Not a hundred-year-old blog, but a blog with images of American life a hundred years ago:
How people looked and what they did for a living, back when not having a job usually meant not eating. We're starting with a collection of photographs taken in the early 1900s by Lewis Wickes Hine as part of a decade-long field survey for the National Child Labor Committee, which lobbied Congress to end the practice. One of his subjects, a young coal miner named Shorpy Higginbotham, is the site's namesake.
Link. The blog includes links to luscious, larger-sized versions of these images, and links to places where you can buy prints.
Above, "Shut This Door That Means You," a child working in a West Virginia coal mine in 1908. Notice the birds sketched on the door, and the words "Please don't scare the birds." Does that have something to do with canaries in coalmines? (via Heading East)
Reader comment: Anonymous says,
Shorpy has a picture of the guy on the front of Johnn Hodgman's book "The Areas Of My Expertise", only this time he has a string of dead rats instead of a ferret. Link.
akb says,
BB readers wishing to do their own research and wanting more info on the images might like to know that the source of images for shorpy.com is the online catalog of the Library of Congress Prints and Photo Division.
The LoC has a page for the National Child Labor Committee: Link. Here's Shorpy himself: Link.
