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Category / Nostalgia

The Book Rescuers

I came upon a small collection of photos in the LIFE Archives that show the sheer awesomeness of librarians. Pictured in 1951 drying out state library books damaged by fighting the Lewis Cass State Office Building fire in Lansing, as you can see, it was quite the undertaking… The fire was started by a 19 year-old…

Take a Step Back in Time into these Flower Power Fashion Comic Books

Today I went in search of mindless distractions from reality. Perhaps you did the same. I went to my happy place and took a deep dive into the archives and photo pools of Flickr. There, I found these 1960s hippie-mod fashion pages from various romance comic books of the 60s and 70s. Some of them have empowering…

A Trip down Presidential Campaign Memory Lane

In no particular order, (because frankly I couldn’t muster the strength to chronologise them), please find enclosed a short retrospective of vintage U.S. presidential campaigns. Happy voting across the pond and remember folks, Nixon’s the one! The most patriotic campaign video you will ever see:

Backstage Fakery at Universal City in 1963

Universal Pictures was founded by a German immigrant, Carl Laemmle, who opened his first cinema in Chicago in 1906. In the early days, other studio chiefs laughed at Carl’s haphazard Universal City and nicknamed it “Laemmle’s Folly”. But the ambitious film pioneer would become responsible for creating the “star system”, rather than just using anonymous actors in films, and…

Alaska’s Eskimo Ghost Village on Stilts

For thousands of years, a community of Inupiat Eskimos lived, survived and thrived in one of the harshest environments in the world. This is King Island and these are the improbable cliff-hanging houses of Ukivok that a displaced community still calls home more than 50 years after its abandonment. (c) NOAA Photo Library In 1959, the…

Casablanca & other American Film Classics being Preserved inside a Nuclear Bunker

I wrote an article a few years ago about “lost films”, which include the original film-adaptation of The Great Gatsby, an Alfred Hitchcock picture, several Oscar-winning movies and countless masterpieces that all vanished. More American silent films have been lost than have actually been preserved and more than half of sound films made in the U.S…

Shopping at Cuba’s Ration Supermarkets

You might be ready to light up that Cuban cigar thanks to Obama or fill up your Instagram account with voguish snapshots from a Havana vacation, but even with the historic opening of diplomatic relations with the US, how will life in Cuba really change for Cubans? To get a real idea of the transition that lies ahead for Cubans emerging from their…

Preserved Moments of Historical Sass (Vol.4)

sassy: adjective \ˈsa-sē\ impudent, lively, spirited, vigorous, distinctively smart and stylish, showing no respect for people in authority, saucy, pert, confident, chic. Students from five states smile through the gate of Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, March 1939. Photograph by Anthony Stewart from National Geographic Two Couples in Bathing Outfits c.1934 from Letters of Vintage …

Marilyn Monroe’s Diet Plan, Lipsticks and her Most Intimate Belongings are Up for Auction

You only have to glance at the range of items in the upcoming sale of the largest collection of Marilyn Monroe ephemera ever offered at auction, to see that her fingerprint can still transform the most prosaic of objects more than 50 years after her tragic death. While it wouldn’t be a true Marilyn Monroe auction without her most iconic dresses, diamonds…

Descend into a Tomb of Imprisoned Vehicles Frozen in Time

Nobody likes a visit to the car pound. It probably as one of my least favourite places to be on earth, but you wouldn’t have a hard time convincing me to pay a visit to this particular car pound, hidden 150ft below a piazza in the city of Naples, sealed off after WWII and forgotten about for more than…

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