-
Turn of the century photographs of Spitalfields, London taken by Horace Warner,
an overview of 1930s foods, the
British Pathé archive, and a collection of
vintage christmas catalogs. A collection of
places in Hollywood, a history of
coin-op cuisine, and an
Art Deco airport in Brooklyn.
-
Before Air-Conditioning by Arthur Miller - "Every window in New York was open, and on the streets venders manning little carts chopped ice and sprinkled colored sugar over mounds of it for a couple of pennies", and
Coney Island in 1940.
-Histories of the
St. George Hotel and the
Morse Dry Dock and Repair Company. The
Digital Comic Museum, and the
letters of an American doctor upon the liberation of Dachau, which "complicate that sanitized picture of the G.I., revealing him instead to be what he was in real life: undeniably heroic, courageous, dutiful, dedicated, brutal, vengeful, and ethically compromised".
-Sample rooms from the
Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Interesting bit about housing reform around the turn of the century:
No room in a now existing tenement house shall hereafter be occupied for living purposes unless it shall have a window upon the street, or upon a yard no less than four feet deep, or upon a court or a shaft of no less than twenty-five square feet in area, open to the sky without roof or skylight, or unless such room has a sash window opening into an adjoining room in the same apartment[...]
-New favourite thing: photos of
washing lines stretched between buildings. In a similar vein:
photos of Brooklyn and the surrounding area from 1918-1945 via Historypin, the Brooklyn Visual Heritage
collections, the Brooklyn Public Library's
Flickr page (it looks like Steve could have used the Walt Whitman branch, which seems...
rather appropriate), and
Berenice Abbott's photos of New York.
-The
Waldorf Astoria's archives, the BBC's
People's War, and the
Brooklyn tag at Forgotten New York. Ed Clark's
photos of Brooklyn in 1946, the
atrium train station of the Brooklyn Army Terminal (via
Scouting New York, see also
Brooklyn Relics), and a collection of WW2-era
history and reenacting information. Private Pete
learns to be a good soldier, and a Russian hedgehog
finds himself in the fog.
-Courtesy of the
Council of Books in Wartime over one hundred million books were shipped and sold cheaply to US armed forces around the globe:
"Dog-eared and moldy and limp from the humidity those books go up the line," wrote a war reporter from the southwest Pacific. "Because they are what they are, because they can be packed in a hip pocket or snuck into a shoulder pack, men are reading where men have never read before." A lieutenant in the Marshall Islands wrote of seeing men devour books "by a dim flashlight under a shelter half, even after the air-raid siren has already blown and they should be in a foxhole." Another soldier reported that "the books are read until they fall apart."
-A guide to finding
historical photos via the NYPL, a short history of the
Vitagraph Studio ("[which] boasted the first glass-enclosed studio, a studio tank for battle and sea scenes, costume and set design shops, vast editing and processing rooms and lavish sets"), and a look back at the
1939 World's Fair. Sinister
architectural collages, the decaying
Admiral's Row, an introduction to
Dorothy Day, and the online collections of the
Metropolitan Museum and the
Museum of the City of New York.
-Brooklyn's
Wonder Theatre, a documentary about New York
in the 1930s, and what to do with a
kitchen bathtub. Macy's
Thanksgiving parade balloons, the old tradition of
Thanksgiving masking, what to do when you've been
called up to military service, and European landscape photographs inspired by the
Brothers Grimm.
-A brief history of
women cartoonists in North America, a profile of
Nell Brinkley, and a
poem by Siegfried Sassoon. Photos of London during the
blackout, and an archive of
Brooklyn newspapers from 1841-1955. A history of
army rations, a book about the twenties
written in the thirties (and one about
the thirties), and photographs of
Grand Central and
Penn Station.
-NYC's
pneumatic tubes:
The Pneumatic Tube system was once an essential part of New York life. Cylinders containing letters, packages, or at least in one case a live cat, were shot through tubes by air pressure, at a rate of 35 mph, and these tubes ran all over New York from Harlem to the Lower East Side, from Canal Street to the Planetarium, even from Manhattan to Brooklyn itself. [...] At the height of its operation it carried around 95,000 letters a day, or 1/3 of all the mail being routed throughout New York city.
-More
tubes, historical
subway maps, a WWI hospital
run entirely by
women, and a chart of
comparative army ranks from the 1940s. The photography of
Fred Stein, and
The Henry Ford of Literature: "Selling for as little as five cents and small enough to fit in a trouser pocket, these books were meant to bring culture and self-education to working people, and covered topics ranging from classic literature to home-finance to sexually pleasuring one’s spouse."
-A
documentary about tuberculosis in America, and
The Doctor Who Made a Revolution: "By the time Baker retired from the New York City Health Department in 1923, she was famous across the nation for saving the lives of 90,000 inner-city children. The public health measures she implemented, many still in use today, have saved the lives of millions more worldwide."
-Vintage cards, photos, and ephemera at
The Passion of Former Days (including
soldier sing-alongs). An
article about the non-existence of the Brooklyn Battery Bridge and the obnoxiousness of Robert Moses. British women in WWII at the
Wartime Memories Project, and backstage with burlesque dancers
in the 1930s.
-
The Mohawks in High Steel by Joseph Mitchell, excerpted from
Up in the Old Hotel, a portrait of New York from the 1930s and onwards.
Profiles of NYC neighbourhoods from 1943, and a guide to
talking dirty throughout history.
170,000 Depression Era photos, and a
Simple Sabotage Field Manual from the OSS.
-
Steve Rogers Is Historically Accurate and I am utterly delighted ♥
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