinese NGO web archiving project

This is a transnational and openly-accessible repository of Chinese nonprofit organizations. It brings together the online presence and publications of nonprofits in China, including their websites, blogs, and weibos, in order to explore how NGOs utilize digital tools and practices for public goods in a country that is going through rapid changes.

Treasures from the Stanford University Libraries

This exhibition tells the story of how New World discoveries and ideas contributed to the Enlightenment and illustrates the transatlantic debates over issues of government, science, religion, and individual rights that shaped it.

August 15-21, 1971

Materials documenting the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by psychology professor Philip G. Zimbardo.

The Office of Strategic Services was created during World War II in order to gather intelligence in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Thousands of maps were made to order and later distributed to libraries across the United States. These maps were either individually produced or were part of reports. The OSS was terminated in September 1945.

History and Culture in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania 1918–2018

This online exhibit is based on a physical exhibit that celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Baltic countries and was displayed in Cecil H. Green Library in 2018. Stanford Libraries and Hoover Institution Library & Archives staff worked together to create the exhibition using materials from their respective collections related to the history and culture of the Baltic region.

Early Tel Aviv through the Eyes of the Eliasaf Robinson Collection

The Jewish settlement that became the city of Tel Aviv was established in 1909. Almost everything in this collection dates from before 1948, the year that the State of Israel proclaimed its independence. The collection documents a vast range of private and public activity in Tel Aviv during its first four decades. Above all, the materials in the collection demonstrate one of the twentieth century’s boldest and most effective acts of social engineering: the revival and enforced use of the Hebrew language.

Photographs, audiovisual materials, posters, and ephemera documenting activism at Stanford.

This collection contains transcribed meetings and interviews with Civil Rights workers in the South recorded by several Stanford students affiliated with the campus radio station KZSU during the summer of 1965. The project was sponsored by the Institute of American History at Stanford.

A searchable index of the copyright renewal records for books published in the US between 1923 and 1963.

A Digital Archive

The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was established by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 and existed from 1946 to 1977. It was created to "make continuing studies of the activities of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and of problems relating to the development, use, and control of atomic energy."

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

This exhibit provides access to documents and information of and about the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), an organization that promoted international commerce and the reduction of trade barriers among member states from 1947-1994.