Thanks to digital technology, it’s possible for anyone with a smartphone to create galleries of captivating plant images in an afternoon. But this is just the latest chapter in a long love affair between photographers and plants—many examples of which are documented in The Huntington’s collections.

In 1789, historian David Ramsay (1749–1815) marveled that the United States was a nation “born in a day” and that American subjects of a king “became citizens” overnight—a wildly simplified notion of U.S. history that later would be repeated in many a Fourth of July oration. Even though news of the break from Great Britain did spread quickly, by 18th-century standards, it took more than a month to spread the word. The Huntington holds items that reveal the complexity of that story.