Bringing You the Wonder of Yesterday – Today
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Marilyn Monroe and screenwriter Arthur Miller on set of the film ‘The Misfits’, 1961.
Two little girls reading a board advertising carrots instead of ice lollies, 1941. Wartime shortages made such substitutions a necessity.
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Throughout the early nineteenth century, African Americans formed a substantial minority of inhabitants of the United States; 15 to 18 percent of the total population were free or enslaved black people. In 1800, there were about one million black people living in the country; by 1850, that number had grown to about 3.6 million.
White farmers enslaved the vast majority of African Americans living in the United States, but there were many free people of color living in cities and urban coastal areas. Of the four million black people residing in the United States in 1850, about 3.2 million were enslaved, and about 430,000 were free.
While white men enjoyed increased citizenship rights and privileges as the century progressed, for African Americans the opposite was true. The spirit of the American Revolution, which encouraged many states to gradually abolish slavery and slaveholders to undertake voluntary emancipation, declined after 1800. State governments, north and south, imposed harsher restrictions on both free and enslaved black populations.
Despite this hostile environment, African Americans in the Early Republic found ways to resist repression, maintain their communities, and combat slavery.
Here below is a set of amazing photos that shows studio portraits of African-American women in the 19th century.
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Akiko Wakabayashi (born December 13, 1939) is a retired Japanese actress. She is best known in English-speaking countries for her role as Bond girl Aki in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Before this, she had made many films in her native Japan, especially Toho Studio’s monster films, such as Dagora, the Space Monster (1964) and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), both of which were also released under various other titles.
When production of You Only Live Twice began, Wakabayashi was slated to play the role of Kissy Suzuki while her co-star Mie Hama played Suki, one of Tiger Tanaka’s top agents. When learning English proved to be a major hurdle to Hama, the women switched roles, with Hama playing the smaller part of Kissy and Wakabayashi playing the larger part of Suki. At her suggestion, the character of Suki was renamed Aki. They had acted together in King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) and Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi (1965), from which footage was recut to make Woody Allen’s What’s Up Tiger Lily?.
In 1971, she made an appearance in an episode of Shirley’s World. Wakabayashi made only one more film (and a guest TV appearance) before disappearing from both the big and small screen. In an interview in G-FAN magazine (No. 76), Wakabayashi said she retired from acting owing to injuries sustained while making a film.
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Charles Schridde was born in 1926 and grew up in rural Illinois. He was an artist from an early age and received a scholarship to the Chicago Art Institute when he was age 17. He began at the institute, but was then enlisted in the Navy for two years. When he returned from the Navy, Charles began his career as a free-lance commercial illustrator. His major clients included The Saturday Evening Post, Life magazine, Motorola and Chevrolet.
In 1961, Motorola asked Charles Schridde to envision the homes of the future centered around Motorola’s most recent line of electronics. The ads created by Schridde ran in Life Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post from 1961 to 1963 and depicted an optimistic future made of lavish, elegant, dream-homes, where domestic technologies and serene landscapes coexisted harmoniously. Through his stunning drawings, we were offered a fascinating glimpse of what the past thought the future would be like, and how home technology companies capitalized on their consumers’ minds by swaying them in the direction that these electronic products were relevant to that ultimate future.
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Street kids at play, Georgetown, Washington D.C., Summer 1935
The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. It began after the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, the “Black Tuesday”, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors.
Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and employment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed.
The end to the Great Depression came about in 1941 with America’s entry into World War II. America sided with Britain, France and the Soviet Union against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The loss of lives in this war was staggering.
The European part of the war ended with Germany’s surrender in May 1945. Japan surrendered in September 1945, after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
These incredible vintage photos were colorized by Lamont Cranston that revived life of the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s.
Street smart, Washington, D.C., 1935
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Jim Morrison, 1968
A heavily-armed patrol of ‘L’ Detachment SAS in their jeeps in the North African Desert, January 1943.
A Fireman’s Bicycle from the year 1905.
A Rare 1947 Labatt Brewing Co. Streamliner, one of the coolest delivery trucks ever built.
Nirvana’s first photo shoot as a band, 1988
Grandpa Munster reading a Playghoul Magazine, 1966
A 7 year old Wyatt Earp with his Mother Virginia Ann, 1855
Janis Joplin photographed at Woodstock, 1969
Bob Marley, 1965.
Iggy Pop holding a knife to David Bowie’s throat, 1976.
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Born 1920 in London, England, British actor and singer Anthony Steel was best known for his appearances in British war films of the 1950s such as The Wooden Horse (1950) and Where No Vultures Fly, and his marriage to Anita Ekberg.
Steel was described as “a glorious throwback to the Golden Age of Empire… the perfect imperial actor, born out of his time, blue-eyed, square-jawed, clean-cut.” As another writer put it, “Whenever a chunky dependable hero was required to portray grace under pressure in wartime or the concerns of a game warden in a remote corner of the empire, Steel was sure to be called upon.” Another said “Never as popular as Stewart Granger or as versatile as Kenneth More, he enjoyed a brief period of fashionability embodying the kind of idealized, true-blue Englishman who probably rowed for his university, played cricket on the village green and exuded calm under pressure as he bravely fought for king and country.”
Steel also was the stiff-upper-lipped star of many distinguished British war films and made more than 60 film appearances between 1948 and 1980. In the 1980s his once brilliant career collapsed into poverty and destitution.
Steel died from lung cancer in Northwood, Middlesex in 2001, aged 80. Take a look at these vintage photos to see portrait of a young and handsome Anthony Steel in the 1950s.
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Anna May Wong (born Wong Liu Tsong) was an American actress, considered to be the first Chinese American Hollywood movie star, as well as the first Chinese American actress to gain international recognition. Wong became interested in movies at a very young age and decided to pursue a film career. During the silent film era, she acted in The Toll of the Sea (1922), one of the first movies made in color, and in the swashbuckler epic fantasy The Thief of Bagdad (1924). By 1924, Wong had achieved international stardom and became a fashion icon.
Wong spent the first half of the 1930s traveling between the United States and Europe for film and stage work. She was featured in films of the early sound era, such as Daughter of the Dragon (1931), Shanghai Express (1932). In 1935, Wong was dealt the most severe disappointment of her career, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer refused to consider her for the leading role of the Chinese character in the film version of The Good Earth (1937), as she was deemed “too Chinese to play a Chinese” by the studio. Instead, they offered her a supporting role of Lotus, the seductress, but she refused on principle. Wong spent the next year touring China, visiting her family’s ancestral village and studying Chinese culture.
In the late 1930s, she starred in several B movies for Paramount Pictures, portraying Chinese and Chinese Americans in a positive light, including Daughter of Shanghai (1937), King of Chinatown (1939), and Island of Lost Men (1939). Take a look back at the beautiful actress in the 1930s through 30 stunning vintage black-and-white photographs:
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Amsterdam is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands. It is colloquially referred to as the “Venice of the North”, attributed by the large number of canals which form a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Amsterdam is well known for its nightlife and festival activity; with several of its nightclubs (Melkweg, Paradiso) among the world’s most famous. Primarily known for its artistic heritage, elaborate canal system and narrow houses with gabled façades; well-preserved legacies of the city’s 17th-century Golden Age. Cycling is also key to the city’s character, and there are numerous bike paths.
The Port of Amsterdam is the fifth largest in Europe. The KLM hub and Amsterdam’s main airport, Schiphol, is the Netherlands’ busiest airport as well as the third busiest in Europe and 11th busiest airport in the world. The Dutch capital is considered one of the most multicultural cities in the world, with at least 177 nationalities represented.
These rare vintage photos show what street scenes of Amsterdam looked like in the 1930s.
Rapenburg, Amsterdam, 1930
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Abolitionist Button is an early photography daguerreotype and gold photographic print created from between the 1840s to the 1850s. It lives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The image is in the public domain, and tagged jewelry and political work.
This miniature daguerreotype shows two hands resting on a book. The photograph is set into a two-piece gold-washed brass frame with a loop on the reverse for sewing to a garment. The case design with its simple, raised ornamental border is typical of the gilt-metal buttons mass-produced from 1830 to 1850 in several New England factories such as the Scovill Manufacturing Company in Waterbury, Connecticut, which also manufactured daguerreotype plates. The button was discovered in the early 1980s in a flea market in Massachusetts.
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