Wednesday, April 23, 2014

The Illustrated Guide to the Rate of Change

Last month I wrote a piece about how  a historical novelist views the rate of change.

I often look at photographs as a way to glimpse how my characters lived.  Many of those photos are illustrative of the points I made in my post "The Rate of Change."  I thought you would like to see what life looked like before the machine age:



The Cincinnati Public Library and its clientele 


Child laborers on their break
Public transportation
Clothes dryers
How you treated a toothache 

Victor Hugo's hand written manuscript for Les Miserables
Telephone wires in Manhattan
Tree pruning
Annamaria Alfieri

3 comments:

  1. Those were the days, all right. I'm reading "Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940: How Americans Lived Through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression," by David E. Kyvig, a history professor. So far I caught one mistake: he said that the washing machines of the twenties and thirties used water and detergent. Detergents weren't commercially available back then. Housewives used soap flakes. He must be a young fella.

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  2. Where do you find your pictures? tjs

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  3. If you like old pictures, the Library of Congress is a treasure trove, as is a site called Shorpy.

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