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Film Treasures, Streaming Courtesy of the Library of Congress

The astonishment of riches includes up-close looks at our history in hundreds of films. And they’re all free.

One of the world’s oldest films, “Sneeze,” is a gift that keeps on giving. Shot in 1894 and about as long as an achoo, it shows a mustachioed gent emitting a single sneeze, a kerchief clutched in one hand. The film was made by W.K.L. Dickson and the sneeze delivered by Fred Ott. Working in Thomas Edison’s New Jersey studio, they gave us the first celluloid sneeze, an open-mouth exhalation that was meant to be humorous but today seems ominous. Cover your mouth! I yelled when I looked at it again.

“Sneeze” is just one of many films that you can watch for free online courtesy of the Library of Congress, which partly acquires deposits through the United States Copyright Office. The biggest library in the world, it has an extraordinary trove of online offerings — more than 7,000 videos — that includes hundreds of old (and really old) movies. With one click, you can watch Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show parade down Fifth Avenue in 1902; click again to giggle at Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse in a 1916 cartoon. And while the library is temporarily closed to the public, its virtual doors remain open. It remains one of my favorite places to get lost in.

The Library of Congress was created in 1800 by the same act of Congress that moved the federal government to Washington, with a $5,000 budget for books approved by John Adams. The library was originally meant for the sole use of Congress and its role was debated over successive administrations and crises, including several catastrophic fires. By the time its first dedicated building opened in 1897, though, its status was settled: It was “the book palace of the American people,” as one librarian of Congress called it, a classification that expanded when it began adding films.

“Sneeze,” a.k.a. “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze,” is the library’s earliest surviving copyrighted motion picture and was submitted in paper form. Films weren’t protected by copyright until 1912 but photos were, so savvy producers deposited their films as paper contact prints (entire motion pictures were submitted that way). There are more than 3,000 such paper prints in the library (they’ve been turned back into films). Most were produced in the United States and open fascinating, often charming windows to earlier times whether through a Yale-Princeton football game, a New Jersey baby parade or some nuzzling in “Kiss,” the first film to show lips locking.

You can sample this bounty on the Library of Congress website or through its more limited, curated selections on YouTube, where loading times seem faster.

On each platform, the films are organized into playlists like the National Screening Room, a catchall that includes everything from educational films to slapstick comedies. Here’s where you can watch “Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day” (1915), which was co-directed by one of its stars, Mabel Normand, or dive into Pare Larentz’s “The River” (1938), a classic about the Mississippi made for the Farm Security Administration. Here, too, is where to find Edward O. Bland’s “The Cry of Jazz” (1959), a political scorcher about jazz that has bad acting, searing documentary imagery and terrific music (from Sun Ra, among others).

The aesthetic quality of the titles varies, but that’s to the point of the library’s democratic mandate. Not all the films on deposit are exemplars of the art — although greatness abounds here — but they nevertheless have cultural and historical value. Some are flat-out weird and wonderful, while others seem like souvenirs from a distant land. That’s true of “Television,” a 1939 curio that opens with an audience seated in the dark before a tiny glowing screen that abruptly grows larger, a stark encapsulation of TV’s challenge to moviegoing. “Television now takes its place,” the narrator promises (threatens!), “as a new American art and industry.”