Recently I was doing some digging and came across the largest public domain film archive I’ve ever imagined in my life. I was absolutely giddy when I realized that all the videos in the archive were simply a click away from being downloaded onto my machine, ready for the cutting board.

There are a few tricks to learning the keyword system, but once you get comfortable understanding how the archive stores information it’s basically an endless resource.

Here’s an alphabetical list by subject of just one of the major contributors to the archive. Outside of this contributor you can search by ‘moving images’ for video with basically any subject.

Interested in Eisenhower’s Presidential campaign spot from 1952?

Or perhaps a nice 35 minute spot from the Department of Defense and it’s documentation of the construction of the Alaskan Highway from 1944?

And let me tell you now there is 50-year old footage of Portland, Oregon in there too. I’ll let you dig for those. Just imagine an aerial shot of downtown portland circa 1960. Incredible.

Or, if you are so inclined, use some of your own footage. I did, take a look!  Some things I’ve been cutting my hands on lately: