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Transportation

Circular medieval painting of a man raising his right arm
Review

Res Obscura

Functioning primarily as the personal blog of historian Benjamin Breen, Res Obscura stays true to its by-line by being ‘a catalogue of obscure things’.
Review

The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project

The Chinese Railroad Workers in America Project is an excellent, multi-faceted model of how rigorous academic research can embrace the digital turn to interface with the public in a clear and accessible way.
Illustration shows an island with a collection of buildings in the center
Source

Kilwa Map Illustration

This illustration shows the trading city state of Kilwa or Kilwa Kiswani on an island off the Swahili Coast in East Africa (modern Tanzania), which flourished between the 12th and 15th century.

Stellar diagram features a drawing of a ship surrounded by Chinese characters
Source

Navigational Charts Based on Those Used by Zheng He

These two woodblock prints are part of a map printed in a seventeenth-century military treatise, and thought to be based on the maps used by Zheng He in his voyages.

Korean world map
Review

World Digital Library

The World Digital Library is a free online archive of over 19,000 culturally significant primary source materials from around the world.
Horse drawn carts going down a cleared forest path taken from the view of a railway
Review

Around the World in the 1890s: Photographs from the World's Transportation Commission, 1894-1896

Although these photographs are immediately useful to any discussion of 19th-century travel, they also provide an important look at the nature of colonialism and industrialization in many of the regions to which Jackson traveled.
A woman dressed in a kimono and hair in Japanese style sits in a room playing a shamisen. A tray with a tea set and a tobacco tray are placed next to her, and a screen is placed at her back.
Review

Japanese Old Photographs in Bakumatsu-Meiji Period

The site will be useful to instructors looking to add visual sources to enliven a discussion of Japanese history at this critical moment in which Japan confronted the threat of Western imperialism and embarked on its own urgent project of modernization.
1907 photograph of Peck Piano Company workers
Review

Museum of the City of New York: Byron Collection

The Byron photographers took as its subjects all manner of social life in and around New York; the collection includes private subjects (family portraits and home photographs), but the bulk of the collection documents public life and public institutions.
Phelps mourning embroidery from American Centuries' collections. It shows two people visiting a grave flanked by weeping willows.
Review

American Centuries

A section of the site called "In the Classroom" offers numerous lesson plans for elementary and middle-school teachers, some written by museum employees and some by schoolteachers themselves, using materials in the online exhibits.
Thumbnail image of painting of a ship with white sails.
Source

Japanese Nanbanjin Folding Screen

This byobu, or folding screen, was created by Kano Naizen ca. 1593-1603.