Skip to main content

Photography

She was eighteen—pretty and sensitive, to judge by her photograph, taken in 1863. For many another girl, that age would have represented a new chapter in life in the form of a husband, children, a home of her own.
The dusty, busy town of San Antonio, Texas, must have seemed an immeasurable distance from home to the twentyfour-year-old Jean Louis Theodore Gentilz.
Yanqui imperialismo, as any good Latin-American orator will tell you, is a pretty insidious affair.
As we go to press with this issue the country is swept by a new fad—“streaking,” or running naked through public places.
In 1879 Jim McCauley lured his sweetheart onto Overhanging Rock at Glacier Point, California, and threatened to push her off if she didn’t marry him. This rather hardnosed method of popping the question worked, or so McCauley said.
The dignified portrait, opposite, of Bear’s Belly, an Arikara Indian warrior of the eastern plains, wrapped in a bearskin, the symbol of his personal medicine—and the photographs of the other native Americans on the following pages—are a sampling of a wondrou

An album of pictures from the days when the Kennedys were parvenus and workingmen demonstrated in derbies

That the photographs of G. Frank Radway were ever resurrected from the files of an old Boston newspaper was, in the beginning, simply a matter of luck.
Every town is a ghost town in a sense—haunted by the shades of people who were born there, and lived there, and now are sone.

THE ALL-RECORDING LENS RECALLS A TIME WHEN PEDAGOGY STILL WAS PLEASANT

Sometimes the camera solidifies a modest moment in history in a way that reminds us sharply of securities we have left behind.

Stars of the era still glow brightly in portraits by photographer James Abbe

“Life Style” in the Nineteenth Century

“Painting is dead!” cried a French artist when he saw his first photograph about 1840. But painting was not dead at all: it survived the arrival of photography with surprising vigor.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this magazine of trusted historical writing, now in its 75th year, and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate