See the Mid-20th Century in Cushman Color

Hat tip to colleague Malissa Ruffner on Facebook for alerting us to Indiana University Archives' on-line collection of the photography of Charles Weever Cushman. The collection is easy to view and well categorized -- the heart is the more than 14,000 color slides from 1938 to 1969. Most-photographed years? 1965, 1952, and 1955. Most-photographed places: the US (11,374), United Kingdom (759), and Austria. Among the states, there are 4723 photographs of California, 2484 of Illinois, and 943 of Arizona. Cushman graduated from Indiana University and had some genealogical interests, so Indiana got 350, but Wisconsin (83), Ohio (20), and Michigan (6) don't get much attention. Thematically, landscape, architecture, and cityscapes are his commonest themes.

Few photos have names; many of the cityscapes, especially of Chicago, have addresses. There are some great "then and now" shots to be taken. If you want to see circuses from the 1940s, you're in luck. If you're bewildered, check out the highlights.


Harold Henderson, "See the Mid-20th Century in Cushman Color," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Travel in time 162 years back

Learn about a fantastic photographic panorama of the Cincinnati waterfront in 1848 in -- Wired magazine?! We can look forward to seeing the whole thing on the web site of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County in a few months. A little more information from their web site.

Hat tip to colleague Rondina Muncy on the Transitional Genealogists Forum.

See the Midwest 60 years ago

The Newberry Library has been able to digitize and place online a selection of the 3,000 photographs taken in the late 1940s for the 1955 centennial of the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy Railroad. It's not just railroad shots, either -- a Chicago fruit auctioneer, commuters waiting for the smoke-belching locomotive to haul them downtown, yard ornaments in Princeton, a Memorial Day parade in Galesburg, a coal mine in Fiatt. You will probably not see your Midwestern ancestors, but you will see some of what they saw.

This online exhibit -- "Daily Life along the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad" -- is just a fragment of the Newberry's 5,000 cubic feet of CB&Q archives, which "mainly document the nineteenth century operations of the Burlington and its component roads. Beyond their significance for the study of nineteenth century railroad history and labor history, the archives are a relatively unexplored and valuable resource for those interested in topics related to the social and economic development of the region served by the CB&Q." The archives are said to be "relatively unexplored." Who said the frontier was closed?