Whether you’re a history fan, working on a project for school, or you’re looking for archival footage for a full documentary, CriticalPast is an excellent source for stock video of historical figures and events as early as the 1890s. The service has thousands of video clips and photos that span decades of modern history, from the end of the 19th century all the way to the end of the 20th. If you’re a history fan, you can browse the archive for free. If you’d like to download and keep any of the clips, the service offers them in multiple formats at prices even a student can love.
CriticalPast features over 57,000 archival videos and over 7 million photos and images spanning the 1890s to the 1980s. The bulk of the material is from the 1940s and 1950s, but you can find videos and photos from much earlier eras as well. The service has a great deal of Civil War imagery and video, like an 1898 film of the USS Brooklyn and its crew on deck in New York City. At the same time, not all of the videos at CriticalPast have intrinsic historic value aside from their age: another 1898 video is a short 30-second film of a man in a gorilla costume sneaking up on a sleeping friend.














