Left: Wall Street bombing, Sept. 16, 1920. Right: NYC police and fire personnel work at Ground Zero, Sept 16, 2001.
During WWI, citizens collected peach pits to be converted to activated charcoal and used in the filtration system of military gas masks. 200 peach pits made enough charcoal for one mask. Left: propaganda poster urging peach pit conservation. Right: 4,000 tons of peach pits awaiting processing at the Chemical Warfare Services plant in San Francisco.
Left: buffalo skulls which will be ground into fertilizer, 1902. Right: a pile of 40,000 buffalo hides in Dodge City, KS, 1874, which will be baled for shipment east. In the 1870s, buffalo hides were used to make robes. After developments in leather tanning in the 1880s, the hides were made into leather for the soles of boots and as drives for machinery.
Left: Liberty ship construction, 1940s. 2,800 of these cargo ships were built during WWII at the rate of 3 ships per day. Production speed came from the use of prefabricated components. Women and Black men found work building these vessels, due to wartime labor shortages. Right: B-24E Liberator bombers being assembled at Ford’s Willow Run plant in Michigan. More than 18,000 of these aircraft were built during the war; half were built at Willow Run. The planes were vaunted for their extended range, and, while they were used across the globe during the war, their heaviest service came in the European Theater.
Left: Pacific Electric Railway cars awaiting destruction at a junkyard on Terminal Island, CA, 1956. This electric railway company connected cities in Los Angeles County, Orange County, San Bernardino County and Riverside County in the early 20th century, but fell into decline in the late 1930s. It couldn’t survive competition with the automobile. Right: a self-service auto junkyard, sometimes called a “you-pull-it” yard, where car parts customers, rather than yard workers, extract a desired auto component from the junkyard inventory.
Left: Civil War veterans on parade in Washington, D.C., 1915. Right: French soldiers parade captive Nazi troops through a jeering crowd of liberated Parisians, Aug. 1944.
Left: Market Square, Cleburne, TX, c. 1900. Right: stevedores unload barrels of fish at New York’s Fulton Fish Market, c. 1910.
Left: Black troops march in Lincoln’s second inaugural parade, March 20, 1865. Right: Native American tribal chiefs march in Theodore Roosevelt’s second inaugural parade, March 20, 1905.
Left: Pine logs cut from a Michigan forest on their way to Chicago for the world’s fair, Feb. 1893. Right: Wisconsin apples displayed at the St. Louis world’s fair, 1905.
Left: Ziegfeld Follies of 1927. Right: the Broadway production of the musical "A Chorus Line," 1980.
