Sunday, November 15, 2009

A great photographic resource


A tip o' the hat to Popehat for bringing this to my attention.

The Library of Congress has released over 1,500 color photographs of the late 1930's and early 1940's showing the tail-end of the New Deal and the beginning years of World War II. They're meticulously catalogued and sorted, and show the USA in that period in a whole new light (to those of us who never knew it at first hand). I'm sure many older folks who can remember those years will be fascinated to view them.

Since all the photographs are (by definition) in the public domain, I've selected four at random that caught my eye, to give you a foretaste of what you'll find at the link above. I can see I'm going to spend many happy hours browsing through the collection (and the more than 170,000 black-and-white photographs linked from that page). The originals at the link can be viewed in larger scale than I've reproduced them here - click on the thumbnail view to see a larger version, then click on the 'All Sizes' icon at the top of the larger picture for a full-size view.



A woman trainee works on an engine at a Douglas aircraft factory in California, 1942




Detroit streets and city center skyline, 1942




An M3 Lee tank (predecessor to the M4 Sherman) at a US Army training school, 1942




Crop-dusting biplanes in a New Jersey field, 1942



There are hundreds more photographs at the link. Highly recommended viewing.

Peter

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Everything seems more real when in color. I dunno why, but the addition of color makes it much, much easier for me to picture it actually happening.

Anonymous said...

Good thing I have the next two weeks off.

Jim