Coopers at work
This painting was first published in the National Park Service publication New Discoveries at Jamestown: Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America. The painting, which shows coopers at work, is an artist's interpretation of life in colonial Jamestown. A cooper is a person who makes barrels, casks, buckets, tubs, and other containers out of staves --thin, shaped pieces of wood. The staves are placed side by side and fastened with a hoop. In this painting, the man on the left in the foreground is making a hoop, and the man on the right in the foreground is making staves. In the background, two men are putting a hoop on a barrel.
The original caption reads, "The Jamestown cooper was a busy craftsman. Many barrels, hogsheads, and casks were needed in the colony, and large quantities of barrel staves were made for shipping to England."
Public Domain
Public Domain is a copyright term that is often used when talking about copyright for creative works. Under U.S. copyright law, individual items that are in the public domain are items that are no longer protected by copyright law. This means that you do not need to request permission to re-use, re-publish or even change a copy of the item. Items enter the public domain under U.S. copyright law for a number of reasons: the original copyright may have expired; the item was created by the U.S. Federal Government or other governmental entity that views the things it creates as in the public domain; the work was never protected by copyright for some other reason related to how it was produced (for example, it was a speech that wasn't written down or recorded); or the work doesn't have enough originality to make it eligible for copyright protection.