Turn of the 20th century color photography, courtesy of occasional reader Jeananne.
Haunting, in a way. Especially the Mongolian form of capital punishment.
Those old sky dogs had brass, too.
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Targets of Opportunityblog advertising is good for you Credo"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones "Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra" "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche "A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier "Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas "Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex Amazon AssociateFor the Effort!Winnar! Subscribe CategoriesPagesTagsacademy
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Brave men. Bugs in your teeth, castor oil in your eyes, nose and throat (not on pushers, but many others).
Way too cool. Admitedly, one of my degrees being in Military History, I STILL find this stuff incredibly interesting even after all these years.
Great pictures! I marvel sometimes at how much good use those of a few generations back made of photography. Imagine descendants of the people captured in those photos seeing them today. What would be their reaction?
I have pictures from my paternal grandmother’s families, Brown & Williams, some of which are taken in north county Sandy Eggo near Lake San Marcos and Del Dios. Pictures taken in 1916 at Del Mar when it was still nothing but a beach, and others from the San Joaquin valley in the early 20′s. Priceless gems that really tug at the heart strings.
I think I finally have the answer to my GrGrandmother’s question concerning the whereabouts of her old bathtub. It went flying!
Gran’ma don’t take my autochrome away.
Great pictures,great history.
Thanks,Alan
What the Air Force would STILL look like if Obama, et al, had their druthers…
My, but what a century of nanny-state does to the thinking.
Seeing the soldiers, they had the traditional woolen coats on. How hot can you be in one of those? I participated in a Civil War re-enactment in August in Wisconsin, trust me wool is great for winter, not so much for any other time of year. Used to be we dressed for the weather and took off or added a layer. Today we seem to expect our clothing to adapt to the temperature for us and require multiple uniforms.
The pics from Africa. Naked men standing in front of some huts. My first thought was what they used for sunscreen. Oh, wait, melanin does that for us, and always has, along with clothing. I guess that bottle of SPF50 is a solution in search of a problem. They’re living the same way trappers, explorers, pioneers, farmers, and others have done throughout the world. No doctor or dentist at their beck and call, subsistence living with what they can glean from the land, transportation is at the end of their legs, and they somehow managed to live, thrive and survive. What a pathetic people we’ve become that we let the siren song of convenience and dependency make such living impossible to even fathom today.
The woman condemned to starvation. No use trying to pick the locks with your fingernails. But you’ve fingernails, toenails, and teeth that are useful against wood. And you might be able to reach a rock below. It’ll take days to die of starvation, which isn’t actually that painful a way to go. Your thirst will kill you first. Claw, scrape, and eat your way out of that thing. Then go kill some of the people who put you in there. They deserve it, and chances are the look on their faces when they see you alive will be priceless. But don’t you have friends or relatives with the guts to help?
Time magazine is slated to have an Afghan girl on the cover, she being minus a nose. She’s also minus her ears, but the headdress covers that up. The Taliban are evidently going to be annoyed that she’s showing the world their brand of justice, so she’s is under protective guard. She thinks it is worth risking her life to show the world the Taliban style of justice.
You go, girl.
What kind of father allows his child to be mutilated without hindrance, without doing a little killing of his own? Punishment is one thing, mutilation is quite another. Yet here in the pictures of the world we’ve people from a hundred years ago, looking much the same as we, yet they’d not given up their independence, their responsibility, their self-determination. Today we seem to be lining up to trade that for security, for the convenience of somebody else making our decisions. The result is a nanny state in one land and women without noses or starving in boxes in other lands.
I cannot possibly understand how a man might watch his daughter starve in a box or have her nose cut off by a self-professed judge and not simply kill the sunofabitch right then and there.
– Max
MD, the ingredient missing from your understanding is shame. We are a society of conscience, we understand guilt. But the majority of the world, including in these photos, are shame-based. Guilt, right or wrong–nothing to do with anything, but shame, loss of face, that is everything to these people. The woman in the box caused shame to her kin, they will not help her. The woman with no nose by her very existence brings shame to her kin. It is why fathers and brothers murder daughters with the full complicity of mothers (and mothers and sisters cut and poison, too).
The photos show, though, that we used to understand the difference between us and them.
Zane, I saw you mention the other day that you were 36 mos away. What do you plan to do? Double-dip as a CIA analyst or go the Xe route? Or just retire to the back garden and take still photography of your champion roses?
Seriously, tho, NYC police has a HUGE counter-terrorist intel program going (but you already know that) so ought to snarf up a guy with your background in a second–if you could finesse the real-estate problem, that is. I’ve often said that if not for the real-estate dilemma, as long as one didn’t eat out very often, NYC is actually one of the cheaper places to live, all things considered, otherwise. (But then that’s like the “Other than THAT Mrs Lincoln…” bit, isn’t it? LOL)
PS: Plus the *minor* detail of taxes..
No idea, VX. Finding a nice JTTF day job out in the midwest will pay the bills, but I’ve been thinking about trying to earn a respectable living. Problem is, the rest of the economy is screaming stay on the government teat. I doubt that three years from now there will be the huge demand for contractors with clearances that there is now.
Jerry Pournelle says, and all sensible people agree, that if yer just looking out for number one, the way to go is a government job. Hey, average twice the salary you’d get for doing something useful and productive!
Pretty much the only government jobs I approve of are those in the armed forces. As P.J. O’Rourke said, the only thing governments are actually good at is killing people.
I do trust the people here, and their comrades, to know the difference between those who need killin’ and those who don’t, and act accordingly. (Something about an Oath to defend the Constitution…)
Really, though, when you think about it, government is mostly a parasite on society. The current regime in the District of Columbia seems to think that government IS society, and the actual people of that society are serfs of the government.
Max, I’m with you all the way on the wool Civil War era uniforms. The Confederate Museum in N.O (nation’s 2nd largest after the one in Richmond) has lots of uniforms on display. Close inspection reveals the weave to be on order of good burlap bags. GOD, just the THOUGHT of fighting/living in the dust, muck and mire in the summer in the South in those things makes me want to go soak for a few hours in a tub full of ice water! LOL.
Funny thing is, you kind of get used to it. Move a bit slower, take a break during the hottest part of the day, put a damp cloth in the crown of your hat (or, just soak your hat in cool water). Wear an unlined sack coat rather than a lined shell jacket, and button only the top button (even though it looks sloppy).
The weave of the cloth, especially as used for CS uniforms, varied widely. Anything from cheap burlap to what today would be a nice tight weave. Jean-cloth or Jean-wool, a mix of cotton and wool, is very nice.
But face it, that muggy heat is miserable no matter what, the wool uniform doesn’t add greatly to the misery.
What bugs me more are the shirkers who never seem to be there for water or firewood detail, but always seem to be there for the meals.
Virgil,
Most of the enlisted uniforms for the Confederate armies were made from a wool/cotton jeancloth. A bit rough on the outside but usually lined with some sort of flannel or osnaburg. Officers uniforms tended to be broadcloth or a finer wool, since they were required to purchase their own clothing, equipment and arms. Now, the South also imported a HUGE amount of “English Army Cloth” from a number of mills in England, especially Abimelich Hainsworth, which is still in business today. This was a better quality wool of a bluish/gray color. From 1863 on (actually earlier, according to the records still extant) Peter Tait from Limmerick, Ireland provided a great amount of ready-made uniforms, as well as shirts, caps, knapsacks and accoutrements.
Once you wear that clothing on a regular basis, it becomes much more tolerable. yes, it’s warm, and sometimes downright hot. However, the idea was to sweat and your shirt became damp, and when you took your jacket off (which many did on the march and especially in camp, even a slight breeze will help cool you down.
I’ve been involved in Living History and reenactments for almost 40 years now, and I guess I’ve just learned to tolerate those clothes and the conditions better than some. I’ll tell you this much, those ACW uniforms are actually some of the more comfortable clothes I’ve ever owned.
respects,
If my SIL had done that to my daughter, he would know that being shot is an easier way to die.
Kinda interesting how these photos match photos of now in a lot of the muslem countries.
I noticed a lack of burkas on the Iranian and Iraqi females.
Great photos. There was also a Russian photographer in the early 1900s who developed his own color process and, under the sponsorship of the Czar, took photographs all over Russia.
Czarist Russia, in color
A fascinating trip back through a vanished time, thanks David. I found myself looking at those people living quite ordinary lives just as their parents had for hundreds of years and wondering how many of them survived the coming convulsions; World War I, the revolution, the terrors, collectivization, the Kulak destruction. The youngsters would have been front line troops in World War II.
God shield us from too rapid change.
There is also a fantastic collection of color WWI images online. I haven’t the URL, but if you use a search engine with those words, you’ll find it quickly enough.
I looked at those too, Cap’n. One commenter remarked that nobody was smiling in those pics, and was answered by another who said that being photographed was Serious Business back then, and required a proper sober expression. Photos of my great-grandparents show a similar serious sour-puss facial expression.
Very cool, Lex. Thanks for posting that. I appreciate your political commentaries because they so eloquently put into words things I think anyway. But, you can post this kind of thing from around the Net anytime – fascinating views of a world-gone-by.
I suggest reading through the comments completely. There are many explanations for some of the photographs, and links to other collections. But it disturbed me as well to see so many commenters “interpreting” the photographs through one 20th c. ideology after another. Oppression of women, racism, evils of colonialism–these photos all “proved” one or another. They are a fascinating collection showing the way different people are (or were), not a palette for an ideological spiel. How convenient to have a prepackaged explanation for everything rather than to have do the hard work of getting out of our skins, our times and precepts, and understanding other people as they are, in their own skins and times.
I had a similar reaction, Zane. It was so disturbing to see commenters judge with such ignorance rather than try to understand the way in which living in a different time and place shaped those people. I think what bothered me most was the obvious lack of empathy…
American youth and liberals are some of the most provincial people you will meet. Some regions are that way, and usually they are strongly liberal. It was funny watching the reactions of people in Newport, RI react to my slight southern accent.
I went back to read the comments, and had much the same reaction. Add to it: People stuck on their self-righteous notions out looking for a spat.
For my part, it seems, from a cursory observation, that the Mongol on his horse, the nurses stepping out of a jeep to treat Cholera, or the Cabinet ministers in Afghanistan, were probably quite satisfied with their lives and would not have traded them for anything in the world.
Mongo et al, I think it runs deeper than just “liberal.” I think it represents a deep failure of imagination, a failure that has been brought about by a number of circumstances in our time. That people are provincial and parochial is a given (sorry about that cold reception, QM), but what the ideologically-bound commentators have is no actual interest in these people, how they lived or thought.
I thought the Iraqi girl was fascinating because she’s a Kurd, dressed in her finery and yet barefoot. That Mongol horseman, indeed, probably felt king of his world. The chinaman leaning on the pillar looked young and handsome, but I see him desperately competing for a wife in a merciless world, and forty years later worn out from manual labor. Perhaps I have my own projections, but at least I want to understand what drove each and every one of them. And the other takeaway is that we are supremely fat, dumb and happy compared to the very hard lives these predominantly rural people led.
I think you’re right on, Zane. I would only add that I think the ideological baggage carried into this probably has a lot to do with whether one tends to see people as individuals or members of groups. If they are individuals, we tend to wonder about their individual connections to others, their hopes and dreams, their experiences, etc.–everything that makes them unique. If they are members of groups, they are first and foremost either victims or perpetrators of the culture of their time–because that culture was not as free, wealthy, healthy or educated as we believe we are today.
One viewpoint looks first at what they don’t have, while the other looks first at what they DO have. One viewpoint sees them as human beings, the other as pieces of a wider monolith that must be judged against today’s “progress.”
Dammit, Zane! It’s late at night here, and too late to buy more beer! I get so hoppin’ mad at those doodahs! (far too many of whom share my own neural weirdness) I really am sorry about the promiscuous dyke aspichick in your division; there really are aspichicks in the Navy who are neither dykes, nor promiscuous. They are pretty weird, though. You can count on them; we people who are weird in that way take our oaths very seriously.
Methinks you’ve been browsing through old threads, and are posting in the wrong one. But thanks for the support!
That’s gotta be a Voisin in the title pic. Struts are too small to be wood, prolly steel tube.
Oh, yeah. The Donovan found these years ago. He posted the pic of the Freench officer using the field pissoir and we pretty much made a caption contest of it.