Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Photography
Fitz W. Guerin, shown here in a moment of solemn whimsy, was a St. Louis photographer who ordinarily took his work very seriously.
The sad story of a magazine born eighty years too soon
Some time ago a man lit on a publishing idea that seemed obvious enough but apparently had never been tried before: since people are most interested in the doings of famous people, why not devote a magazine to just that?
The Forgotten Photographs of Nancy Ford Cones
In 1905 the Eastman Kodak Company held a photographic competition that drew twenty-eight thousand entries. The first prize went to a young photographer named Edward Steichen; the third-prize winner was Alfred Stieglitz.
A haunting portfolio of newly discovered Civil War photographs
Shortly after the turn of the century, the historian Francis Trevelyan Miller began writing collectors, photographers, historical societies, and retired military men asking for photographs of the Civil War. In many cases he asked too late; a Mr.
A Photographic Portfolio
“Again, the seas smashed over her. In a sudden shift of maddened wind, the whole mainmast went overboard—sails, yards, rigging, everything.
The Photographic Record of a Western Success Story
The river has its source on the western slopes of the continental divide in Yellowstone National Park, flows south through Grand Teton National Park, curves west in a long arc through southern Idaho, then turns north and west for its meeting with the Columbia River, 1,038 miles
The story behind the recently rediscovered picture that proved to the world that the human face could be photographed
Everyone knows that the age of photography was born in France when Louis Daguerre developed a way to fix sunlight on a plate.
As a nation we spend a disproportionate amount of time destroying the remnants of our immediate past.
Between his arrival in Fresno in 1911 and his death there fifty-five years later, Claude “Pop” Laval devoted all his energy, every day, to photographing the people, places, events, industries, and farms of Fresno and the surrounding San Joaquin Valley.
When old James E. Taylor exercised his powers of near-total recall to set down memories of the Shenandoah campaign, he left us a unique record of a very new, very hazardous profession
“Mr. Taylor’s entire career has been fraught with vicissitudes and picturesque adventures” —James E. Taylor
They don’t look like much.
The Klondike Photographs of Clarke and Clarence Kinsey
In the words of historian William Bronson, it was “the last grand adventure,” and there is no denying the dimensions of the event: in 1897 and 1898, at least one hundred thousand people took passage to the scruffy little towns of Dyea and Skagway in the Alask
A Connecticut photographer’s record of life in a shipbuilding town
In the mid-nineteenth century, Mystic, Connecticut, was at once identical to all the small seafaring communities that stood on the Eastern seaboard and unique in that it turned out a greater tonnage of sturdy ships than any town of its size in America.
The Winnebago Indians called him 0Ke-wah-gah-kah (“Man Who Takes the Pictures”) and he certainly did that, over a career that spanned more than four decades.
The Utah Photographs of George Edward Anderson
When George Edward Anderson was born at Salt Lake City in 1860, Brigham Young’s desert kingdom—“the resting place of Israel for the last days”—still stood defiantly apart from the rest of America, embattled and alone.
By the 1890’s, when Denver telegrapher George Lawton began collecting the curious photographs on this and the following pages, the era of the Western badmen was coming to an end.
One reason most Americans find greater immediacy in the Civil War than in the Revolution is that the camera came into being during the eighty-odd years between the two conflicts.
A remarkable collection of daguerreotypes by the St. Louis photographer Thomas Easterly illuminates the zest and chaos of city life in the Age of Expansion
Throughout his working life, Thomas Easterly’s St. Louis acquaintances knew him as “the daguerrean,” a title that reflected the man’s stubborn espousal of the first photographic method known in America.
Carlos Cortez Coyle did not know much about art, at least not in the formal sense. But he knew whom he liked, and he painted his heroines and heroes with naive enthusiasm.
A new book presents uncommon portraits of our past from the photographic archives of the Library of Congress
“If one loves old photographs, with all their compelling I magic, there is no happier a hunting ground than the I Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.” So writes Oliver Jensen, the former editor of this magazine, in the introduction to
A Tireless Photographer’s Record of a River Town
FORTY YEARS ON GLASS
PLYMOUTH , Vt, Dec., 1925-Up here in the cold, silent hills of Vermont, his old friends and neighbors are afraid that success may be spoiling Colonel John Coolidge’s son Calvin.
The question of how many angels can dance on the point of a pin stimulated debate among medieval scholars. Absurd, we say.
It seemed to me paradise then,” said Mrs. Alden Van Campen, “permanent and timeless.” Mrs. Van Campen, a surviving niece, was speaking of the bright and languid life of the Drakes of Corning, New York.
When the daughters of James A. Drake were born, in the 1880’s, Queen Victoria was on the throne of England, and she and her brood of nine were the first family to the world at large.
The happy meeting of a young matron and an extraordinary camera produced a memorable record of turn-of-the-century America
The little group of figures below, who have composed themselves with such artless grace on a sun-dappled lawn beside a lake, were photographed in the first decade of this century by an ingenious camera called the Number 4 Panoram Kodak.
Horace Engle’s An amateur photographer surreptitiously captured the mood of unsuspecting neighbors—with affecting results
“I photograph for my own pleasure and culture.” Thus Horace Engle—agriculturist, mineralogist, electrical “experimenter”—summed up what was an avid hobby for most of his eighty-eight years. Engle took his most unusual photos when in his late twenties in 1888-89.
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