This Week's Best Old Photos.

January 4, 2023.

1. Photographer Dorothea Lange explains the Great Depression.

Dorothea Lange left her successful San Francisco portrait studio in 1933 and devoted the next six years to documenting the plight of families that had been crushed by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Much of this work was done on behalf of the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal government agency that sought to inform the public about the hardships of migrant farm workers, displaced families and sharecroppers. Lange’s images were circulated broadly, generating public support for government agricultural programs, and her work set new standards for documentary photography.

2. Lillie Langtry and Joe Jefferson, 19th century actors.

She was a world renown beauty; the mistress of the Prince of Wales and other royals, and wife to two husbands; the owner of a California winery and a stable of racehorses; the first celebrity product endorser; and, a stage actress in England and the US who wrote her own productions, ran her own production company, and, for a while, managed a London theater. Lilly Langtry is shown here in 1885 and in theater costumes in 1887 and 1890. Joe Jefferson began his career in the 1830s as a four-year-old black-faced minstrel player, and toured regional US theaters, with sojourns in Australia and England, for the next seventy years. One of America’s finest comedic actors, Jefferson’s stock in trade was his portrayal of Washington Irving’s character, Rip Van Winkle, which he performed for four decades on the stage and in early silent films. Jefferson is shown here in 1869, as Doctor Pangloss, the protagonist in Voltaire's novel Candide, in a painting by John Singer Sargent (1890), and as an aged Rip Van Winkle in 1896.

3. The Civil War Veterans' Gettysburg Reunion, 1913.

On the fifty-year anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, more than fifty thousand Civil War veterans returned to Gettysburg to attend a five-day reunion, staying in a large encampment on the battlefield. It was a time of somber reflection mixed with back-slapping laughter, evening sing-a-longs of songs of the North and the South, and solo walks in the woods. Many brought notebooks and pencils to write things down and draw diagrams for savoring later; and an Iowa veteran scooped up two suitcases full of dirt from the spot on which he had stood and fought fifty years before. For these old men, this was a time to remember who they once were, to honor their dead and to make a final peace with the living, and probably with themselves. From all accounts, the old hate was gone. [First row: the reunion. Second row: the “Bloody Angle,” the scene of furious hand-to-hand combat, with the old veterans who had fought there shaking hands. Third row, photos from 1863: Confederate soldiers captured during the battle; the dead awaiting battlefield burial; and President Lincoln at Gettysburg on November 19 to dedicate a soldiers’ cemetery.]

4. Life in the Deep South and New Mexico, c. 1940.

5. Dakota Territories, 1880 [imagine them in winter].

Deadwood and Pierre, SD; Fargo and Valley City, ND. Both states were admitted to the Union in November 1889.

6. Four presidents as young children.

Eisenhower, age 3. FDR, age 7. Ford, age 3.…