Some pictures stick with you.
Here are the ones from last week, which we posted here on Substack or on our Bluesky page or on our YouTube Channel, which have stuck with me:
This bull shot dead in Central Park after escaping from the vehicle hauling him to the slaughterhouse.
Sometimes in life there are no good options.
Erik Charell, a German theater impresario, and his dance troop on stage in the mid-1920s.
American sailors aboard the USS Newport, c. 1900.
A smiling Franklin Roosevelt stands to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd at the Hollywood Bowl while campaigning for votes in the 1932 presidential election.
1932 was the worst year of the Depression.
Poverty and hunger had the nation in its grip.
FDR’s campaign slogan: “Happy days are here again.”
And you’d be hard pressed to find a photo of FDR out on the campaign trail with an angry look on his face.
He smiled, instead, and offered reassurance that the nation’s inherent strength could be harnessed to meet the challenge.
There’s a lesson in this.
These little boys are waiting for food in an Arkansas bread line after bad floods destroyed a large region of Arkansas in 1936.
Private charities and local governments handled disaster response then, with mixed results.
FEMA began in 1979 during the Carter Administration.
A sleigh ride in Central Park, c. 1900.
Kuno, a war dog who was shot in 2019 while protecting his British special ops team in Afghanistan.
Amputations were necessary to save his life.
But Kuno healed and was fitted with prostheses and learned to run again.
These pictures of two elegantly dressed men.
On the left: Dred Scott, who tried to use the American judicial system to establish his rights as a free man.
On the right: Chief Justice Roger Taney, whose decision in the Dred Scott case held that Black men are not citizens and have no rights under the Constitution.
A dirigible flies over a crowd of spectators in Los Angeles, 1910.
Sunset Boulevard, 1900.
These German butchers work in a mobile sausage-making factory preparing sausages for German troops fighting the Red Army in Ukraine, 1941.
This picture from 1871 shows a Los Angeles parade with veterans of the War of 1812 front and center.
And finally…
Silent film star Harold Lloyd stands on a Los Angeles street since swallowed by the Hollywood Freeway, waiting for the approaching trolley car to smack him and put him out of his misery, 1920.
FDR would tell him to smile, roll up his sleeves, get to work, and, most importantly, to believe in himself.
And he’d tell all of us the same thing.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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