# Snapshots of the Past Archive > Snapshots of the Past helps heritage brands, museums, historians and storytellers tell stories with history: historic prints, image licensing and historical storytelling drawn from more than 25 years of research and curation. Snapshots of the Past, founded in 2001, has spent more than 25 years gathering, researching and restoring historic images, most of them public domain pictures from the Library of Congress and other archives. This archive presents them hand-sorted into collections by subject. Every picture has its own page with its catalog record (title, date, creator, medium, source, call number and a link to the Library of Congress record where one exists), print sizes and prices, and a licensing contact. What visitors can do here: - Buy archival prints, unframed or framed, through PayPal. - License historic images for books, websites, exhibits, packaging and media (use the licensing link on any picture page). - Hire Snapshots of the Past to research and build historical storytelling for heritage brands, museums, towns and organizations. ## Main pages - [Home](https://jameslantos.com/archive/index.html): the interactive gallery - [Every collection](https://jameslantos.com/archive/boards.html): an index of all collections - [Blog](https://jameslantos.com/archive/blog/index.html): stories behind the pictures - [Sitemap](https://jameslantos.com/archive/sitemap.xml) ## Library of Congress Collections - [Bain News Service](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/bain-news-service.html): 2,994 pictures. George Grantham Bain founded what is generally considered the first American news picture agency, and the reason his work survives in the quantity it does is a fire. Bain started… - [Brady-Handy Collection](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/brady-handy-collection.html): 6 pictures. Levin Handy was Mathew Brady's nephew, apprenticed to him at twelve, and he inherited what was left of the most famous photographic operation in America after Brady's own business… - [Civil War Photographs](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/civil-war-photographs.html): 333 pictures. The Civil War was the first American war photographed at scale, and everything about the way it looks is determined by the equipment. The wet-plate process required a glass plate… - [Detroit Publishing Company](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/detroit-publishing-company.html): 792 pictures. Detroit Publishing was the largest producer of photographic views in the United States, and at its height it was printing seven million prints a year. The business began around… - [Harris & Ewing Studio](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/harris-and-ewing-studio.html): 30 pictures. George Harris and Martha Ewing opened a photographic studio in Washington in 1905 and kept it running for forty years, and between them they photographed nearly everyone who… - [Historic Print Archive](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/historic-print-archive.html): 5,957 pictures - [National Photo Company](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/national-photo-company.html): 1,709 pictures. The National Photo Company ran a commercial photographic service in Washington from about 1909 to 1932, and its beat was the capital city as a working place rather than as a… - [Photochrom Color Views](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/photochrom-color-views.html): 328 pictures. A photochrom is a color picture made from a black-and-white photograph by a person who decided what the colors should be. Understanding that is the whole key to looking at them.… - [Vintage Photograph Archive](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/vintage-photograph-archive.html): 64 pictures. Not every photograph in a national archive arrives as part of a famous collection. A great deal of it comes in ones and twos — donated by a family, transferred from an agency… - [Vintage Stereoviews](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/vintage-stereoviews.html): 73 pictures. A stereoview is two photographs of the same scene, taken a couple of inches apart, mounted side by side on a card. Looked at through a viewer, they merge into a single image with… - [Vintage Theater Posters](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/vintage-theater-posters.html): 192 pictures. American theater posters of the nineteenth century were among the most sophisticated color printing being done anywhere, and they were made to be pasted on a wall and covered over… - [Vintage War & Advertising Posters](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/vintage-war-and-advertising-posters.html): 49 pictures. The First World War produced the greatest concentration of poster art in history, and it happened because governments discovered they needed to persuade rather than order. The… ## Cities - [Across America](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/across-america.html): 33 pictures. Most American towns were photographed the same way, and for the same reasons. Around 1900 a town that wanted to be taken seriously needed a few things to show off. A courthouse… - [Alaska](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/alaska.html): 28 pictures. In 1867 the United States bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, about 2 cents an acre. The deal was arranged by Secretary of State William Seward, and some critics called it… - [Atlanta](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/atlanta.html): 48 pictures. Atlanta existed because of railroads. It began in 1837 as the end of a line — the original name was Terminus — and it mattered in the Civil War for exactly that reason. Four… - [Baltimore](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/baltimore.html): 85 pictures. On 7 February 1904 a fire started in a downtown warehouse and burned for thirty hours, taking about fifteen hundred buildings across seventy blocks. Fire companies came from… - [Boston](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/boston.html): 931 pictures. A good deal of Boston is not natural ground. The Back Bay was a tidal marsh until 1857, when the city began filling it with gravel brought by train from Needham — a trainload… - [Brooklyn](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/brooklyn.html): 103 pictures. Until 1898 Brooklyn was a separate city and the third largest in the United States, behind New York and Chicago. It had its own mayor, its own newspaper, its own baseball team and… - [Buffalo](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/buffalo.html): 82 pictures. Buffalo existed because the Erie Canal ended here in 1825. Everything grown west of the Appalachians that was going to New York came through this harbor, and by the 1860s Buffalo… - [California](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/california.html): 25 pictures. In January 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall found flakes of gold in the tailrace of a sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the American River. Within 2 years… - [Charleston](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/charleston.html): 154 pictures. The Civil War began in Charleston harbor at half past four in the morning on 12 April 1861, when batteries around the harbor opened on Fort Sumter. The fort surrendered after… - [Chicago](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/chicago.html): 281 pictures. In October 1871 a fire crossed the Chicago River and burned for two days, taking roughly three and a half square miles and leaving a third of the city homeless. What happened… - [Cincinnati](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/cincinnati.html): 81 pictures. Cincinnati was the first American boomtown of the interior, and for a stretch of the nineteenth century it was the sixth largest city in the country and the largest west of the… - [Cleveland](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/cleveland.html): 108 pictures. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in Cleveland in 1870, and within a decade controlled most of American refining. The reason the company started here rather than in the oil… - [Colorado](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/colorado.html): 31 pictures. Colorado began with a gold rush and a slogan. When gold was found near the future site of Denver in 1858, thousands of people headed west the next year with "Pikes Peak or Bust"… - [Columbus](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/columbus.html): 74 pictures. Columbus exists because the Ohio legislature decided in 1812 to build a capital in the geographic center of the state, and there was nothing there. The city was laid out on paper… - [Dallas](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/dallas.html): 13 pictures. Dallas has no natural reason to exist. There is no port, no natural harbor, no mineral deposit and no navigable river. It is where it is because the city bought two railroads. In… - [Denver](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/denver.html): 25 pictures. Gold was found at the confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek in 1858, and the rush that followed was called Pikes Peak or Bust. Most of it was bust. The placer gold ran… - [Detroit](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/detroit.html): 259 pictures. Detroit occupies a particular place in this archive, and not only as a subject. The Detroit Publishing Company was headquartered here, and it was one of the largest photographic… - [Florida](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/florida.html): 15 pictures. St. Augustine is the oldest city in the United States settled by Europeans that has been lived in ever since. The Spanish founded it in 1565, more than 40 years before Jamestown.… - [Georgia](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/georgia.html): 15 pictures. Savannah was planned on paper before anyone lived there. James Oglethorpe founded the colony of Georgia in 1733, the last of the 13, and he laid out its first town as a grid of… - [Hartford](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/hartford.html): 41 pictures. Hartford in this period was, per head, one of the wealthiest cities in the country, and the money came from insurance. The industry started here in the eighteenth century… - [Houston](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/houston.html): 28 pictures. Houston was founded in 1836 by two brothers from New York who bought swampland at the head of a bayou and advertised it as a great center of commerce. It was, at the time, a… - [Jacksonville](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/jacksonville.html): 22 pictures. Jacksonville sits on a bend in the St. Johns, one of the few rivers in North America that flows north, and the city was for a period the winter destination of the American… - [Los Angeles](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/los-angeles.html): 29 pictures. Los Angeles was founded in 1781 as a Spanish pueblo of forty-four settlers, and for a century afterward nothing much happened. In 1880 the population was eleven thousand. By 1930… - [Maine](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/maine.html): 21 pictures. Maine was part of Massachusetts until 1820. It became a separate state as part of the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state to… - [Massachusetts](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/massachusetts.html): 162 pictures. The Pilgrims did not land at Plymouth first. The Mayflower made landfall at the tip of Cape Cod in November 1620, anchored off what is now Provincetown, and the passengers signed… - [Mid-Atlantic](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/mid-atlantic.html): 22 pictures. The national anthem was written in Baltimore harbor. In September 1814, during the War of 1812, a British fleet bombarded Fort McHenry through the night. A Washington lawyer named… - [New England](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/new-england.html): 35 pictures. The American industrial revolution started in a small wooden building beside a waterfall in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. In 1793, Samuel Slater, an English mechanic who had memorized… - [New Hampshire](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/new-hampshire.html): 44 pictures. Mount Washington is only 6,288 feet high, and it has some of the worst weather on Earth. In April 1934, observers at the summit recorded a wind gust of 231 miles per hour, a world… - [New Haven](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/new-haven.html): 10 pictures. New Haven was laid out in 1638 as nine squares, with the central one left open as a common. That square is the Green, and it is still there, still open, and still the organizing… - [New Orleans](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/new-orleans.html): 110 pictures. New Orleans sits below the level of the river beside it, held there by levees, and every photograph of the waterfront is an image of water standing above the city. Ships at the… - [New York](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/new-york.html): 17 pictures. The Erie Canal made New York the Empire State. When it opened in 1825, it ran 363 miles from Albany on the Hudson to Buffalo on Lake Erie, and suddenly goods could move by water… - [New York City](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/new-york-city.html): 1,335 pictures. The New York in this archive is not yet the New York in your head. It is a city in the middle of an argument about how tall a building should be, whether a bridge could cross the… - [North Carolina](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/north-carolina.html): 31 pictures. On December 17, 1903, on a sand hill near Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks, Orville Wright flew a powered airplane for 12 seconds while his brother Wilbur ran alongside. The Wrights… - [Ohio](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/ohio.html): 26 pictures. Ohio sent 7 men to the White House between 1869 and 1923: Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, Taft and Harding. That is more than any state except Virginia, and… - [Oregon](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/oregon.html): 24 pictures. Portland, Oregon, got its name from a coin toss. In 1845 the 2 men who owned the land, Asa Lovejoy of Boston and Francis Pettygrove of Portland, Maine, each wanted to name the new… - [Pennsylvania](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/pennsylvania.html): 118 pictures. On the afternoon of May 31, 1889, a dam gave way 14 miles above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and a wall of water carrying trees, houses and railroad cars came down the valley of the… - [Philadelphia](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/philadelphia.html): 298 pictures. Philadelphia was the largest city in the colonies, the capital for a decade, and the place where both the Declaration and the Constitution were written. By the time photography… - [Pittsburgh](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/pittsburgh.html): 117 pictures. Pittsburgh sits where the Allegheny and the Monongahela meet to form the Ohio, and that point of land is the reason the French, the British and the colonists all fought over it… - [Richmond](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/richmond.html): 135 pictures. On the night of 2 April 1865 the Confederate government left Richmond and ordered the tobacco warehouses burned so the supplies would not fall to the Union. The fire spread. By… - [San Diego](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/san-diego.html): 14 pictures. San Diego Bay is one of the great natural harbors on the Pacific coast and the reason the city exists. The Spanish landed in 1542 and founded the first mission in California here… - [San Francisco](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/san-francisco.html): 221 pictures. On the morning of 18 April 1906 the San Andreas fault moved, and for three days afterward San Francisco burned. The fire did more damage than the shaking. It is the most… - [Savannah](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/savannah.html): 46 pictures. James Oglethorpe laid out Savannah in 1733 on a plan of wards, each built around a public square. Twenty-four were made and twenty-two survive. It is the oldest planned city grid… - [St. Louis](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/st-louis.html): 105 pictures. St. Louis was the place people left from. Everything moving west between the 1840s and the 1870s came through here to be outfitted, and the levee photographs from that period show… - [Tennessee](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/tennessee.html): 23 pictures. Nashville has a full-size copy of the Parthenon. It was built for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in 1897, when the city liked to call itself the Athens of the South. The… - [The American West](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/the-american-west.html): 48 pictures. Many Americans saw the West in photographs before they ever saw it in person, and a good share of those photographs were made by men on government payroll. After the Civil War… - [The Midwest](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/the-midwest.html): 29 pictures. The Midwest was where much of 19th-century America went to work. It grew the wheat and corn, packed the meat, cut the timber and later built the cars. This board stretches the… - [The South](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/the-south.html): 45 pictures. The South was photographed by 2 very different groups of people. Around 1900, commercial photographers made handsome views of New Orleans balconies, Charleston mansions and… - [The West](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/the-west.html): 24 pictures. Santa Fe was a capital before Plymouth was a colony. The Spanish established it as the seat of their province of New Mexico around 1610, and the Palace of the Governors on its… - [Virginia](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/virginia.html): 95 pictures. Skyline Drive was built to be looked at from. The road runs about 105 miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge through Shenandoah National Park, and nearly every turn was planned… - [Washington DC](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/washington-dc.html): 1,132 pictures. Washington is the most photographed city in the American archive, and the reason is bureaucratic rather than romantic. It was a company town, and the company was the federal… - [West Virginia](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/west-virginia.html): 26 pictures. Harpers Ferry sits where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers come together and cut through the Blue Ridge, and it is one of the most beautiful spots in the East. Thomas Jefferson… ## Occasions - [Christmas](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/christmas.html): 314 pictures. Christmas was illegal in Massachusetts for twenty-two years. The Puritans banned it in 1659 on the grounds that it had no scriptural basis and had become an excuse for drinking… - [Easter](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/easter.html): 304 pictures. Easter as an American public occasion is largely a nineteenth-century creation, and like Christmas it was assembled from German customs, English fashion and American commerce. The… - [Fourth of July](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/fourth-of-july.html): 6 pictures. The most useful thing to know about Fourth of July photographs is that around 1910 the holiday changed character completely, and it changed because it was killing people.… - [Friendship](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/friendship.html): 4 pictures. The friendship category sits on top of a real historical phenomenon, which is that between about 1907 and 1915 Americans sent each other picture postcards at a rate that has never… - [Halloween](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/halloween.html): 93 pictures. The Halloween in these photographs is not a children’s holiday for most of the period. It is a night of property damage that communities spent thirty years trying to civilize. The… - [Holidays](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/holidays.html): 1 picture. Many of the holidays Americans think of as old took their modern shape fairly late. Thanksgiving was celebrated in different states on different days until 1863, when Abraham… - [Memorial Day](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/memorial-day.html): 21 pictures. Memorial Day began as Decoration Day, and the name tells you what people did. In the years after the Civil War, families and townspeople went to cemeteries in late spring to lay… - [Mother's Day](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/mother-s-day.html): 2 pictures. Mother’s Day was created by a woman who then spent the rest of her life and most of her money trying to shut it down. The groundwork was her mother’s. Ann Reeves Jarvis organized… - [New Year](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/new-year.html): 23 pictures. New Year\u2019s Day in nineteenth-century America was a more formal occasion than New Year\u2019s Eve, and the custom that governed it has disappeared completely. It was called… - [Patriotic](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/patriotic.html): 228 pictures. There was no official arrangement of the stars on the American flag until June 1912. Congress had specified the number of stars and stripes and said nothing about the layout, so… - [Religious](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/religious.html): 532 pictures. American religious life produced buildings, gatherings and printed images in enormous quantity, and the photographic record covers all three unevenly. The buildings are the most… - [St. Patrick's Day](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/st-patrick-s-day.html): 12 pictures. The St. Patrick's Day parade is more American than Irish. The first recorded parades were held not in Ireland but in the American colonies. Irish soldiers serving in the British… - [Thanksgiving](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/thanksgiving.html): 316 pictures. Thanksgiving is a national holiday because one woman would not stop writing letters. Sarah Josepha Hale edited Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read magazine in the country… - [The Four Seasons](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/the-four-seasons.html): 118 pictures. Winter outnumbers every other season in the old pictures, and there is a good reason. Snow made the world look different. A street, a farm or a park that was ordinary in July… - [Valentine's Day](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/valentine-s-day.html): 375 pictures. Valentine’s Day became a mass American custom because postage got cheap. Before the 1840s a letter was paid for by the person receiving it and cost enough to matter. Once rates… - [Weddings](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/weddings.html): 133 pictures. Almost everything people assume is traditional about an American wedding is younger than the photographs that record it. The white dress dates from 1840, when Victoria married… ## Landmarks - [Acadia National Park](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/acadia-national-park.html): 22 pictures. Acadia is the first national park east of the Mississippi and the only one of the early parks that the federal government did not carve out of land it already owned. Every acre… - [Adirondacks](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/adirondacks.html): 50 pictures. The Adirondack Park is larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier and Great Smoky Mountains combined, and roughly half of it is private land. It is not a national… - [Asia, Africa & Australia](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/asia-africa-and-australia.html): 16 pictures. For more than 200 years, Japan kept almost all foreigners out. Trade with the West was limited to a small Dutch post at Nagasaki, and few outsiders saw anything of the country.… - [Atlantic City](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/atlantic-city.html): 53 pictures. Atlantic City was not a town that grew into a resort. It was a resort laid out on an empty barrier island because a railroad wanted somewhere to carry people to. The line from… - [Blue Ridge Parkway](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/blue-ridge-parkway.html): 92 pictures. The Blue Ridge Parkway was built to be driven slowly. It runs 469 miles along the crest of the Appalachians, from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to Great Smoky Mountains… - [Boston National Historic Park](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/boston-national-historic-park.html): 314 pictures. Boston National Historical Park is an odd kind of park. There is no gate and no single piece of ground. It is a chain of buildings and sites scattered across downtown Boston and… - [Canada](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/canada.html): 15 pictures. Canada as a country is younger than many of the photographs taken there. The Dominion of Canada was formed in 1867, when Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined… - [Cape Cod National Seashore](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/cape-cod-national-seashore.html): 106 pictures. The Pilgrims came ashore on Cape Cod before they ever saw Plymouth. In November 1620, the Mayflower anchored in what is now Provincetown Harbor, and the passengers signed the… - [Catskills](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/catskills.html): 19 pictures. The Catskills were the first place Americans went on holiday to look at scenery, and the reason is that a group of painters told them to. Thomas Cole came up the Hudson in 1825… - [Central Park](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/central-park.html): 20 pictures. Almost nothing in Central Park is natural. It is a manufactured landscape on ground that was swamp, rock outcrop and pig farm, and building it took fifteen years and more… - [Coney Island](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/coney-island.html): 26 pictures. Coney Island in the archive is a specific twenty-five years, roughly 1897 to 1920s, and the thing that made it photographable was electricity. Three enclosed amusement parks ran… - [Delaware Water Gap](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/delaware-water-gap.html): 33 pictures. The Delaware Water Gap is a place where a river cut straight through a mountain. The Delaware River runs between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and at the gap it slices through the… - [Ellis Island](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/ellis-island.html): 90 pictures. Ellis Island is a small island in New York Harbor that handled one of the largest movements of people in history. Between 1892 and 1954, more than 12 million immigrants passed… - [Europe](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/europe.html): 242 pictures. Long before color film, there were color photographs of Europe that look almost as fresh as a postcard printed yesterday. They are called photochroms, and they are one of the… - [Franklin D. Roosevelt](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/franklin-d-roosevelt.html): 164 pictures. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president 4 times, more than anyone before or since. He led the country through the worst years of the Great Depression and most of World War II… - [Gateway National Recreation Area](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/gateway-national-recreation-area.html): 27 pictures. Gateway National Recreation Area takes its name from its location. Its pieces sit on both sides of the entrance to New York Harbor, the gateway that ships have used for centuries… - [Gettysburg](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/gettysburg.html): 436 pictures. For 3 days in July 1863, a Pennsylvania market town of about 2,400 people became the site of the largest battle ever fought in North America. When it was over, the 2 armies had… - [Governors Island National Monument](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/governors-island-national-monument.html): 18 pictures. Governors Island sits in New York Harbor just a few hundred yards off the tip of Manhattan, and for most of its history ordinary New Yorkers could not set foot on it. For nearly 2… - [Grand Canyon](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/grand-canyon.html): 100 pictures. For most of the nineteenth century the Grand Canyon was hard to reach and therefore barely photographed. Getting to the rim meant a full day in a stagecoach from Flagstaff over… - [Great Smoky Mountains](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/great-smoky-mountains.html): 28 pictures. Great Smoky Mountains National Park was not carved from empty land. When it was created, the mountains were home to thousands of people, and much of the forest belonged to timber… - [Horseshoe Bend National Military Park](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/horseshoe-bend-national-military-park.html): 18 pictures. On March 27, 1814, at a sharp bend in the Tallapoosa River in what is now Alabama, an army under Andrew Jackson attacked a fortified camp of Red Stick Creek warriors. By the end… - [Jefferson Memorial](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/jefferson-memorial.html): 174 pictures. The Jefferson Memorial was dedicated on April 13, 1943, the 200th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth, in the middle of a world war. The bronze statue was not ready. Metal was… - [Johnstown Flood](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/johnstown-flood.html): 91 pictures. On the afternoon of May 31, 1889, an earthen dam failed in the hills above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and a wall of water came down the valley of the Little Conemaugh River. In… - [Lake George](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/lake-george.html): 62 pictures. Lake George is thirty-two miles long, held between mountains, and it was the invasion route between the Hudson and the St. Lawrence for a century and a half. Everything about its… - [Latin America](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/latin-america.html): 260 pictures. Cuba sits about 90 miles from Key West, and for most of the 1800s Americans looked at it the way a neighbor looks at a house next door. They traded with it, argued about it, and… - [Library of Congress](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/library-of-congress.html): 291 pictures. The Library of Congress began in 1800 with a few hundred books bought for the use of Congress, and for its first century it was exactly that: a working library for lawmakers, kept… - [Lincoln Home National Historic Site](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/lincoln-home-national-historic-site.html): 15 pictures. The house at the corner of Eighth and Jackson Streets in Springfield, Illinois, is the only home Abraham Lincoln ever owned. He and Mary Lincoln bought it in 1844, 2 years after… - [Lincoln Memorial](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/lincoln-memorial.html): 152 pictures. Congress first proposed a memorial to Lincoln in 1867, two years after his death. It was dedicated in 1922. The fifty-seven years in between were spent arguing. The arguments were… - [Mackinac Island](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/mackinac-island.html): 18 pictures. Mackinac Island sits in the strait between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, and for two centuries it was one of the most strategically valuable pieces of ground in North America… - [Middle East & Holy Land](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/middle-east-and-holy-land.html): 347 pictures. Egypt and the Holy Land were among the first places on earth to be photographed seriously, and the reason is simple. Europeans and Americans already knew them by heart. They had… - [More National Park Sites](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/more-national-park-sites.html): 75 pictures. The National Park System is much bigger than most people picture. Besides the great western parks, it includes forts, battlefields, birthplaces, theaters, caves, canals and… - [Mount Vernon](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/mount-vernon.html): 10 pictures. Mount Vernon is the reason historic preservation exists in America as an organized activity, and the story is not the one most people assume. By the 1850s the house was falling… - [Natchez Trace Parkway](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/natchez-trace-parkway.html): 69 pictures. The Natchez Trace was a footpath before it was a road, and a road long before it was a parkway. It runs about 440 miles from Natchez, Mississippi, to near Nashville, Tennessee… - [Native American](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/native-american.html): 204 pictures. Some of the most striking portraits ever made in America are of Native American men and women, and many of them were taken at a time when the government was working hard to end… - [Newport](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/newport.html): 46 pictures. Newport had two lives and the photographs cover both. It was a major colonial seaport, and then, after a century of decline, it became the summer address of the richest people in… - [Niagara Falls](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/niagara-falls.html): 49 pictures. Niagara was the first American landscape to be systematically photographed for sale, and the volume of it is difficult to overstate. Stereoviews of the falls were produced in the… - [Railroaders Museum](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/railroaders-museum.html): 328 pictures. The railroad set the clocks. Before 1883, every American town kept its own local time by the sun, and a traveler crossing the country could pass through dozens of them. That… - [Saratoga](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/saratoga.html): 40 pictures. Saratoga was built on water that tastes terrible and people traveled hundreds of miles to drink it. The mineral springs were known to the Mohawk and were being visited by… - [Star Spangled Images](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/star-spangled-images.html): 77 pictures. The flag that inspired the national anthem was big on purpose. Before the British attack on Baltimore in 1814, the commander of Fort McHenry asked for a flag so large that the… - [State Parks](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/state-parks.html): 162 pictures. Niagara Falls is the reason the United States has state parks. In the 1800s, the land along the American side of the falls was crowded with mills, hotels, souvenir stands and… - [Statue of Liberty](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/statue-of-liberty.html): 176 pictures. The photographs people expect of the Statue of Liberty are the ones taken after 1886. The more interesting ones are earlier, and they show her in parts. The torch and the raised… - [Theodore Roosevelt](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/theodore-roosevelt.html): 793 pictures. Theodore Roosevelt became president because of a bullet that was not aimed at him. On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was shot at the Pan-American Exposition in… - [U.S. Capitol](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/u-s-capitol.html): 219 pictures. The Capitol in the archive is a building under construction more often than not. Between 1850 and 1892 it was almost continuously a work site, and the photographers who came for… - [Washington Landmarks](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/washington-landmarks.html): 10 pictures. Washington was planned before it was built. In 1791, Pierre Charles L'Enfant drew up a design for the new capital, with the Capitol on a hill, a home for the president, and broad… - [Washington Monument](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/washington-monument.html): 275 pictures. For twenty-two years the Washington Monument was a stump. That fact explains most of the photographs. Construction began in 1848 with private subscription money and ran out of it… - [Western National Parks](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/western-national-parks.html): 27 pictures. The idea of a national park came out of the American West, and pictures helped make it happen. Before most Americans could travel west, they saw Yosemite and Yellowstone in… - [White House](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/white-house.html): 392 pictures. The White House in these photographs is not one building. It is a house that has been burned, gutted, extended and rebuilt so many times that the pictures from any two decades… - [White Mountains](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/white-mountains.html): 11 pictures. The summit of Mount Washington recorded a wind speed of two hundred and thirty-one miles an hour in 1934, which stood as the world record for sixty years. The mountain is not high… - [Yellowstone](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/yellowstone.html): 365 pictures. Yellowstone is the first national park anywhere, signed into existence in March 1872, and it exists in large part because of pictures. The Hayden Survey went into the region in… - [Yosemite](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/yosemite.html): 255 pictures. Yosemite was protected before Yellowstone, and it happened because of a photographer with a camera the size of a suitcase. Carleton Watkins went into the valley in 1861 with a… ## Maps - [Bird's Eye View Maps](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/bird-s-eye-view-maps.html): 46 pictures. A bird's eye view map shows a town from a point in the air that nobody could actually reach. The artist made it up. And yet the buildings are usually right, down to the number of… - [Panoramic Maps](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/panoramic-maps.html): 1,618 pictures. A panoramic map shows a town the way a bird would see it, from high up and off at an angle, with every street, house, church steeple and factory chimney drawn in. The striking… - [Panoramic Photographs](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/panoramic-photographs.html): 22 pictures. Some of the people in old panoramic photographs appear twice. A quick runner could stand at one end of a long group, wait for the camera to swing past, then sprint behind the… - [Panoramic Photos](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/panoramic-photos.html): 2,760 pictures. Some photographs are too wide to fit in an ordinary frame. A panoramic photograph can run 3, 4 or even 6 feet long, taking in an entire town, a whole regiment or a convention of… ## Subjects - [African American History](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/african-american-history.html): 78 pictures. The camera arrived in America at almost the same moment as the abolition movement was finding its voice, and some of the people who understood photography best were Black… - [Animals](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/animals.html): 86 pictures. Animals were hard to photograph for a long time. A 19th-century exposure could take several seconds, and few animals will hold still that long. So most of the early animal… - [Astrology & Magic](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/astrology-and-magic.html): 129 pictures. Harry Houdini took his stage name from a Frenchman. Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874 and raised in Wisconsin and New York, he named himself after Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, a… - [Automobiles](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/automobiles.html): 329 pictures. In 1900 there were about eight thousand automobiles in the United States and almost no roads worth driving them on. Outside city limits the surface was dirt, which meant dust in… - [Aviation](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/aviation.html): 52 pictures. The most famous aviation photograph ever made was taken by a man who had never used a camera before. On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright set up his… - [Ballooning](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/ballooning.html): 436 pictures. The first people to fly were not pilots. They were passengers in a basket under a bag of hot air, and they went up over Paris in November 1783 while a crowd watched from below.… - [Barns & Farms](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/barns-and-farms.html): 635 pictures. You can identify most regions of the United States from the shape of a barn, because a barn is a machine designed around one crop and one climate. The Pennsylvania bank barn is… - [Baseball](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/baseball.html): 575 pictures. The reason American baseball photography from 1908 to 1920 is as rich as it is comes down to one office. George Grantham Bain ran a news picture agency in New York and covered the… - [Battleships](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/battleships.html): 245 pictures. The American battleship was a diplomatic instrument before it was a weapon, and the photography reflects that. These ships were built partly to be seen. The turning point was… - [Beaches & Waterways](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/beaches-and-waterways.html): 133 pictures. Going to the beach for fun is a fairly modern idea. For most of history the shore was a place of work, for fishing, shipping and boatbuilding. It was not until the 19th century… - [Bicycles](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/bicycles.html): 118 pictures. The Wright brothers built and sold bicycles in Dayton, Ohio, before they built an airplane. The shop paid for their experiments, and the skills it taught them, light frames… - [Books & Writers](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/books-and-writers.html): 373 pictures. In the 1930s the federal government put writers on the payroll. It was a Depression relief program, and it produced some of the most useful books ever written about the United… - [Breweries](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/breweries.html): 4 pictures. American brewing before Prohibition was a German industry conducted in English, and the numbers were extraordinary. The peak came in 1873 with 4,131 breweries operating in the… - [Cats & Dogs](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/cats-and-dogs.html): 124 pictures. Pets were hard to photograph. In the early decades of the camera, a sitter had to keep still for several seconds, and dogs and cats had no interest in the project. Many early… - [Circus & Carnival](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/circus-and-carnival.html): 123 pictures. A large American circus at the turn of the century moved on its own trains, employed over a thousand people, carried several hundred animals, and set up and struck a canvas city… - [Civil War](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/civil-war.html): 197 pictures. The Civil War was the first American war that ordinary people saw in photographs, and it was a shock. In October 1862 Mathew Brady's New York gallery showed pictures of the dead… - [Courthouses](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/courthouses.html): 138 pictures. A county courthouse is the only building most American towns ever put real money into, and the photographs show a hundred years of communities trying to out-build the county next… - [Covered Bridges](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/covered-bridges.html): 1 picture. The roof was never for travelers. It was there to keep rain off the trusses. An untreated timber bridge left open to the weather rots at the joints within about ten years. Cover… - [Family Life](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/family-life.html): 410 pictures. Nobody smiles in the earliest family photographs, and the usual explanation is only half right. Exposures in the 1840s and 1850s could run many seconds, and holding a smile that… - [Fire Engines](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/fire-engines.html): 151 pictures. American firefighting was a volunteer business before it was a municipal one, and the volunteer companies were social clubs, political machines and street gangs as much as they… - [Flowers & Trees](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/flowers-and-trees.html): 99 pictures. Before color photography, if you wanted a picture of a flower that looked like the flower, someone had to paint it. That simple fact explains most of what is in this collection.… - [Food & Drink](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/food-and-drink.html): 144 pictures. The modern grocery store depends on an invention from the Napoleonic Wars. In the early 1800s a French confectioner named Nicolas Appert worked out that food sealed in a container… - [Freemasons](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/freemasons.html): 67 pictures. Few organizations have produced as many pictures about themselves as the Freemasons. Lodge certificates, membership charts, aprons, banners and portraits all carried the same set… - [Fruit & Vegetable Labels](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/fruit-and-vegetable-labels.html): 481 pictures. A fruit crate label had a short life. It was pasted on the end of a wooden box, seen by a buyer at a wholesale market for a few seconds, and thrown away with the crate. That is… - [General Stores](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/general-stores.html): 3 pictures. In thousands of American towns the general store held the post office, and that single fact explains everything else about it. Fourth-class postmasterships were political… - [Golf](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/golf.html): 73 pictures. Golf in America is younger than most people think. The game had been played in Scotland for centuries, but it did not take root here until the late 1880s. A group of men laid out… - [Government & Politics](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/government-and-politics.html): 232 pictures. The Great Seal of the United States took Congress 6 years and 3 committees to settle. The first committee, appointed on July 4, 1776, included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and… - [Home & Household](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/home-and-household.html): 113 pictures. Running a 19th century household was hard physical work. Water came from a pump or a well. Heat came from a stove that had to be fed with wood or coal several times a day. Laundry… - [Horses](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/horses.html): 698 pictures. For most of the period these pictures cover, the horse was the engine of American life. It pulled the streetcar, the delivery wagon, the plow, the fire engine and the family… - [Libraries](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/libraries.html): 243 pictures. When the British burned Washington in 1814, the small Library of Congress burned with the Capitol. Thomas Jefferson offered to sell Congress his own library as a replacement, and… - [Lighthouses](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/lighthouses.html): 212 pictures. The United States built more than a thousand lighthouses, and for most of the nineteenth century they were badly run. The Treasury put them under a customs official who bought the… - [Locomotives](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/locomotives.html): 16 pictures. There is a specific tradition of locomotive photography that has almost nothing to do with railroads as transport and everything to do with the machine as an object. Builders like… - [Medicine & Health](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/medicine-and-health.html): 196 pictures. For most of the 19th century, anyone could bottle a mixture, give it a name and sell it as a cure for almost anything. No law required the label to say what was inside, and many… - [Military](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/military.html): 395 pictures. The American military photographic record begins with a business failure. Mathew Brady equipped and financed some twenty photographers to follow the Union armies, expecting the… - [Mobile](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/mobile.html): 14 pictures - [Movies & Film](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/movies-and-film.html): 289 pictures. The Library of Congress holds hundreds of early films that survived only by accident. Before 1912 there was no way to copyright a motion picture as such, so producers printed… - [Music & Dance](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/music-and-dance.html): 123 pictures. Before the phonograph and the radio, if you wanted music at home, someone in the house had to play it. That simple fact built an enormous industry. By the late 19th century the… - [Native Americans](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/native-americans.html): 211 pictures. Many of the best-known photographs of Native Americans were made by people trying to record what they believed was a vanishing way of life. The people in the pictures had other… - [Opera Houses](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/opera-houses.html): 9 pictures. Almost no opera was performed in an American opera house. The name was aspirational and slightly defensive — a theater was a disreputable thing in much of nineteenth-century… - [PAN MAPS](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/pan-maps.html): 301 pictures - [PAN PHOTOS](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/pan-photos.html): 23 pictures - [Parades](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/parades.html): 145 pictures. The ticker tape parade began by accident. In October 1886, as a parade in New York celebrated the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, office workers along Broadway threw the… - [Presidents](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/presidents.html): 1,862 pictures. There are no photographs of George Washington. He died in 1799, 40 years before the camera came to America, so every image of him is a painting, an engraving or a copy of one.… - [Railroads & Depots](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/railroads-and-depots.html): 550 pictures. Before 1883 every American town kept its own time, set by the sun at noon. When it was noon in Chicago it was a few minutes before or after noon in towns a hundred miles east or… - [Revolutionary War](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/revolutionary-war.html): 51 pictures. There are no photographs of the American Revolution. The war ended more than 50 years before the camera was invented, so nearly every picture in this collection was made either… - [Sailing & Yachts](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/sailing-and-yachts.html): 65 pictures. For most of history, a sailboat was a working tool. Yachting, sailing purely for pleasure and sport, only became a big business in the 19th century, and the photographs here catch… - [Schools](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/schools.html): 35 pictures. Almost everyone who went to school in America after about 1880 ended up in a class photograph. That habit has left a huge and oddly moving record of children standing in rows… - [Schooners](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/schooners.html): 11 pictures. A schooner carries its sails fore and aft rather than square across, which means it can work closer to the wind and be handled by a much smaller crew than a square-rigger of the… - [Sorted Images](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/sorted-images.html): 10 pictures - [Sports](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/sports.html): 94 pictures. Most of the sports in these pictures were still being invented while the photographers were taking them. The rules were loose, the equipment was homemade by modern standards, and… - [Steamboats](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/steamboats.html): 125 pictures. The western river steamboat is a peculiarly American machine, developed for water nobody else had to deal with — shallow, snag-filled, constantly shifting rivers with no reliable… - [Taverns & Saloons](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/taverns-and-saloons.html): 264 pictures. By 1900 there was roughly one saloon for every three hundred Americans, and in working-class city wards the ratio was far tighter than that. It was the most common commercial… - [Tobacco](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/tobacco.html): 80 pictures. Tobacco kept the first permanent English colony in America alive. In Virginia around 1612, John Rolfe planted a milder strain of tobacco than the local plant, and it sold well in… - [Transportation](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/transportation.html): 56 pictures. In 1800 a trip from New York to Boston took several days by stagecoach over rough roads. By 1900 it took a few hours by train. Within a few more decades people were making it by… - [Travel](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/travel.html): 10 pictures. Tourism as we know it is a product of the railroad and the steamship. Before them, travel for pleasure was slow, expensive and mostly limited to the wealthy. By the late 1800s a… - [Trolleys & Streetcars](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/trolleys-and-streetcars.html): 10 pictures. Between about 1890 and 1920 the electric streetcar rearranged every American city, and it did so on a business model that had almost nothing to do with carrying passengers. The… - [Wine, Beer & Spirits](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/wine-beer-and-spirits.html): 184 pictures. Several of the most famous drink brands in the world were started by druggists. Coca-Cola was mixed by an Atlanta pharmacist named John Pemberton in 1886. Pepsi-Cola began a few… - [Work & Industry](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/work-and-industry.html): 384 pictures. Thomas Edison called his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, an invention factory, and he meant it literally. He set up the place in 1876 with a staff of machinists and… - [World War I](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/world-war-i.html): 1,725 pictures. The United States was in World War I for only about 19 months, from April 1917 to the armistice on November 11, 1918. In that short time it produced one of the largest outpourings… - [World's Fairs](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/world-s-fairs.html): 267 pictures. A world's fair was a complete city, built at enormous expense, occupied by millions of people for a single summer, and then demolished. That is the fact that makes the photographs… ## Vintage Art & Photography - [Daguerreotypes & Early Photography](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/daguerreotypes-and-early-photography.html): 743 pictures. A daguerreotype is a photograph with no negative. Each one is a single image on a sheet of silvered copper, polished to a mirror finish, and there is no second copy anywhere. When… - [Fine Art Prints](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/fine-art-prints.html): 39 pictures. Before photography could reproduce a painting, the only way most people saw great art was through a print. A skilled engraver or lithographer would copy the painting by hand onto… - [Japanese Prints](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/japanese-prints.html): 778 pictures. A Japanese woodblock print was a team effort. An artist drew the design, a carver cut it into blocks of cherry wood, a printer inked and pressed each color by hand, and a… - [Theater Posters](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/theater-posters.html): 395 pictures. American theater posters of the nineteenth century were among the most sophisticated color printing being done anywhere, and they were made to be pasted on a wall and covered over… - [WPA Posters](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/wpa-posters.html): 935 pictures. During the Great Depression the federal government put artists on the payroll, and one of the things it asked them to make was posters. Thousands of designs were produced between… ## Pictorial America - [Apples](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/apples.html): 66 pictures. This board holds the pictures gathered for Apples, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. They trace one of the most familiar fruits… - [Balloons](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/balloons.html): 83 pictures. This board holds the pictures gathered for Balloons, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. Long before the airplane, the balloon… Flip-through edition of the book: https://online.anyflip.com/goawe/dyvg/mobile/index.html - [Books](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/books.html): 76 pictures. This board holds the pictures gathered for Books, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. It is a book about books, and about the… - [Boston Baseball](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/boston-baseball.html): 68 pictures. This board holds the pictures gathered for Boston Baseball, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. Boston has been a baseball town… - [Christmas](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/pictorial-america-christmas.html): 74 pictures. Christmas was illegal in Massachusetts for twenty-two years. The Puritans banned it in 1659 on the grounds that it had no scriptural basis and had become an excuse for drinking… - [Gettysburg](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/pictorial-america-gettysburg.html): 456 pictures. This board holds the pictures gathered for Gettysburg, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. Few places in America have been… Flip-through edition of the book: https://online.anyflip.com/goawe/vjoq/mobile/index.html - [Halloween](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/pictorial-america-halloween.html): 66 pictures. The Halloween in these photographs is not a children’s holiday for most of the period. It is a night of property damage that communities spent thirty years trying to civilize. The… Flip-through edition of the book: https://online.anyflip.com/goawe/pmof/mobile/index.html - [Jefferson](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/jefferson.html): 104 pictures. This board holds the pictures gathered for Jefferson, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. Thomas Jefferson died before the camera… - [Lincoln](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/lincoln.html): 114 pictures. This board holds the pictures gathered for Lincoln, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. Abraham Lincoln was the first president… Flip-through edition of the book: https://online.anyflip.com/goawe/ofbr/mobile/index.html - [Love](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/love.html): 133 pictures. This board holds the pictures gathered for Love, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. Romance has always been a favorite subject… - [Star Spangled Images](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/pictorial-america-star-spangled-images.html): 60 pictures. This board holds the pictures gathered for Star Spangled Images, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. It collects American… Flip-through edition of the book: https://online.anyflip.com/goawe/kirq/mobile/index.html - [Thanksgiving](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/pictorial-america-thanksgiving.html): 123 pictures. Thanksgiving is a national holiday because one woman would not stop writing letters. Sarah Josepha Hale edited Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read magazine in the country… Flip-through edition of the book: https://online.anyflip.com/goawe/jyuv/mobile/index.html - [Tractors](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/tractors.html): 71 pictures. This board holds the pictures gathered for Tractors, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. The tractor did more to change daily… - [Trains](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/trains.html): 123 pictures. Before November 18, 1883, there was no such thing as a time zone. Every town set its clocks by local noon, which meant that when it was noon in Chicago it was 11:50 in St. Louis… - [U.S. Capitol](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/pictorial-america-u-s-capitol.html): 78 pictures. The Capitol in the archive is a building under construction more often than not. Between 1850 and 1892 it was almost continuously a work site, and the photographers who came for… Flip-through edition of the book: https://online.anyflip.com/goawe/rnnx/mobile/index.html - [Washington](https://jameslantos.com/archive/b/washington.html): 233 pictures. This board holds the pictures gathered for Washington, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. George Washington was the most… Flip-through edition of the book: https://online.anyflip.com/goawe/mjwe/mobile/index.html