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:
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| The Cincinnati Public Library and its clientele |
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| Child laborers on their break |
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Public transportation
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| Clothes dryers |
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| How you treated a toothache |
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| Victor Hugo's hand written manuscript for Les Miserables |
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| Telephone wires in Manhattan |
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| Tree pruning |
Annamaria Alfieri
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.
ReplyDeleteWhere do you find your pictures? tjs
ReplyDeleteIf you like old pictures, the Library of Congress is a treasure trove, as is a site called Shorpy.
ReplyDelete