Portraits from the first 100 years of photography
On November 11, 1918, an armistice came into effect which ended the fighting on the Western Front in the First World War. In connection with that event, many countries observe a public holiday or official day of remembrance on November 11 each year. In the United States, Veterans Day honors all veterans of the armed... Continue Reading →
March is Women’s History Month in the United States, and few professions have historically been as closely associated with women as nursing. Update, April 11, 2019: I made a significant error in the initial version of this post. When I first searched online for information related to the Montefiore Hospital School of Nursing, the only... Continue Reading →
According to information in an article in the St. Cloud Times in July 2015, the town of Richmond, Minnesota, was officially called Torah for nineteen years, from 1890 until 1909. It had been called Richmond informally by locals before that, but when the town was incorporated in 1890, the name Richmond was already in use at... Continue Reading →
The two cartes-de-visite on this page came from an antiques dealer in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in the northwest part of the state. On the back of the carte above is the name Adolphe with a question mark: The portrait was made at the studio of E.v. Eggert, which probably stood for Emmanuel von Eggert (see... Continue Reading →
I bought this photograph from a dealer in Finland, who told me it had come from the estate of a Jewish family. Finland was part of the Russian Empire from 1809 until December 6, 1917, when it declared independence from the new Soviet government in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg). A note about dates: the Julian calendar... Continue Reading →
This postcard is well-traveled. I bought it online from someone in Estonia, who told me he had taken it from an album he had bought on a trip to Romania. The message on the back of the postcard is written in German, so he assumed the photo had been sent from Germany to relatives in... Continue Reading →
Tokens of Companionship 
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