Tag: history

Public Domain Sources

~ Mr. Breeze ~ 1 Comment
Creative workspace for content creation
Content creation using PD Sources by ChatGPT and kittehboi.

🎨 General Public Domain Search Tools

  • Creative Commons – An international nonprofit organization that empowers people to grow and sustain the thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture.
  • Europeana – Discover Europe’s digital cultural heritage.
  • Digital Public Library of America – A platform that brings together many collections of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
  • Library of Congress – Use the largest library in the world online or in person!
  • Internet Archive – A non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

📚 Books & Text

  • Project Gutenberg – A library of over 75,000 free eBooks. The world’s great literature is here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.
  • Internet Archive – Over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts.
  • HathiTrust – Home to millions of digitized books and publications.
  • Standard Ebooks – A collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks.
  • Google Books – Find and download over 10 million free books and magazines, primarily classics published before 1925.

🖼 Images & Artwork

  • Wikimedia Commons – Many public domain images (check license)
  • Library of Congress – Search millions of items in many formats and languages.
  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Over 492,000 images of public-domain artworks, is available for free and unrestricted use.
  • Rijksmuseum – This innovative platform opens a world of beauty and knowledge, where images, archival sources, stories, and research come together.
  • National Gallery of Art – Free open access image downloads are now available directly from the object pages located on this website. More than 60,000 images are available for download.
  • New York Public Library – Explore 1,070,667 items digitized from The New York Public Library’s collections.

🎼 Music & Audio

  • Musopen – Provides recordings, sheet music, and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions.
  • Free Music Archive – Free access to open licensed, original music by independent artists around the world.
  • Library of Congress – Use the largest library in the world online or in person!
  • Internet Archive – Recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users.

🎥 Film & Video

  • Internet Archive – Digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts.
  • National Archives and Records Administration – Audio-Video and Motion Picture Preservation Labs.
  • Prelinger Archives – Collects, preserves, and facilitates access to films of historic significance that haven’t been collected elsewhere.

📰 U.S. Government Publications

Works created by U.S. federal government employees as part of their job are usually public domain.

  • NASA – Discover our intergalactic multimedia collections.
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – The imagery showcased in the PHIL is historic in nature.
  • U.S. Geological Survey – provides access to over 180,000 publications written by USGS scientists over the century-plus history of the bureau.
  • National Park Service – search by keyword, location, or file type (including photos, videos, audio, webcams, and podcasts) and filter for high-quality images.

(Always check each site’s usage guidelines.)

Important Reminder

Even on trusted sites:

  • Always check the license on each item.
  • Confirm it is truly public domain.
  • When in doubt, double-check.

Public domain is powerful — and careful use keeps you safe and professional.

The Jersey Devil

~ Mr. Breeze ~ 2 Comments
The Jersey Devil
Mrs. Leeds’ 13th Child

Imagine if you will…

You are camping with your friends in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. It’s an early fall evening. There’s a chill in the air and the moon is full.

As you sit around the campfire telling ghost stories, there is a sudden thrashing in the blueberry bushes. Something moves quickly toward your campsite. Wait, were those antlers? Is it a deer this late at night?

No, it is not a deer. It is South Jersey’s oldest cryptid, the Jersey Devil himself!

In 1735, decades before the Revolutionary War, Mrs. Leeds had her 13th child. As the boy was born, Mrs. Leeds cursed him. For a time, he seemed like a normal baby. Then one evening Mrs. Leeds entered the nursery to find her baby had grown hooves, wings, and vicious fangs. With a blood-curdling shriek he flew up the chimney and disappeared into the night!

The Jersey Devil has been sighted many times over the centuries, and he is responsible for many strange goings-on. Campers see glowing eyes in the brush. Children go missing, livestock is killed, and banshee-like wails are heard through the pines. He has even been seen on Long Beach Island cavorting with mermaids.

Today there is a little tavern on Leeds Point. The lights of Atlantic City are visible across the bay. And on stormy nights you may hear the Jersey Devil clip-clopping across the tavern roof.