Originally published in 1856, George Robinson Fardon’s San Francisco Album is the earliest existing photographic record of an American city. An unmatched historical document of San Francisco during its years of rapid growth and burgeoning prosperity in the wake of…
At first glance, the photos look like stills from an old disaster movie or a spectacular example of theme park scenery welcoming visitors to some wild new ride. However, these extraordinary images are actually testament to a real-life tragedy, the…
These photos were taken in the end of 19th century and now are kept in the collection of the Russian Museum of Ethnography. The women in the photos are wearing traditional costumes of different regions of Russia. And though you…
During the Civil War, Mathew Brady and his associates traveled throughout the eastern part of the country, capturing the effects of the War through photographs of people, towns, and battlefields. Additionally, Brady kept studios in Washington, DC and New York…
At the turn of the 20th century, when most cameras and photographers operated out of a studio, Ontario-based photographer Reuben R. Sallows (1855-1937) took his heavy, cumbersome equipment outside. He photographed people at work and play in the small towns,…
Amélie Galup (1856-1943) taught herself photography in 1895 at the family home in Saint-Antonin-Nobleval, where she spent her vacations, turning the basement into a darkroom. She developed and printed the pictures she took of her husband, their two children and…
When the Tongzhi Emperor came to the throne at the age of five in 1861, these officials rallied around him in what was called the Tongzhi Restoration. Their aim was to adopt Western military technology in order to preserve Confucian…
Wallace G. Levison was a chemist, inventor, and lecturer who founded the Departments of Mineralogy and Astronomy at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in the latter half of the 19th century. As the dawn of the 20th century…
This set shows photos of Swedish churches from 1100-1900 AD – a mix of stone and wooden churches, cathedrals and chapels – country churches as well as city churches. We think that these pictures well describe the wide range of…
During the Victorian Era, a woman’s place was at home. Unlike in the earlier centuries when women could help their husbands and brothers in family businesses, in the nineteenth century, the gender roles became more defined than ever. Their dress…
Tempest Anderson (1846 – 1913) was an expert amateur photographer and vulcanologist. He was the world’s first volcano-chaser, scaling the world’s most dangerous slopes in his quest to photograph volcanoes as they erupted. He was a member of the Royal…
he Battle of Antietam, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, particularly in the Southern United States, was fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland and Antietam Creek as part of the Maryland Campaign. It was the first field…
In the 1830s, the railroad boom started a new era in the building of railroad bridges pushing engineers to build towering wooden bridges that have become synonymous with the era. Timber trestles were one of the few railroad bridge forms…
George Hendrik Breitner (1857 – 1923) was a Dutch painter and photographer. An important figure in Amsterdam Impressionism, he is noted especially for his paintings of street scenes and harbours in a realistic style. He painted en plein air, and…
Mathew Brady efforts to document the American Civil War on a grand scale by bringing his photographic studio onto the battlefields earned Brady his place in history. Despite the dangers, financial risk, and discouragement by his friends, Brady was later…
The pictures were taken between 1857 and 1865, and the collection of glass negatives were to remain untouched for more than a century. Under the watchful eye of British photographer T. Murray, the Maharaja – who became known as the…
Sri Lanka was known from the beginning of British colonial rule until 1972 as Ceylon. At first the area it covered did not include the Kingdom of Kandy, which was a protectorate from 1815, but from 1817 to 1948 the…
After Brazil became independent from Portugal in 1822, as declared by Emperor Pedro I where the Monument of Ipiranga is located, he named São Paulo as an Imperial City. In 1827, a law school was founded at the Convent of…
Carl Størmer (1874-1957) is one of Norway’s pioneer photographers. He is known as an astronomer and mathematician. In history books Størmer is referred to as “The Northern Lights photographer”: he will go down in history as the first person to…