Yesterday Today

38 Amazing Photos Showing Everyday Life of People in Their Houses during the Victorian and Edwardian Eras

The economic transformations of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century brought about further changes in men’s and women’s roles. Work was less likely to be done in the home, as fewer and fewer Americans lived on farms, and men left the home to work in offices and factories. Men assumed sole responsibility for the financial support of the family, becoming the breadwinners, a term coined in the early 19th century. Married women were not supposed to work for wages, and were considered too pure and innocent to be out in the working world. Women were supposed to devote themselves to domestic duties, and children were seen as young innocents who needed a mother’s protection. Fathers had less and less to do with raising their children.

Although the 19th-century ideal held that married women were not supposed to work, women did contribute to the family’s well-being. Wealthy women planned formal dinners, balls, and other social gatherings that were crucial to their husbands’ political and business success. Middle-class women sewed for what they called pin money, small amounts that frequently balanced the family budget. Married women in the middle and working classes took in boarders, sold hot lunches or pastries to neighbors, and saved money by doing their own baking, brewing, gardening, and other chores. It was also common in middle- and working-class families for sons to be sent to school, while their teenage sisters supported this schooling by working in a factory, teaching in elementary schools, or taking in sewing. Such work was considered acceptable as long as it was either done in the house or by unmarried young women.

Many 19th-century American families did not fit into this nuclear family ideal, as it was expensive. High housing costs meant more people than just the nuclear family often lived under one roof. Extended families, including grandparents and other relatives, were most numerous in the mid-19th century. Immigrants clung to traditional extended-family forms, and poorer families often included grandparents, grandchildren, and sometimes aunts and uncles in order to maximize sources of income and save on rent.

Check out these amazing photos below to see how did everyday life of people in their houses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

50 Amazing Vintage Photos Showing Wartime Weddings of Soldiers of World War 2

The war years of 1939 to 1945 were filled with romance amid pain and suffering. During World War II many women arranged wartime weddings within a few days to accommodate a boyfriend coming home on a 24 hour leave, before being sent to combat. Frequently there was no time to get a special dress and often women could not afford the clothing coupons needed for a wedding dress.

Nevertheless happy weddings took place, with family members donating small amounts of staples like sugar, flour and eggs so that the war bride could bake a wedding cake.

Women borrowed hats, raided gardens for flowers and loaned wedding dresses. Bridesmaids reused dresses worn to other weddings. This sometimes gave a mix and match look to bridal group photographs. Most brides wore clothes so that every item could be used again in a different venue. Friends and family rallied around loaning a hat, a bit of lace, or a dress.

A bride often wore her hair high on top of her head in a waved roll. Abundant hair was helpful, but lack of it did not stop women from adopting the style. Ever resourceful, they used old stockings rolled up to create foundations to be covered by their own hair. This style became popular since it offered the glamour lacking in other areas of wartime life. The look is film star glam.

Army, Navy and Air Corps personnel usually wore their uniforms when they wed.

In 1944, an American B-29 pilot was returning with his crew from a bombing raid over Japan, when the plane’s engine caught fire. The pilot used his parachute to jump from the burning aircraft. Later the chute helped him survive by providing shelter until he was rescued. After returning home from war, he proposed to his girlfriend. She used the life-saving parachute as material for her wedding dress. She modeled her dress on one which appeared in the movie Gone With The Wind. The bride used the original parachute strings to create the train in the back. A person can think of no other wedding dress that would be as meaningful as one that saved the life of the groom. (www.hhhistory.com)

50 Magnificent Photos of Cities of the World During the 19th and 20th Century

**Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA, 1904**

47 Vintage Photos Showing Young People During the 1970s

21 Amazing Colorized Photos Showing World War 1

**The announcement of armistice brought ecstatic scenes to Philadelphia. This picture was taken on Nov 11, 1918.**

**Captain Benjamin H Geary VC, 1st Battalion, East Surrey Regiment being carried in on a stretcher by prisoner bearers at Achiet-le-Petit. 21 Aug 1918.**

**A crowd of soldiers on the Western Front celebrating as an officer announces the news of the Armistice.**

**Three soldiers look out across a battlefield where wagons are upturned and destroyed and craters break up the mud.**

**A group of troops wave their hats as they pose for a camera on the edge of a road next to some hedgerows on Armistice Day.**

**New Zealand troops on the Western front laughing and smiling in a trench.**

**Canadian soldiers charging at the enemy during a dawn attack by going over the top of the trenches.**

**This poignant photo shows the funeral of Sergeant Henry Nicholas, VC, in World War I, France.**

**20th Battery Canadian Field Artillery, Neuville St. Vaast, April 1917. The horse are soaking and laden with gear.**

**German soldiers on board a tank which bears the word escapade on the side. Three sit on the top while another leans out of the window.**

**Crowds in New York celebrate the end of the First World War. America joined the conflict in 1917.**

**A group of Scottish soldiers wearing kilts smiled for the camera as they prepared to board a truck to head away from the battlefields.**

**Nuns laying wreaths in a field of mass graves. The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was around 40 million.**

**Smiling British men and boys marching out of a trench captured from the Germans at the Somme. A sign reads ‘the old hun line’ – referring to where the German front line used to be.**

**A group of eight British soldiers stand next to a blown-out building. They smile as they pose for the camera wearing their helmets.**

**A German prisoner helps British wounded make their way to a dressing station near Bernafay Wood, following fighting on Bazentin Ridge, July 19, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme.**

**Scottish troops march with combat gear and rifles slung over their backs as they make their way over a grassy mound during the Battle of the Canal du Nord, 1918.**

**Canadaian soldiers relax in a captured trench in France. One can be seen attending to his rifle as another smokes a cigarette.**

**French soldiers at the Battle of Verdun. One sits on the mud as others help the wounded.**

**A bombed out town with collapsing buildings as a lone soldier wanders near a crater. Pictured 24. A gigantic shell crater, 75 yards in circumference, Ypres, Belgium, October 1917.**

**German officers with an armored car, Ukraine, Spring of 1918. They stand next to the car as they smile for the camera.**

Photos colorized by Cardiff based electrician Royston Leonard

17 Vintage Photos of Zoot Suits Being Worn During the 1940s

A zoot suit is a men’s suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. This style of clothing became popular among the African American, Chicano, Filipino American, and Italian American communities during the 1940s.

The zoot suit of the 1940s was full of scandal. Technically illegal due to the abundance of fabric needed to make it and the restrictions place by the war board it was the underground dress uniform of young, ethnic, rebellious men. These “swing kids” danced in jazz clubs, purchased their clothes on the black market and in L.A. caused a month long street war.

Young people continued to wear the style and the suits soon became associated with delinquency and crime. Most wearers were simply rebellious youths, many in inner city urban areas like Harlem and Los Angeles, trying to form a culture all their own. The wearers of zoot suits were seen as being unpatriotic, and tensions between zoot-suiters and military servicemen stationed in California erupted in a week of violent street fighting in Los Angeles in mid-1943 that came to be known as the Zoot Suit Riots.

55 Beautiful Photos of Yvonne de Carlo from between the 1940s and 1960s.

A vibrant, full-bodied performer with a rich voice and a lushly sensuous if somewhat odd beauty, Yvonne De Carlo (1922–2007) achieved stardom in the 1940s in some of the more bizarre escapism of that era.

Yvonne De Carlo was a Canadian born American actress, singer, and dancer whose career spanned more than seven decades. A brunette with blue-grey eyes, voluptuous figure, and a deep sultry voice, she was one of most recognizable stars in the golden age of Hollywood and an early multihyphenate.

She began taking dancing lessons at the age of three and spent her late teens performing in various night clubs and on stage. She made her screen debut in 1941 in an uncredited role in the comedy film ‘Harvard, Here I Come’.

After appearing in several other movies in the same capacity, she played the titular character in the 1945 western drama ‘Salome, Where She Danced’. Her next important role was in ‘Song of Scheherazade’ in 1947, which though gave traction to her career, ended up typecasting her as an Arabian Nights-type temptress dressed in harem attire. Despite this stereotyping, she did significant work in comedy and western genres, and was part of the main cast of the 1960s sitcom ‘The Munsters’.

In 1957, she released her first and only album ‘Yvonne De Carlo Sings’. As she aged, she made a relatively easy transformation to being a character actor, active and compelling well into her 70s. De Carlo received two separate stars in 1960 on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to films and television.

30 Amazing Color Photos Showing Life in America Just After WWII

When World War II ended, the United States was in better economic shape.

Building on the economic base left after the war, American society became more affluent in the postwar years than most Americans could have imagined in their wildest dreams before or during the war.

These Kodachrome slides show life of the US in the mid-late 1940s and early 1950s.

48 Wonderful Historic Photos of Portland Oregon During the 1910s

Portland is the largest and most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon and the seat of Multnomah County. It is a major port in the Willamette Valley region of the Pacific Northwest, at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in Northwestern Oregon. As of 2020, Portland had a population of 652,503, making it the 25th-most populated city in the United States, the sixth-most populous on the West Coast, and the second-most populous in the Pacific Northwest after Seattle. Approximately 2.5 million people live in the Portland metropolitan statistical area (MSA), making it the 25th most populous in the United States. Its combined statistical area (CSA) ranks 19th-largest with a population of around 3.2 million. Approximately 47% of Oregon’s population resides within the Portland metropolitan area.

Named after Portland, Maine, the Oregon settlement began to be populated in the 1830s near the end of the Oregon Trail. Its water access provided convenient transportation of goods, and the timber industry was a major force in the city’s early economy. At the turn of the 20th century, the city had a reputation as one of the most dangerous port cities in the world, a hub for organized crime and racketeering. After the city’s economy experienced an industrial boom during World War II, its hard-edged reputation began to dissipate. Beginning in the 1960s, Portland became noted for its growing progressive political values, earning it a reputation as a bastion of counterculture.

The city operates with a commission-based government guided by a mayor and four commissioners as well as Metro, the only directly elected metropolitan planning organization in the United States. Its climate is marked by warm, dry summers and cool, rainy winters. This climate is ideal for growing roses, and Portland has been called the “City of Roses” for over a century.