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:
Ken Middleton at Women’s History Sources posted some great links on Works Progress Administration posters from the 1930s that are too good not to share.
Want to check out more New Deal art? Search the New Deal Art Registry! Here’s a neat one from a D.C. library in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood – “Animal Circus,” 1934.
Women played a significant role in the creation and composition of the art that was produced. In an exhibit catalog entitled Federal Art in Cleveland 1933-1943, for the Cleveland Public Library exhibit in 1974, 21 women were listed as active artists in the program.
For my team’s project on building a website, we were using old WPA posters as a design inspiration. They were freaking fabulous. I’m working on doing a series, but here are some of the posters that originally caught my eye.
Keep mum – the world has ears / Grigware. Edward T. Grigware. [between 1941 and 1943]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction Number: LC-USZC2-5554.
Sew for victory / Pistchal. [between 1941 and 1943]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction Number: LC-USZC2-5382.
