Bringing You the Wonder of Yesterday – Today
Remember when unfriending people was just scratching or tearing out their faces on your photographs… Below is a collection of 20 vintage photos show how we used to “unfriend” people back then.
Texas is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by both area (after Alaska) and population (after California). Texas shares borders with the states of Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the west, and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the south and southwest; and has a coastline with the Gulf of Mexico to the southeast.
Houston is the most populous city in Texas and the fourth-largest in the U.S., while San Antonio is the second most populous in the state and seventh-largest in the U.S. Dallas–Fort Worth and Greater Houston are, respectively, the fourth- and fifth-largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country. Other major cities include Austin, the second most populous state capital in the U.S., and El Paso. Texas is nicknamed the “Lone Star State” for its former status as an independent republic, and as a reminder of the state’s struggle for independence from Mexico. The “Lone Star” can be found on the Texas state flag and on the Texas state seal. The origin of Texas’s name is from the Caddo word táysha’ meaning ‘friends’.
Due to its size and geologic features such as the Balcones Fault, Texas contains diverse landscapes common to both the U.S. Southern and the Southwestern regions. Although Texas is popularly associated with the U.S. southwestern deserts, less than ten percent of Texas’s land area is desert. Most of the population centers are in areas of former prairies, grasslands, forests, and the coastline. Traveling from east to west, one can observe terrain that ranges from coastal swamps and piney woods, to rolling plains and rugged hills, and finally the desert and mountains of the Big Bend.
The term “six flags over Texas” refers to several nations that have ruled over the territory.[note 1] Spain was the first European country to claim and control the area of Texas. France held a short-lived colony. Mexico controlled the territory until 1836 when Texas won its independence, becoming the Republic of Texas. In 1845, Texas joined the union as the 28th state. The state’s annexation set off a chain of events that led to the Mexican–American War in 1846. A slave state before the American Civil War, Texas declared its secession from the U.S. in early 1861, and officially joined the Confederate States of America on March 2 of the same year. After the Civil War and the restoration of its representation in the federal government, Texas entered a long period of economic stagnation.
Historically, four major industries shaped the Texas economy prior to World War II: cattle and bison, cotton, timber, and oil. Before and after the U.S. Civil War, the cattle industry—which Texas came to dominate—was a major economic driver for the state, and created the traditional image of the Texas cowboy. In the later 19th century, cotton and lumber grew to be major industries as the cattle industry became less lucrative. It was ultimately, though, the discovery of major petroleum deposits (Spindletop in particular) that initiated an economic boom which became the driving force behind the economy for much of the 20th century. Texas developed a diversified economy and high tech industry during the mid-20th century. As of 2015, it has the second most Fortune 500 company headquarters (54) in the United States. With a growing base of industry, the state leads in many industries, including tourism, agriculture, petrochemicals, energy, computers and electronics, aerospace, and biomedical sciences. Texas has led the U.S. in state export revenue since 2002, and has the second-highest gross state product. If Texas were a sovereign state, it would have the 10th-largest economy in the world. (Wikipedia)
The photographs and information related to photos from SMU Libraries Digital Collections provide a unique glimpse into the social and domestic history, architecture, transportation, ranching, agriculture, commerce, material culture, costume, and urban and rural history of Texas in the 1880s and 1890s.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a 1991 science fiction action film, the second installment of the Terminator franchise and the sequel to The Terminator (1984). Directed by James Cameron and written by Cameron and William Wisher, Jr., it stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, and Edward Furlong.
Terminator 2: Judgement Day was released in the United States on July 3, 1991. Its visual effects saw breakthroughs in computer-generated imagery, including the first use of natural human motion for a computer-generated character and the first partially computer-generated main character. It was a critical and commercial success and influenced popular culture, especially the use of visual effects in films.
The film received several accolades, including Academy Awards for Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Makeup, and Best Visual Effects. The highest-grossing film of 1991 and of Schwarzenegger’s career, Terminator 2 has since been named by several publications such as the American Film Institute as one of the greatest action films, science fiction films, and sequels of all time.
Below is a gallery of 35 behind the scenes photographs from the making of the Terminator 2.
Björn Allard (1923-2006) was employed as a photographer at the Swedish National Heritage Board in the 1950s and 1960s. He took part in archaeological surveys and excavations to contribute documentary photographs. Since he held an academic degree in Nordic and comparative archeology, he was certainly well suited for the work.
An important part of Björn Allard’s tasks was to document at the Board’s culture-historical surveys and archaeological excavations in northern Sweden, due to the regulations of Swedish lakes and rivers at the expansion of hydropower and the construction of new power plants in the 1950s and 1960s.
Five Swedish provinces will be represented in the album. From north to south: Lapland (Lappland), Ångermanland, Jämtland, Dalecarlia (Dalarna), Östergötland and Västergötland.
The images are taken between 1957 and 1959. They show landscapes, cultural environments in the countryside and archaeologists from the Swedish National Heritage Board at field work. Locals in northern Sweden, at work or at leisure, will appear now and then.
Steffi Graf, byname of Stephanie Maria Graf is a German former professional tennis player who dominated women’s tennis in the late 1980s and ’90s.
Graf began playing tennis with the encouragement of her father, who became her coach. At age 13 she became the second youngest player ever to earn an international ranking. In 1987 she won her first Grand Slam event, defeating Czech-born American Martina Navratilova at the French Open. In 1988 she became the third woman to win all four Grand Slam tournaments (the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open) in one calendar year, and she won a gold medal at the Olympic Games in Seoul—an unprecedented feat that became known as the “Golden Slam.”
Graf was known for her intensity, speed, and powerful forehand, and by the 1990s she had become one of the premier players in the world, winning multiple singles titles in the French Open (1987–88, 1993, 1995–96, 1999), Australian Open (1988–90, 1994), and U.S. Open (1988–89, 1993, 1995–96). Her seven victories at Wimbledon (1988–89, 1991–93, 1995–96) were second in number to only Navratilova’s nine. Soon after losing in the finals at Wimbledon in 1999, Graf, who had been plagued by injuries, retired from the sport.
Graf’s retirement did not remove her from the public spotlight. In 2001 she married fellow tennis great Andre Agassi, and the couple was involved in various charitable causes, including Children for Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization that Graf had founded in 1998 to aid children and families affected by war and other crises. Graf was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2004.
Born in Glasgow, Montana in 1926, Steve Reeves was an American professional bodybuilder, actor, and philanthropist. He moved to California at age 10, developed an interest in bodybuilding at Castlemont High School, and trained at Ed Yarick’s gym in Oakland, California. After winning the Mr America title in Chicago in 1947, he was contacted by an agent who suggested he go into acting.
Reeves was famous in the mid-1950s as a movie star in Italian-made peplum films, playing the protagonist as muscular characters such as Hercules, Goliath, and Sandokan. At the peak of his career, he was the highest-paid actor in Europe.
From 1959 through 1964, Reeves went on to appear in a string of sword and sandal movies shot on relatively small budgets and, although he is best known for his portrayal of Hercules, he played the character only twice: in the 1957 film (released in the US in 1959) and its 1959 sequel Hercules Unchained (released in the US in 1960). By 1960, Reeves was ranked as the number-one box-office draw in twenty-five countries around the world.
Reeves decided to retire for several reasons: stress, his injury, and the decline in the market for his sort of movies. He had earned enough to retire and moved to his ranch in Oregon, which he purchased from Chandler Knowles.
In 2000, Reeves died from a blood clot after having had surgery two days earlier. He died at Palomar Hospital in Escondido, California, where his second wife had also died.
Many years before Hercules, these cool pics that captured a very young and handsome Steve Reeves in the 1940s.
Spot is a man of many talents. Besides serving as the album producer and sound engineer for punk bands like the Misfits and Black Flag, the photographer, who goes only by Spot, also snapped a treasure trove of photos that perfectly captured SoCal beach and punk rock life during the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
He started taking photography seriously in 1969. Spot grew up with magazines like LIFE and was inspired by the black and white journalistic photos he saw, and when he got a Pentax, he was inseparable with his camera. He started writing music articles for a local newspaper, the Easy Reader, and began taking photos for the outlet as well.
In 1982, Spot lost access to the darkroom he had been using to develop his pictures, and along with being so busy recording at the time, he gave up photography.
“I started taking photos in 1969,” Spot told in an interview. “My first camera got stolen in ’72 and I didn’t get another one til ’76 when I was living in Hermosa and writing for the Easy Reader. Then it became photo-journalism. I lost my darkroom in 1981 when Media Art closed down. But all that damn musical punkin’, rockin’ and sockin’ had happened and I didn’t have time or facilities for photography anymore.”
Otto Gilmore’s photographs are a “comprehensive, overall photographic study of El Shatt, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s refugee camp for Yugoslavs in the Sinai, Egypt”. Gilmore was the camp in September 1944 at the behest of the US Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information.
Also there was Treva Edgerton, a worker with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an international relief agency. His snapshots add texture to the story of Europeans who rode the Sinai Express. Croats left everything behind as the Germans approached their homes. El Shatt housed 30,000 refugees from Dalmatia. These people had been evacuated by the Allies ahead of a German invasion. Created on February 2, 1944, the camp was disbanded on March 20, 1946, after the war ended. The refugees left behind 825 graves of their comrades. An estimated 650 children were born in the camp.
Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude (137 kilometres or 85 miles) north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bordering the Strait of Malacca to the west, the Singapore Strait to the south, the South China Sea to the east and the Straits of Johor to the north. The country’s territory is composed of one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet, the combined area of which has increased by 25% since the country’s independence as a result of extensive land reclamation projects. It has the third greatest population density in the world. With a multicultural population and recognising the need to respect cultural identities of the major ethnic groups within the nation, Singapore has four official languages; English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil. English is the lingua franca and numerous public services are available only in English. Multiracialism is enshrined in the constitution and continues to shape national policies in education, housing, and politics.
Singapore’s history dates back at least a millennium, having been a maritime emporium known as Temasek and subsequently as a major constituent part of several successive thalassocratic empires. Its contemporary era began in 1819 when Stamford Raffles established Singapore as an entrepôt trading post of the British Empire. In 1867, the colonies in Southeast Asia were reorganised and Singapore came under the direct control of Britain as part of the Straits Settlements. During the Second World War, Singapore was occupied by Japan in 1942, and returned to British control as a separate crown colony following Japan’s surrender in 1945. Singapore gained self-governance in 1959 and in 1963 became part of the new federation of Malaysia, alongside Malaya, North Borneo, and Sarawak. Ideological differences, most notably the perceived encroachment of the egalitarian “Malaysian Malaysia” political ideology led by Lee Kuan Yew into the other constituent entities of Malaysia – at the perceived expense of the bumiputera and the policies of Ketuanan Melayu – eventually led to Singapore’s expulsion from the federation two years later; Singapore became an independent sovereign country in 1965.
After early years of turbulence whilst lacking natural resources and a hinterland, the nation rapidly developed to become one of the Four Asian Tigers based on international trade and economic globalisation, integrating itself within the world economy through free trade with minimal to no trade barriers or tariffs, export-oriented industrialisation, and the large accumulation of received foreign direct investment, foreign-exchange reserves and assets held by sovereign wealth funds. A highly developed country, it is ranked joint-eleventh on the UN Human Development Index and has the second-highest GDP per capita (PPP) in the world. Identified as a tax haven, Singapore is the only country in Asia with a AAA sovereign credit rating from all major rating agencies. It is a major financial, maritime shipping and aviation hub, and has consistently been ranked as one of the most expensive cities to live in for expatriates and foreign workers. Singapore is placed highly in key social indicators: education, healthcare, quality of life, personal safety, infrastructure and housing, with a home-ownership rate of 88 percent. Singaporeans enjoy one of the longest life expectancies, fastest Internet connection speeds, lowest infant mortality rates and lowest levels of corruption in the world. The country has a retentionist stance for capital punishment, one of four in the developed world along with Japan, the United States and Taiwan. Singapore’s use of capital punishment for drug trafficking is a source of contention with non-governmental organisations.
Singapore is a unitary parliamentary republic with a Westminster system of unicameral parliamentary government, and its legal system is based on common law. While elections are free, the government under the People’s Action Party (PAP) wields significant control and dominance over politics and society, with limits on assembly, association, expression and the press except for the Speakers’ Corner; the PAP having ruled continuously since full internal self-government was achieved in 1959, with 83 out of 104 seats in Parliament as of the 2020 election, the rest of the elected seats being held by the Workers’ Party (WP). One of the five founding members of ASEAN, Singapore is also the headquarters of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Secretariat, the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC) Secretariat, and is the host city of many international conferences and events. Singapore is also a member of the United Nations, World Trade Organization, East Asia Summit, Non-Aligned Movement, and the Commonwealth of Nations. (Wikipedia)
Here below is an amazing color photo collection of Singapore in the 1960s, before becoming a global commerce, finance and transport hub.
The Shining (1980) is creative director Stanley Kubrick’s intense, epic, gothic horror film and haunted house masterpiece – a beautiful, stylish work that distanced itself from the blood-letting and gore of most modern films in the horror genre. It is considered one of the greatest horror movies of all time.
The film’s source material from science-fiction/horror author Stephen King’s 1977 best-selling novel by the same name, bears little resemblance to Kubrick’s creation.
Kubrick’s quest for perfection was taken to new levels during the making of The Shining. Crew members broke down in tears and actors found themselves asked to do over 127 takes (The Guinness Book World record) for a single shot. Other stories include: Kubrick agonizing for months on the color of the titles in the opening credits; calling Stephen King obsessively at 3 AM asking him if he believed in God; frantically changing scenes at the last second; forcing Jack Nicholson to eat cheese sandwiches (which he hated) to portray disgust; and pushing actress Shelly Duvall’s sanity till her hair started falling out. Jack Nicholson was so disturbed by the way Shelly Duvall and Scatman Crothers were treated that he vowed never to work on a Kubrick film again.
