If you've ever wondered what your little slice of the world looked like decades ago, we've got a rabbit hole for you to fall down: Yale University has collected 170,000 photos from the Library of Congress that were taken between 1935 and 1945 — the Depression era. The government archive of snaps from this period is quite large. Since the administration wanted to build support for programs like the New Deal, they sent photographers all over the United States to document the state of the country.
And today, all of those images are searchable and sortable online through Photogrammar thanks to Yale. Want to see what New York City looked like during the 1930s? No problem. Curious about your hometown? Hunt away. You can even search by keywords, like "boys playing cards" or "woman cleaning."
But besides entertaining us, the archive is meant make an impact on the way many view history: "Our project will allow researches to back-up, or even challenge, previous positions about the archive and the period of history it recorded with direct visual and quantitative evidence, while discovering new patterns that would otherwise be undetectable by simply going through the photographs one by one," Lauren Tilton, co-director of the project, told Popular Photography.
Here are a just a few of the photos you can discover in the archive, starting with garment workers leaving the factories for noon hour on Seventh Avenue and West 28th Street in New York City:
Homestead children are seen here walking home from school in Indiana:
Here are soldiers in training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where they learned how to use mechanized striking equipment before being sent to war.
[via Kottke
