Two archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 8 shown for “Missouri Democratic Ticket for the United States Presidential Election of 1868” — 8 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-02 18:48 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.Smithsonian Open Access: HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

Mad Tom in a Rage
Anonymous, American, 19th century · [1801]

Cider Making
William Sidney Mount · 1840–41

Storming the Castle – "Old "Abe" on Guard
Currier & Ives · 1860

"Satan, Don't Get Thee Behind Me!"–Anything to Get Possession, from "Harper's Weekly," vol. 16, p. 641
Thomas Nast · August 17, 1872

The National Game. Three "Outs" and One "Run" – Abraham Winning the Ball
Louis Maurer · 1860

"The Irrepressible Conflict," or the Republican Barque in Danger
Louis Maurer · 1860

"Uncle Sam" Making New Arrangements
Louis Maurer · 1860

John Quincy Adams
Southworth and Hawes · ca. 1850
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. 8 matched · 8 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.8 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-02 18:48 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.