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Archive: 2015 (21 Posts)

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Beating the Summer Heat

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

During a Washington D.C. summer, it’s a given that it will be hot and humid, and this summer is definitely living up to that standard. While I was thinking about how much I love air conditioning, my attention was caught by these photos, featuring people seeking relief from the heat in a time when air conditioning …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Keep Mum: WPA Posters Do the Talking

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

Artists working for the Federal Art Project (FAP), a part of the Work Projects Administration (WPA), created thousands of posters between 1936 and 1943. The posters took on all manner of topics: public health and safety, cultural events and exhibitions, education, tourism, and wartime warnings, to name a few. Only a small percentage of those …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

D-Day 1944: America Watched and Waited

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

People today have instant access to news from all over the world through the Internet, often right in the palm of their hand on a smartphone. A series of photographs taken on D-Day in 1944 show that people looked up to get the news in Times Square, rather than down at their electronic devices. The …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

A Tale of Two Houses and the U.S. Civil War

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

In these photographs, we see two houses, both set in rural Virginia, in the mid-nineteenth century. These were the homes, a few years apart, of a retired officer of the Virginia militia named Wilmer McLean and his family. At first glance, the houses and these facts are unremarkable. But the history these walls witnessed, and …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

“What’s the Story?”: Solving Mystery Photos

Posted by: Kristi Finefield

We asked “What’s the Story?” – and the answers came rolling in! Two months ago, we added twenty photographic puzzlers from the Harris & Ewing collection to the Library’s Flickr account with the (we hoped) tantalizing headline of “Mystery Photos – What’s the Story?” The corresponding glass negatives for these photos came to us without …