Reader Moses links to an extraordinary website of just-released photos from 1935-1945 America, and comments:
OT – Over 100k photos of American everyday life between 1935-1945 were just released online.
http://photogrammar.yale.edu/map/
Incredible.
Observe the style, the formality, civic rituals and shared civic culture. That is the culture that built America.
It’s gone.
Street scene at 38th Street and 7th Avenue, New York City, Nov 1936.
Detroit, Michigan. Style show of clothes worn by better-dressed office workers, presented by the Chrysler Girls’ Club of the Chrysler Corporation at Saks Fifth Avenue store. Chrysler girls drinking non-alcoholic punch. 1942.
Tip Estes, Indiana hired hand, with four of his nine children. Near Fowler, Benton, Indiana. March, 1937.
Men waiting in line outside the city mission–the first twenty-five will be fed. Dubuque, Iowa, April, 1940. [ed: that’s shame and gratitude on their faces, a look we haven’t seen on America’s underprivileged in a long while.]
Housewives in Tygart Valley, West Virginia, have weekly group meetings in home economics. Here they are quilting. September, 1938. [ed: not a fatty (or single mom) in the bunch. today, west virginia has the highest obesity rate in the nation.]
Student with recreational director during basketball game. Prairie Farms, Montgomery, Alabama. 1939.
Something more tragic than nostalgia for a time in America you weren’t even alive forms a knot in the pit of your stomach.
I wonder, if late-stage decadent Romans had had access to photographs from Rome’s glorious past, would they have seen the light and done all they could to turn back before it was too late?
Reminder: What we have gained:
Anyplace, America, 2015.