Pictures from Long Ago

I've always been an addict of History. My favorite courses in school were those that told stories about the people and places of Long Ago.

History is, after all, stories; and stories allow a listener or reader to place himself in a time or place different than his own, to experience the as-yet-unknown, to imagine the what-ifs, to see what the world was like before they were aware it. And to learn lessons from it.

But in order to learn lessons from History, one must first grasp its innate reality. That is, one must actually believe that it happened.

We of the modern age have an advantage because there are pictures, photographs, audio recordings and motion pictures of practically every major event over the last hundred years. One has only to obtain and view/hear these to start to believe that, Yes, it really happened.

It is even easier when dealing with events from the past forty or fifty years because the images we see are nearly the same in format as those of present times, embued with color and clarity and sharpness so often absent in those of the long-since past. For this reason, we can relate to this much more than, say, the old black-and-white Civil War photographs, when the subjects had to stand still for long periods of time or else appear as nothing but a blur on the glass plate.

Until recently, the same could be said for events of the early 20th century. But then, much to our surprise, and no doubt due to the flood of information caused by the Internet explosion, it was revealed that color photography had actually been invented - and used - in the 19th century.

I was completely blown away by that news. And excited. And thrilled.

Two or three years ago, an obscure website surfaced which featured actual color photographs from turn-of-the-century Russia.

What goes through your mind when you look through the colored window into the past?

In Russia: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

In France: http://www.worldwaronecolorphotos.com/