A Push-Button Look at Sacramento History

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A push-button look at Sacramento history

First, there's the gold. You can almost touch the glittering vials of dust, the gleaming flakes, the milky quartz boulders shot with yellow veins, the twisted blbs of pure metal. Then there are the exhibits, objects that make history present to the visitor's senses: a Miwok Indian hut that still smells like the reeds it's made of; the shiny black-lacquered Brewster landau used by Governor Stanford in 1861.

But the most intriguing collection you'll find in the new Sacramento History Center isn't on a shelf or in a box. It is images from an archive of some 2 million photographs that document the history of the Sacramento Valley from the mid-1800s on. How can you even begin to see them? With the help of computers, on …