Audre Lorde (1934-1992), ca. early 1940s, as a Roman Catholic schoolgirl, dressed for her First Communion.
September 1939. "Liquor store in Gateway District, Minneapolis." 35mm negative by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sees off a group of Freedom Riders as they board a bus for Jackson, Miss., on May 24, 1961.
Spelman College graduation.
July 1940. Berrien County, Michigan. "Migrant mother of family from Arkansas in roadside camp of cherry pickers." Our second look at the lady seen here last week. 35mm nitrate negative by John Vachon.
Washington, D.C., 1920. "Bill Dudack, Georgetown University basketball." National Photo Company Collection glass negative.
November 1935. Prince George's County, Maryland. "CCC boys at work." Another one of those Civilian Conservation Corps projects that involved lots of photogenic exertion. 35mm negative by Carl Mydans for the FSA.
Washington, D.C., 1915. "Dog show." The happy couple, looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative.
So many great things to post about today. Shorpy has more great early 20th-century images of DC:
Washington, D.C., circa 1919. "Red Cross ambulances at Washington Monument." Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative.
September 1935. Washington, D.C. "Front of Negro home near Capitol. Interiors of these homes vary little. A chair or two and a table, a bed and perhaps an extra mattress on the floor cares for six to ten people." 35mm nitrate negative by Carl Mydans for the Farm Security Administration.
Fuck Yeah Women’s History has an anti-suffrage cartoon from 1915, the mug shot of Julia Aaron, one of the Freedom Riders, and the Motorcycle Queen of Miami, Bessie Stringfield.
An old anti-suffragist cartoon shows a white man being thrown out of a brick building onto the street. The brick building shows three white women looking out the window at the man being thrown out onto the street, and they seem pretty pleased with the situation. The man is well dressed in a top hat and coat and looks incensed at the way he has been treated as he looks back at the building and the women in the doorway that are looking happy with themselves. These women are wearing votes for women buttons and are carrying women’s rights pamphlets. On the buildings are signs that say “Man? The missing link”, “No men admitted”, “Home for lost stolen or strayed suffragettes”, “man disgraces the animal world” and “down with the men”. At the bottom of the image are red words that read “girls I didn’t marry”.
Julia Aaron, 1961. Julia Aaron didn’t just participate in the Freedom Rides, her family also housed some of the many people who arrived in New Orleans in order to integrate inter-state buses and trains.
“Known as the Motorcycle Queen of Miami, Bessie Stringfield started riding when she was 16. She was the first African-American woman to travel cross-country solo, and she did it at age 19 in 1929, riding a 1928 Indian Scout. Bessie traveled through all of the lower 48 states during the ’30s and ’40s at a time when the country was rife with prejudice and hatred. She later rode in Europe, Brazil, and Haiti and during World War II she served as one of the few motorcycle despatch riders for the United States military.”
Black Vintage has a beautiful photograph by Dorothea Lange from 1945:
And Vivat Vintage serves up some cool advertisements:
It’s so exciting to own a new President refrigerator. 1954.
It’s new, it’s practical, it’s pegboard! 1954
But the winner of the “Dang, that is awesome” award for the week goes to the Library of Congress for their National Jukebox project.
The goal of the Jukebox is to present to the widest audience possible early commercial sound recordings, offering a broad range of historical and cultural documents as a contribution to education and lifelong learning.
The Jukebox contains over 10,000 recordings between the years 1901 and 1925. You can browse the collection by genre, artist, date, and even target audience, or you can listen to one of their playlists. They even feature a Day by Day search function that allows you to find songs that were recorded on a specific date. On my birthday in 1904, this version of Auld Lang Syne was recorded:
We finally got a sunny day on Saturday, so I spent the afternoon working on the lawn. A friend lent me his electric tiller, so I was able to dig up 1/3 of the yard in a few hours.
Our pile of rusty nails and screws that have been unearthed continues to grow. I found 8 nails in one spot alone.
Some of the debris was kind of pretty. I’m not sure what this was originally, but it looks like it was perhaps a bowl or a garden pot.
Other earthy chunks were not as attractive. There were huge rocks…
…and huge brick-like things with L-edges.
Next step is to continue raking the tilled soil to make sure we have most of the glass, nails, and large rocks out, then to mix in fresh soil. After that – the seeding!
I have embarked upon a project that once seemed so simple, and has since then turned into a 3-trips-to-Home-Depot/purchasing-multiple-bags-of-soil/ruining-kitchen-strainers ordeal. I’m renovating the yard.
Parker helps.
It started simple enough. I wanted to plant something pretty along the fence near the stairs.
So I started digging.
And guess what I found a ton of. GLASS.
And not just glass. But rusty old nails and screws, too.
Once I discovered this array of scary sharps lying in wait to stab poor dogs’ feet, I began seeing glass and nails everywhere. A lot of it wasn’t even fully buried – tips of glass poking out of the grass, outlines of nails mere millimeters below the surface… Now I’m obsessed with locating and removing all forms of inorganic/dangerous material from the yard, and replacing it with fresh new soil and grass seed for high traffic areas.
Meanwhile, as I continue to dig, I keep discovering the most random collection of crap buried deep in the dirt.
Yeah, that’s a WHOLE GLASS BOTTLE that I dug up. I’ve got to admit, I was more than a little disappointed that it was not, as I hoped, a time capsule. Perhaps I’ll bury one when it’s time to fill in the holes. At least for now, the bottle has a toy frog and a plastic key to keep it company until I get back to the yard and unearth more treasure.
