In 1942, twenty-one-year-old Esther Bubley, accepted a position with the Office of War Information (OWI) in Washington, D.C. to work as a darkroom lab technician. The OWI had recently absorbed the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and their stable of l…
The Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw (or Kwakiutl) are Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous people. Most live in British Columbia on northern Vancouver Island and the adjoining mainland, and on islands around Johnstone Strait and Queen Charlotte Strait. Originally made up…
In the early years of the 20th century, a number of circuses toured Northern Ireland providing entertainment, tricks, and a lot of excitement for the crowds. Though the dim lighting condition inside the circus’ tent prevented images from being made of t…
Dorothy Counts made national news in September 1957, when at the age of 15, she became one of the first and, at the time, the only black student to enroll in the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School in Charlotte (North Carolina). This came nearl…
Stunt shows featuring diving horses began in the 1880s and were a wildly popular attraction for decades, despite the obvious cruelty to the animals and the danger it posed, ironically, it would seem, more for the riders than the horses' theme. According…
Local historians routinely disagree on how many Cliff Houses have been built in the wind-beaten northwestern edge of San Francisco. Three is the most common answer, some argue that four is correct, and even fice has its partisans. But everyone does agre…
In the Victorian era, the woman's hair was considered an important part of her appearance and it marked her status and her femininity. Women in that era were often expected to grow their hair to great lengths, and it was common knowledge that a woman’s crow…
In the 1970s, New York City was a broken, ungovernable metropolis barreling into anarchy. New Yorkers remember this decade as the bleakest, most crime-ridden, and most uncertain time the city has ever faced. It was a time of economic, criminal, and cultura…
Starting from the 1890s, the famous Dutch impressionist painter George Hendrik Breitner (1857 – 1923) used his camera to record the everyday life in the streets of Amsterdam. He found photographs to be a useful tool for capturing fleeting conditions of …
More so than any war in history, World War II was a woman’s war. Women, motivated by patriotism, the opportunity for new experiences, and the desire to serve, participated widely in the global conflict. Within the Allied countries, women of all ages pro…
During the early years of World War II, various initiatives were undertaken by the US government in order to increase the public’s support for the American war effort. In 1942, photographer Jack Delano was tasked with capturing a young American man, George …
The Rutland State Fair in Rutland, Vermont, renamed the Vermont State Fair in 1972, is one of the oldest state fairs in the United States. It started in 1846 and originally started out as a one-day event. By 1849, the fair had become so popular the Rutland …
This collection of hand-tinted lantern slides depicts popular tourist destinations in Norway around the turn of the 19th century. The collection consists of slides produced by at least two British photographers – professional photographer Samuel J. Beck…
Manzanar, Spanish for “apple orchard,” began soon after 1900 in the dream of a fruit-growing empire and today is a national symbol of America’s decision at the onset of World War II to confine thousands of its citizens of Japanese ancestry behind barbed wi…
Amasunzu is a traditionally Rwandan hairstyle that was once worn by men, as well as by unmarried women in order to indicate to potential suitors that they were single and of marriageable age. The hair is styled into crests and is frequently described as cresce…
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, photographer Clifton R. Adams was commissioned by the National Geographic to document life in England. Adams’ beautiful autochromes—a process of producing color images by using potato starch—present images that capture…
With the rise of the daily newspapers in the 1880s, more than half of all newspapers in the United States were sold by newsboys (and a few newsgirls). Newspapers that previously had appeared only in morning editions began to be offered in afternoon edit…
Caroline Munro (born in 1949) is an English actress, model and singer known for her many appearances in horror, science fiction and action films of the 1970s and 1980s. Munro's career commenced in 1966 when her mother and a photographer friend entered some …
This photo collection shows color images of the lifestyle, windmills, canals, cities, and countryside of the late 1890s Netherlands. The pictures are created using the Photochrom process which is a technique that applies colors on black and white images…
Elizabeth Taylor, born in 1932, was a British-American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. She then became the highest-paid movie star in the 1…