Historical photos

Pictures hold something truly special—a speck of time that once was and shall never be again. They’re the closest thing we have to a time machine, allowing us to glimpse through a window of film and into the past.

In the mid-2000s, historian Anna Pegler-Gordon said that visual media often seems more accessible to her students than the written record. They claimed images make the past seem more accessible, giving concrete shape to a world that sometimes seems intangible. Not to mention the immediacy of the image, which often conveys information more quickly than a primary document written in an unfamiliar, or even a foreign, language. But according to Pegler-Gordon, this immediacy also works well in…

Vintage Aesthetic on Instagram: “Shirley Slade, one of the 1,100 female pilots of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, pictured in Life Magazine in 1943, at the age of 23. .…”

Construction Workers Lunchtime 1931 St Johns Bridge N. Portland Oregon historic bw photo by Ray Atkeson

Ever since the invention of the camera in the early 1800s, photographers have documented everything, from wars and protest marches to scientific discoveries, and even space landings, allowing everyone to, in a way, "attend" these special events.

/r/OldSchoolCool **History's cool kids, looking fantastic!** A pictorial and video celebration of history's coolest kids, everything from...

Jacob C. Miller (August 4, 1840 - January 13, 1917) was a private in company K, 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment, and was wounded in the head near the Brock Field at the Battle of Chickamauga on the morning of September 19, 1863. The ball impacted in Miller's head during the Civil War, but luckily the buck didn't penetrate his skull. This extract is from a contemporary newspaper: «His name is Jacob Miller and since Sept. 19, 1863, he has lived with an open bullet wound in his forehead. For a…

You can learn about history from books, but that’s a long path, and quite likely not the one you took back in your school years. Or you did, and in that case, hats off to you!

These colorized monochrome photos will change the way you imagine the past. Since we live and remember in color, a black-and-white image seems almost of another world. Through the process of colorization, that world becomes more familiar, easier to imagine, and easier to connect to.