Back in col­lege, I took a sur­vey class on Russ­ian his­to­ry, taught by one of these peo­ple who take up the pro­fes­sion in their active retire­ment after a career spent work­ing in the field. This par­tic­u­lar pro­fes­sor had gone to work for the State Depart­ment after grad­u­ate school and served in var­i­ous posts in Sovi­et Rus­sia for sev­er­al decades. The for­mat of his class seemed unre­mark­able on paper. One stan­dard syl­labus, one bulky, expen­sive text­book. But the class­es them­selves con­sist­ed of long, fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ries about per­son­al encoun­ters with Brezh­nev and Gor­bachev, or jour­neys into ancient Kiev, or to the out­er reach­es of the Steppes.

All that was miss­ing from those vivid rec­ol­lec­tions was a com­pa­ra­ble pho­to essay to tell the sto­ry visu­al­ly. This has been reme­died and then some by the “The His­to­ry of Rus­sia,” an enor­mous joint archive project from Moscow’s Mul­ti­me­dia Art Muse­um and Yan­dex, Russia’s largest search engine. The archive con­tains over 70,000 pho­tos, gath­ered from “more than 40 insti­tu­tions and col­lec­tions,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic, and rep­re­sent­ing “over 150 years of pho­tographs cap­tur­ing all sorts of scenes of Russ­ian life.”

Non-Russ­ian speak­ers can load the site in Google Chrome and have it trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish. Addi­tion­al­ly, “a time­line allows you to browse by date, a map enables loca­tion-based search­es, and pre­set cat­e­gories fil­ter the images by theme.” Russ­ian speak­ers can enter spe­cif­ic key­words into the site’s search engine. Cur­rent­ly, the archive fea­tures an exhi­bi­tion on the August Putsch, the 1991 coup attempt on the pres­i­den­cy of Mikhail Gor­bachev, staged by hard-line Com­mu­nist Par­ty Mem­bers opposed to reform. See one icon­ic pho­to of that his­tor­i­cal event above, and many more at the vir­tu­al exhi­bi­tion.

The late 1980s and 90s may be a peri­od of par­tic­u­lar inter­est for stu­dents and writ­ers of Russ­ian his­to­ry, like David Rem­nick, and for good rea­son. But every decade in the archive holds its own fas­ci­na­tion. State­ly por­traits from the 1860s, like that at the top of the post, show us the soci­ety of Tol­stoy in the decade he seri­al­ized War and Peace. Pho­tos from the 20s, like the satir­i­cal dis­play in Red Square, fur­ther down, show us the days of Lenin’s rule and the ear­ly years of the Sovi­et Union. Images from the 50s give us unique insid­er views—often impos­si­ble at the time—of ordi­nary Sovi­et life at the height of the Cold War, such as the Christ­mas tree in the Luzh­ni­ki Sta­di­um, above, or the man lead­ing an ele­phant from the Red Army The­ater, below.

The 60s in par­tic­u­lar look like a Life mag­a­zine spread, with dra­mat­ic pho­tos of Olympic ath­letes in train­ing, states­men posed with wives and chil­dren, and hun­dreds of arrest­ing pic­tures from every­day life, like that of two boys box­ing below. The huge gal­leries can be a lit­tle cum­ber­some to nav­i­gate and require some patience on the part of the non-Russ­ian-speak­ing user. But that patience is rich­ly reward­ed with pho­to­graph after pho­to­graph of a coun­try we rarely hear spo­ken of in less than inflam­ma­to­ry terms. We encounter, of course, the odd por­trait of Stal­in and oth­er well-worn pro­pa­gan­da images, but for the most part, the pho­tos look and feel can­did, and for good rea­son.

“Accord­ing to a release,” Hyper­al­ler­gic writes, “many of the pho­tographs are pub­lished here for the first time, part­ly because the por­tal invites users to upload, describe, and tag images from per­son­al archives. It has the feel of a muse­um collection”—and also of a fam­i­ly pho­to album stretch­ing back gen­er­a­tions. “The His­to­ry of Rus­sia” archive offers occa­sion­al con­text in addi­tion to the dates, names, and loca­tions of sub­jects. But infor­ma­tive text appears rarely, and in near­ly unread­able trans­la­tions for us non-speak­ers. Nonethe­less, a few hours lost in these gal­leries feel like a near total immer­sion in Russ­ian his­to­ry. You can enter the archive here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Col­or Por­trait of Leo Tol­stoy, and Oth­er Amaz­ing Col­or Pho­tos of Czarist Rus­sia (1908)

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Down­load 650 Sovi­et Book Cov­ers, Many Sport­ing Won­der­ful Avant-Garde Designs (1917–1942)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The sto­ry of the U.S.’s nation­al parks isn’t one sto­ry, but many. These have been told and retold since the found­ing of the Nation­al Park Ser­vice, a cen­tu­ry ago this past Thurs­day. And they stretch back even fur­ther, to the Civ­il War, the con­quer­ing and set­tling of the west, and the begin­nings of the Amer­i­can con­ser­va­tion move­ment. Near­ly every one of us who grew up with­in a cramped, con­tentious fam­i­ly car ride from one (or more) of those parks has our own sto­ry to tell. But our nos­tal­gic mem­o­ries can con­flict with the his­to­ry. Vir­ginia and North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Park­way, for example—the park clos­est to my child­hood home—offers vis­i­tors an idyl­lic vision of Appalachi­an life and land­scape. But the found­ing and con­struc­tion of the park in the 1930s and 40s was any­thing but.

On the one hand, the build­ing of the gor­geous­ly scenic, 469-mile high­way pro­vid­ed jobs for out-of-work civil­ians and, lat­er, con­sci­en­tious objec­tors under FDR’s Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion, Emer­gency Relief Admin­is­tra­tion, and Civil­ian Con­ser­va­tion Corps. On the oth­er hand, the fed­er­al government’s seizure of the land cre­at­ed hard­ships for exist­ing farm­ers and landown­ers, forced some­times to sell their prop­er­ty or to obtain per­mis­sion for build­ing and devel­op­ment. The Park Ser­vice project also engen­dered resent­ment among the East­ern Chero­kee, who fought the Park­way, and won some con­ces­sions. (In one sto­ry that rep­re­sents both of these hard­ships, a Chero­kee man Jer­ry Wolfe tells WRAL what it was like to work on the road, one that ran direct­ly through the cab­in he once shared with his par­ents.)

To cel­e­brate their 100 years of exis­tence, the Nation­al Park Ser­vice has launched what it calls its Open Parks Net­work, a por­tal to thou­sands of pho­tographs and doc­u­ments dat­ing from the very begin­nings of many of its parks—some of which, like Yosemite and Yel­low­stone, came under fed­er­al pro­tec­tion before the NPS exist­ed, and some, like New York’s Stonewall Inn, only giv­en pro­tect­ed mon­u­men­tal sta­tus this year. The Open Parks Net­work includes over 20 dif­fer­ent parks and sev­er­al dozen col­lec­tions that doc­u­ment spe­cif­ic peri­ods.

In the case of Blue Ridge Park­way, we have only one—a col­lec­tion of the park’s engi­neer­ing plans. One might hope for images of those toil­ing Depres­sion-era crews, or of the anx­ious faces of the region’s res­i­dents. But instead we can piece togeth­er the sto­ry of the park through fas­ci­nat­ing doc­u­ments like the “Plant­i­ng Plan” fur­ther up, from 1965, which reminds us how much the nat­ur­al beau­ty of the Park­way is achieved through human inter­ven­tion. And we can imag­ine what many of those ear­ly-20th cen­tu­ry Appalachi­an folks looked like in his­toric pho­tos like that above, from a col­lec­tion of Great Smokey Moun­tains pho­tographs tak­en in the teens and 20s by Jim Shel­ton.

Regard­less of how much med­dling we have done to cre­ate the scenic over­looks and moun­tain and Red­wood under­pass­es that con­sti­tute the nation’s pro­tect­ed parks, there’s no deny­ing their appeal to us all, nature lovers and oth­er­wise, as sym­bols of the country’s rough grandeur. We can skip the hikes and long car rides, or plan for them in the future, sur­vey­ing the parks’ beau­ty through over 100,000 high-res­o­lu­tion dig­i­tal scans of pho­tographs and 200,000 images in all, includ­ing more gal­leries of build­ing plans, maps, and illus­tra­tions. Some of the gal­leries are quite unusual—like this col­lec­tion of aer­i­al infrared pho­tographs of the Great Smoky Moun­tains, or this one of “his­toric goats” of the Carl Sand­burg Home Nation­al His­toric Site. And many of the photos—like the fad­ed 1968 pho­to of Yellowstone’s Old Faith­ful geyser, fur­ther up, look just like your fam­i­ly vaca­tion pho­tos.

There are beau­ti­ful his­tor­i­cal images like that of a house near Hod­genville, Ken­tucky, site of the Abra­ham Lin­coln Birth­place Nation­al His­tor­i­cal Park, fur­ther up; images of park rangers and staff, like the charm­ing group pho­to above from Ander­son­ville Nation­al His­toric Site in Geor­gia; and sub­lime vis­tas like the pho­to at the top of the post from the Kings Moun­tain Nation­al Mil­i­tary Park in Yosemite Val­ley. The Open Parks Net­work, writes Joe Toneli at Digg, “is con­stant­ly being added to, and is an impor­tant tool in pre­serv­ing the his­to­ry of the NPS and the nation­al mon­u­ments it pro­tects.” Devel­oped in part­ner­ship with Clem­son Uni­ver­si­ty since 2010, Open Parks hosts all pub­lic domain images, free to explore and down­load. See this guide for a detailed expla­na­tion on how to best nav­i­gate the col­lec­tions, all of which are ful­ly search­able.

Each image, like that of Yosemite Falls, above, has options for view­ing full-screen and zoom­ing in and out. So absorb­ing are these archives, you may find your­self get­ting lost in them, and any one of these beau­ti­ful­ly-pre­served parks and their incred­i­ble his­to­ries offer wel­come places to get lost for sev­er­al hours, or sev­er­al days. For even more his­toric pho­tog­ra­phy from the nation’s many parks, see selec­tions online from the East­man Muse­um’s cur­rent exhib­it, Pho­tog­ra­phy and Amer­i­ca’s Nation­al Parks, “designed,” writes John­ny Simon at Quartz, “to inspire peo­ple to look at nation­al land­scape just as Ted­dy Roo­sevelt once did, a cen­tu­ry ago.”

Enter Open Parks here.

via Digg

Relat­ed Con­tent:

226 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs of Great Amer­i­can Nation­al Parks Are Now Online

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

The Beau­ty of Space Pho­tog­ra­phy

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

For about a quar­ter of a mil­len­ni­um, Japan had a pol­i­cy called sakoku, lit­er­al­ly mean­ing “closed coun­try,” which put to death for­eign­ers who dared enter to Japan, or Japan­ese who dared to leave it. It came to an end with the Mei­ji Restora­tion, the peri­od between 1868 to 1912, dur­ing which Japan put the Emper­or back in charge and, as his­to­ri­ans often say, began to “open up” to the out­side world, light­ing out on the path to its own kind of moder­ni­ty. For­eign­ers would still have had only a vague idea of Japan­ese life at the time — at least those with­out access to a stere­o­scope, and who thus could­n’t lay eyes on the vivid 3D pho­tog­ra­phy of Yoko­hama’s T. Ena­mi.

“To many whose lives revolved around pho­tog­ra­phy — includ­ing both Japan­ese and for­eign pro­fes­sion­als, as well as seri­ous ama­teurs — Ena­mi was not just a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, but a ‘pho­tog­ra­pher’s pho­tog­ra­ph­er,’ ” writes Ena­mi enthu­si­ast Rob Oech­sle on his site t‑enami.org. He also dubs his pho­to­graph­ic hero (who was born Nobuku­ni Ena­mi in 1859 and lived until 1929, see­ing the end of the Mei­ji era but not the begin­ning of the sec­ond world war) “King of the Stere­oview, Mas­ter of the Lantern-Slide, Pro­lif­ic, Anony­mous Con­trib­u­tor To the World of Mei­ji-era Yoko­hama Album Views, Ded­i­cat­ed Street Pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and Hon­ored Alum­nus of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Mag­a­zine.”

That first title has grant­ed a por­tion of Enam­i’s large body of work a sur­pris­ing recent after­life. Fol­low­ing in his teacher’s foot­steps, Ena­mi refined the Japan­ese use of the stere­o­graph­ic cam­era, a device that pro­duced, writes the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um’s Zoe Clay­ton, a stere­o­graph: “two pic­tures mount­ed next to each oth­er, viewed with a set of lens­es known as a stere­o­scope.  Tak­en around 7cm apart, rough­ly cor­re­spond­ing to the spac­ing of the eyes, the left pic­ture rep­re­sents what the left eye would see, and like­wise for the right, so when observ­ing the pic­tures through a stereo­scop­ic view­er, the pair of pho­tographs con­verge into a sin­gle three-dimen­sion­al image.”

Adver­tised with slo­gans like “See the world from your par­lor!,” this “opti­cal mar­vel took the world by storm in the mid 19th cen­tu­ry, becom­ing the first ever mass-pro­duced pho­to­graph­ic images sold,” their pop­u­lar­i­ty such that “every Vic­to­ri­an home — regard­less of class — had a stere­o­scope and a col­lec­tion of views.” And though the years have made stere­o­scopes a lit­tle hard to come by, the inter­net has dis­cov­ered that you can enjoy some­thing like the same 3D effect Vic­to­ri­an view­ers did by look­ing at an ani­mat­ed GIF that oscil­lates quick­ly between the left pic­ture and the right one. Ena­mi hand-tint­ed many of his stere­o­graphs, result­ing in col­ored his­tor­i­cal images that look, even in two dimen­sions, star­tling­ly real­is­tic today.

Here we present only a few of Enam­i’s stere­o­graphs, but you can see a much fuller col­lec­tion at Oeschle’s “Old Japan in 3D” Flickr page. He sur­vived 1923’s Great Kan­tō earth­quake, but his stu­dio did­n’t; he rebuilt it and lat­er passed it on to his son, who ran the place until it under­went a sec­ond destruc­tion in 1945 by Allied bombs. Though Enam­i’s name remains known pri­mar­i­ly to fans of Mei­ji-era pho­tog­ra­phy, his posthu­mous rep­u­ta­tion has slow­ly but steadi­ly grown: one of his pho­tos even appeared on the cov­er of the first edi­tion of Odyssey: the Art of Pho­tog­ra­phy at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic. These GIFs have already sparked an inter­est in Enam­i’s work among a new gen­er­a­tion. When 3D mon­i­tors catch on, per­haps he’ll rise to his true place in the pho­to­graph­ic pan­theon.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

Hand-Col­ored Pho­tographs of 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan

Adver­tise­ments from Japan’s Gold­en Age of Art Deco

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The shib­bo­leths of our polit­i­cal cul­ture have trend­ed late­ly toward the loathe­some, crude, and com­plete­ly spe­cious to such a degree that at least one promi­nent colum­nist has summed up the ongo­ing spec­ta­cle in Cleve­land as “grotes­querie… on a lev­el unique in the his­to­ry of our repub­lic.” It’s impos­si­ble to quan­ti­fy such a thing, but the sen­ti­ment feels accu­rate in the fer­vor of the moment. We’ll hear a tor­rent of well-worn counter-clichés at the oth­er par­ty’s big con­ven­tion, and one of them that’s sure to come up again and again is the phrase “nation of immi­grants.” The U.S., we’re told over and over, is a “nation of immi­grants.” And it is. Or has become so, though the term “immi­grant” is not an uncom­pli­cat­ed one, as we’ve seen in the EU’s strug­gle to parse “refugees” from “eco­nom­ic migrants.”

The U.S. is also a nation of indige­nous peo­ple and for­mer slaves, inden­tured ser­vants, and set­tler colonists, all very dif­fer­ent histories—and aca­d­e­m­ic his­to­ri­ans are care­ful not to blur the cat­e­gories, even if politi­cians, ordi­nary cit­i­zens, and text­book pub­lish­ers often do. Yet rhetoric about who owns the coun­try, and who gets to “take it back,” clouds every issue—it belongs to every­one and no one, or as Wal­lace Stevens put it, “this is everybody’s world.”

But when we talk about the his­to­ry of immi­gra­tion, we usu­al­ly talk about a spe­cif­ic his­to­ry dat­ing from the mid-19th to ear­ly-20th cen­tu­ry, dur­ing which diverse groups of peo­ple arrived from all over the world, bring­ing with them their lan­guages, cus­toms, food, and cul­tures, and only slow­ly becom­ing “Amer­i­cans” as they nat­u­ral­ized and assim­i­lat­ed to var­i­ous degrees, forcibly or oth­er­wise. We also talk about a legal his­to­ry that pro­scribed cer­tain kinds of peo­ple and cre­at­ed hier­ar­chies of desir­able and unde­sir­able immi­grants with respect to eth­nic and nation­al ori­gin and eco­nom­ic sta­tus.

Mil­lions of the peo­ple who arrived dur­ing the peak of U.S. immi­gra­tion passed through the immi­gra­tion inspec­tion sta­tion at New York’s Ellis Island, which oper­at­ed between the years 1882 and 1954. The indi­vid­u­als and fam­i­lies who spent any time there were work­ing peo­ple and peas­ants. Among new arrivals, “the first and sec­ond class pas­sen­gers were con­sid­ered wealthy enough,” writes The Pub­lic Domain Review, “not to become a bur­den to the state and were exam­ined onboard the ships while the poor­er pas­sen­gers were sent to the island where they under­went med­ical exam­i­na­tions and legal inspec­tions.”

Many of these indi­vid­u­als also sat for por­traits tak­en by the Chief Reg­istry Clerk Augus­tus Sher­man while “wait­ing for mon­ey, trav­el tick­ets or some­one to come and col­lect them from the island.” Sherman’s cam­era cap­tured strik­ing images like the poised Guade­lou­pean woman in pro­file at the top, the defi­ant Ger­man stow­away below her, stern Dan­ish man fur­ther down, Alger­ian man and Ital­ian woman above, and severe-look­ing trio of Dutch women and Geor­gian man below.

These pho­tographs date from before 1907, which was the busiest year for Ellis Island, “with an all-time high of 11,747 immi­grants arriv­ing in April.” About two per­cent of immi­grants at the time were denied entry because of dis­ease, insan­i­ty, or a crim­i­nal back­ground. That per­cent­age of peo­ple turned away rose in the fol­low­ing decade, and the diver­si­ty of peo­ple com­ing to the coun­try nar­rowed sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the 1920s, until the 1924 immi­gra­tion act imposed strict quo­tas, “as immi­grants from South­ern and East­ern Europe were seen as infe­ri­or to the ear­li­er immi­grants from North­ern and West­ern Europe” and those from out­side the Euro­pean con­ti­nent were lim­it­ed to a tiny frac­tion of the almost 165,000 allowed that year.

“Fol­low­ing the Red Scare of 1919,” writes the Den­sho Ency­clo­pe­dia, “wide­spread fear of rad­i­cal­ism fueled anti-for­eign sen­ti­ment and exclu­sion­ist demands. Sup­port­ers of immi­gra­tion leg­is­la­tion stressed recur­ring themes: Anglo-Sax­on supe­ri­or­i­ty and for­eign­ers as threats to jobs and wages.” Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, dur­ing this time the coun­try also saw the resur­gence of the Klu Klux Klan, which—notes PBS—“moved in many states to dom­i­nate local and state pol­i­tics.” It was a time that very much resem­bled our own, sad­ly, as fanat­i­cal nativism and white suprema­cy became dom­i­nant strains in the polit­i­cal dis­course, accom­pa­nied by much fear­mon­ger­ing, dem­a­goguery, and vio­lence. (It was also in the teens and twen­ties that the idea of a supe­ri­or “West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion” was invent­ed.)

The por­traits above were pub­lished in Nation­al Geo­graph­ic and “hung on the walls of the low­er Man­hat­tan head­quar­ters of the fed­er­al Immi­gra­tion Ser­vice” in 1907, before the hys­te­ria began. They show us the human face of an abstract phe­nom­e­non far too often used as an epi­thet or catch-all scare word rather than a fact of human exis­tence since humans have exist­ed. Becom­ing acquaint­ed with the his­to­ry of immi­gra­tion in the U.S. allows us to see how we have han­dled it well in the past, and how we have han­dled it bad­ly, and the pho­to­graph­ic evi­dence pre­serves the dig­ni­ty of the var­i­ous indi­vid­ual peo­ple from all over the world who were lumped togeth­er collectively—as they are today—with the loaded word “immi­grant.”

These images come from the New York Pub­lic Library’s online archive of Ellis Island Pho­tographs, which con­tains 89 pho­tos in all, includ­ing sev­er­al exte­ri­or and inte­ri­or shots of the island’s facil­i­ties and many more por­traits of arriv­ing peo­ple. We’re grate­ful to the Pub­lic Domain Review (who have a fas­ci­nat­ing new book on Nitrous Oxide com­ing out) for bring­ing these to our atten­tion. For more of the NYPL’s huge repos­i­to­ry of his­tor­i­cal pho­tographs, see their Flickr gallery of over 2,500 pho­tos or full dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy col­lec­tion of over 180,000 images.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000+ Haunt­ing & Beau­ti­ful Pho­tos of Native Amer­i­can Peo­ples, Shot by the Ethno­g­ra­ph­er Edward S. Cur­tis (Cir­ca 1905)

478 Dorothea Lange Pho­tographs Poignant­ly Doc­u­ment the Intern­ment of the Japan­ese Dur­ing WWII

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.