Explore collection highlights

The Black @ Stanford Anthology, a collaboration between Stanford's Black Community Services Center and the Stanford Archives, gathers archival documentation and information on the history of Black activism and community at Stanford, from Ernest Houston Johnson, the first Black student to graduate Stanford in 1895, to the present day.

Despite being a historically white institution, Stanford has a rich Latina/o/x history. Explore the history and impact of Stanford's Latina/o/x community by tracing the story of the people and organizations who, through their actions, have enabled the community to evolve and flourish.

LGBTQIA+ people have been part of the Stanford community since its inception, whether or not they were public about their sexual preferences and identities. Although there is less documentation of queer life at Stanford than of other dominant identities, primary source material featured here provides evidence that queer life has always existed in and around the Stanford community.

From Stanford's founding to today, women have played an instrumental role in the success and growth of the university. This exhibit documents the history of women at Stanford, featuring numerous administrators, faculty members, and research centers as well as materials documenting students and student life, athletics, and activism.

This exhibit serves as a portal into the many digitized Stanford Historical Society (SHS) resources published since 1976 and housed in the Stanford Libraries Digital Repository: past issues of Sandstone & Tile (formerly Stanford Historical Society Newsletter), program recordings, and oral history recordings and transcripts. New digital resources are being added to the exhibit as they become available.

The first mention of California as an island is in Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo’s novel Las Sergas de Esplandián, published in 1510. It was not until Father Eusebio Kino’s map A Passage by Land to California was published around 200 years later that this cartographic blunder was exposed. Containing nearly 800 maps, materials in this collection range from hemispheric to world maps, from title pages to celestial charts, all depicting California as an island.

Having been founded at the close of the nineteenth century, Sunset magazine has borne witness to many of the tumultuous global and national changes that have had significant impact on how people have lived and worked on the West coast. Stanford’s collection of materials pertaining to the magazine is chiefly comprised of the photographic files of the magazine from the 1940s through the late 1990s as well as a variety of administrative records and published books.

The Issei Oral History Project in Watsonville was created by historian Kazuko Nakane in preparation for the book Nothing Left in My Hands : The Issei of a Rural California Town, 1900-1942. Interviews were conducted by Nakane from 1978 to 1983 with fifteen Japanese American residents in Watsonville, California. The collection contains the original audiocassettes of these interviews and their transcripts in English.

This collection of prints (including chromolithographs, colored lithographs, and one engraving), primarily portray San Francisco city views, public buildings, and landscapes. Subjects also include San Jose, Stanford University, the U.S. Navy Yard at Mare Island, San Diego, and San Luis Rey.

Explore the Bay Area a century ago. Taken or collected by William Gardiner in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1869 and 1936, the photographs in this collection are rare and unique images of street cars, workers, bridges, tunnels, construction and roadwork, the 1906 earthquake, and a variety of street scenes. 

Amassed by photographer Lynn Beldner, this collection contains photographs and ephemera pertaining to the Punk and New Wave music scenes in the San Francisco Bay Area, dating from 1980 to 1984. Comprised primarily of materials related to music performances, artists featured in the collection include Iggy Pop, Dead Kennedys, Plasmatics, U2, Lou Reed, The Ramones, Laurie Anderson, The Tubes, and Bay Area bands The Pseudos, The Bruces, Crucifix, Whipping Box, and No Sisters.

During its first twenty-five years, the Monterey Jazz Festival established a rich history and accumulated a sizeable body of important recordings featuring the most significant jazz musicians of their time. In 1984, the festival placed the tape recordings in the care of Stanford’s Archive of Recorded Sound where they have been preserved in a secure and climate-controlled environment, cataloged, and made available for reference and research. 

The Ambassador Auditorium Collection contains the files of the various organizational departments of the Ambassador Auditorium as well as audio and video recordings. The materials cover the period between April 1974 and May 1995, when the Ambassador Auditorium was fully operational as an internationally recognized concert venue.

Meridian Gallery, a non-profit exhibition and performance space, was founded in San Francisco by Anne Brodzky and Anthony Williams. Stanford Libraries’ collection of materials consists of audio and visual recordings, photographs, slides, negatives, correspondence, exhibition catalogs, flyers, notes, newspaper clippings, computer media, and other materials documenting the gallery’s activities from its founding in 1985 to its closure in 2017.

New York, Chicago, and New Orleans are better known as jazz cities than San Francisco, but as this collection reveals, the City by the Bay has played its own illustrious role in jazz history. Explore traditional jazz in the San Francisco Bay Area from the early years through the 1980s by browsing historic images, recorded sound, articles, scores, and film.

This work is the culmination of an international effort to recover, scan, and publicly release a collection of historic airborne radar observations of the Antarctic Ice Sheet acquired nearly a half century ago. The scanned radar sounding profiles provide high resolution views into a wide range of englacial and subglacial features with broad multi-disciplinary relevance. 

This exhibit pulls together several collections of faculty papers, administrative records, publications, photographs, and audio and video recordings documenting the history of computer science at Stanford.

Hopkins Marine Station operates as a branch of the Department of Biological Sciences of Stanford University. It occupies an exposed rocky headland named China Point, as the site was once the location of the Point Alones Chinese fishing village in Pacific Grove, California. This exhibit outlines a portion of the history of Stanford's seaside laboratory. 

The Silicon Genesis collection gathers roughly 100 oral histories and interviews with the people who conceived, built, and worked in the semiconductor industry centered in Silicon Valley since the 1950s. The project to produce these interviews began in 1995 and continues actively today. 

Mining in the West has played a critical role in the development, modernization, and industrialization of the United States. Maps, bird's eye views, cross sections, and photographs were created in abundance between 1849 and the turn of the nineteenth century to record this period of rapid change and growth in towns all over the West.