Featured Resource: Images of War from the Library of Congress On-line Prints and Photgraphs Collection

Research in political communication typically privileges the word over the image. If you’ve wanted to tackle visual elements of political communication, however, the Library of Congress’s online Prints and Photographs Collection offers tremendous resources from American and Western political history. In this issue, we focus on collections of political images of war. All of these collections can be searched online by photographer, caption terms, and other types of keywords. They offer thumbnail or larger images of the contents of the collection. However, in some cases only parts of the collection are available online. Reprints of items from the collection can be ordered through the Library of Congress. Many are not in copyright and can be reproduced for publication without royalty costs.

	Civil War Photographs. The 1600 photographs in this collection include images produced by Matthew Brady’s photographic studio. Lincoln’s administration granted Brady’s photographers special access to battlefields during the war, and Brady’s staff produced some of the iconic images of the conflict. The collection includes both thumbnail and full screen images from the collection.
Fenton Crimean War Photographs. Roger Fenton was England’s “official” Crimean War photographer, sent by the British government to produce images that would help to sell an unpopular war. The 263 photographs in this collection include his famous “Valley of the Shadow of Death” (shown here) and are available as thumbnail and full screen images.
	Posters: World War I Posters. Political propaganda was an important feature of World War I, and this collection of 1063 American and French war posters captures both the images and slogans that were used by governments to promote the war effort and demonize the enemy. Both full screen and thumbnail images are available, although images of some collection items are not yet available.
Posters: Spanish Civil War Posters. This collection of 124 posters comprises war propaganda produced by a wide variety of groups with a stake in the Spanish Civil War, the proxy war that prefigured the Second World War. Poster captions are in Spanish. Translations are provided in the full records for the images. Images are available only as thumbnails.