Explore Our Image Collections

The South Asia Collection at Hamilton Library began with the Oriental Institute in 1932, initially acquiring materials on Sanskrit, Indian philosophy, and religion. Today, the collection is rich in resources about South Asia from the 18th, 19, and 20th centuries, and filled with treasures on a variety of subjects, including history, travel writing, and literature. Several of these are rare items, held in the Special Research Collection, such as Views of India, an album of fifty-four water-color views of architectural sites at Agra, Delhi, and Mathura; Thomas Pennant’s Indian Zoology, a beautifully illustrated volume on animals and birds on the subcontinent; travel accounts by William…

Jerome Feldman, who earned his doctoral degree from Columbia University with a dissertation titled "The Architecture of Nias, Indonesia, with Special Reference to Bowomataluo Village," generously donated a collection of photographic slides documenting Nias Island, Indonesia in the late 1970s. These slides provide valuable visual insights into the island's architecture and culture, particularly focusing on the village of Bowomataluo (sometimes spelled Bawomataluo), a central subject of Feldman's scholarly research.  Professor Feldman would like to make these available to other scholars, and especially to people from Nias.

Dr. Jack A. Tobin (1920-2010) first went to the Marshall Islands in 1950 as a student of Dr. Len Mason, to work on the Pacific Science Board's Coral Atoll Project (CAP) -- an initiative meant to study the needs of atoll dwellers with limited resources and growing populations. Arno Atoll was chosen as the first CAP research site, and the first 225 photos in this online collection derive from Dr. Tobin's time there. (Read Dr. Tobin's typescript description. Len Mason's final report, Anthropology-geography study of Arno Atoll, Marshall Islands is available in the Pacific Collection; Other reports in this series are cataloged under the series title Scientific Investigations in…

The Korean War, a conflict between the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), resulted in the loss of at least 2.5 million lives. The war escalated to international proportions in June 1950 when North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union, invaded the South. The United Nations, led by the United States, intervened on behalf of South Korea, while the People’s Republic of China supported North Korea. After over a million combat casualties on both sides, the fighting ceased in July 1953, leaving Korea divided into two hostile states. Subsequent negotiations in 1954 failed to produce further agreements, solidifying the front line as the de…

The Hindu Gods and Goddesses Collection consists of 35 lithographic prints and 3 typed manuscripts related to Hindu mythology and religious narratives. Created in 1903 by Atul K. Basu, the collection includes visual and textual representations of Hindu gods, goddesses, and religious figures. The manuscripts contain mythological narratives, devotional interpretations, religious symbolism, and descriptions of ritual traditions associated with Hindu beliefs and practices. Together, the lithographs and manuscripts reflect Hindu mythological themes and religious expression within South Asian print and textual culture. The collection may support research in Hindu mythology, South Asian religious…

About the ArtistJuliette May Fraser was born in Honolulu in 1887, during the reign of King Kalakaua when Hawaii was a kingdom. She graduated from Honolulu’s Punahou School in 1905 and earned a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College in 1909. She was a painter, muralist, printmaker and illustrator, and even designed a half-dollar coin for the U.S. Treasury in 1928 to commemorate Hawaii’s Sesquicentennial.  Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art and state collections in Hawaii and California. She began painting murals in Hawaii in the 1920s and learned the technique for frescoes…

The Hawaiian Collection, University of Hawaii at Manoa received an album of photographs from the Margaret S. Fitzharris Trust, Trust & Investment Services, Mount Dora, Florida, via Dana Myers (former Library Development Officer) in 2012. Donor may be "Margaret S Fitzharris: 02 Feb 1911-08 Sep 2005, last residing in Zellwood, FL".* The Hawaiian Collection has no information about the Fitzharris family. The photographs appear to date from the early 1900's. They may have been collected by Will[iam?] and Ella Skinner (see photograph 050) who may be "Mr. William E. Skinner, bookkeeper for the Hawaiian Electric Co. and Miss Eleanor M. Caywood lately of Somerset Ohio" Read article…

The slides in this collection derive from the anthropological fieldwork of Dr. Leonard “Len” Mason and Dr. Robert Kiste, both of whom served as longtime faculty members at the University of Hawaii-Manoa prior to their retirement from fulltime teaching (Mason in 1969 and Kiste in 2002). The United States conducted more than eighty nuclear weapons tests on and around Bikini and Enewetak Atolls between 1946 and 1958. The early images in this collection document the lives of Bikinians after they were relocated first to Rongerik Atoll in 1946 and later to Kwajalein (1948), Kili and Jaluit (1949). These early photos were all taken by Len Mason, who returned in 1957 to do further work on Kili…

Donald Angus' collection of botanical prints are housed at the Bishop Museum, Foster Gardens, the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa Hamilton Library. These exquisite illustrations were published in monographs and journals mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries. They reflect the enthusiasm of scientists, and the popularity of the exotic flora being introduced and cultivated in European botanical gardens. Many prints in the Angus collection are from Monandrian Plants of the Order Scitamineae by William Roscoe (1753-1831). Roscoe, a wealthy banker and amateur botanist, founded the Liverpool Botanic Garden in 1802. Many of the illustrations in his 1828…