AuthorJerry Moore writes about the social history of photographs: work, leisure, urban change, and the strange details that make an old image come alive. His Illustrated Past essays favour careful observation over grand summary, using clothing, tools, buildings, and background details to reconstruct the world around the camera.
A Poor Family During the Great Depression Poor Farm Family During the Great Depression This photograph shows what it meant to be poor in rural America during the Great Depression. This house, little better with a shack, with sagging roof…
Road Construction Photograph of Chinese women breaking rock by hand to make gravel for road construction. They are sitting barefoot in the hot sun, earning pennies a day. Here in this moment in time it may seem that nothing changes. Clang…
Weird airplanes from the early days of aviation. 1. The Multiplan (1908) multiplan The Multiplan (from the French for “multiple levels”) was a bizarre airplane designed and invented by the Marquis d’Ecquevilly . This bizarre contraption…
Great Chicago Fire Illustration of the fire that destroyed most of Chicago in 1871. The Great Chicago Fire destroyed most of the Chicago in the space of just under 3 days. It started some time on Sunday October 8, 1871 and raged until…
A fancy dressed man with a riding whip rides a very big pig, somewhere in England during the early 1900s. Man Riding a Pig Apparently this is still a thing in parts of rural England. Riding pigs and pig races may not have the cachet of…
the greatest show on earth Wild Animals at the Circus A 1901 poster advertising a show by the Barnum and Bailey Circus , billed as the Greatest Show on Earth. The circus was especially popular in the early 1900s and toured all over the…
Road Construction Photograph of Chinese women breaking rock by hand to make gravel for road construction. They are sitting barefoot in the hot sun, earning pennies a day. Here in this moment in time it may seem that nothing changes. Clang…
Every once in a while I stumble across an obscure historical by way that makes me wonder just how different the world might have been if only events had come together just a little bit differently. In the 1930s, the Hindenburg and other…
New Immigrants New Immigrants The early 1900s saw a wave of immigration to America from Europe, particularly Italy, Poland, the Balkans and Ireland. The majority of these immigrants passed through Ellis Island and then set about to carve…
Rope Bridge A very scary looking rickety rope bridge crosses a river at Rampur, India, circa 1870. These types of bridges were often the only way to cross rivers in India and South East Asia. They can still be found in the more…
Native Americans Northern Cheyenne War Chiefs, Little Wolf and Morning Star, 1873 by William Henry Jackson. This is a studio photograph of two great Native American war chiefs of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, taken in 1873. The Cheyenne are…
