Most of the photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs, 20 to 200 megabytes in size) from the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) Many were digitized by LOC contractors using a Sinar studio back. They are adjusted by your webmaster for contrast and color in Photoshop before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here.
Vintage photos of:

Traffic Squad Parade, November 5, 1908. Mayor George McClellan alighting from auto on the plaza at Union Square. View full size. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection. "Max" McClellan, New York mayor from 1904 to 1909, was the son of Civil War general George B. McClellan.

The Navy airship ZR-1 (USS Shenandoah) under construction in 1922-23 at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey. The 680-foot, 36-ton zeppelin, the first rigid airship to use helium rather than hydrogen, broke up in a storm over Ohio in 1925 with a loss of 14 lives. View full size. George Grantham Bain Collection.

August 25, 1923. The Navy airship ZR-1 in its hangar at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey. View full size. George Grantham Bain Collection.

The airship ZR-1 leaving its hangar at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey in 1923. View full size. George Grantham Bain Collection.

November 1942. "An American pineapple, of the kind the Axis finds hard to digest, is ready to leave the hand of an infantryman in training at Fort Belvoir, Va." View full size. 4x5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer.

On the tipple at the Bessie Mine, Sloss-Sheffield Steel & Iron Co. These young boys work around and on these coal cars, loaded and empty, while they are running at full speed. It is dangerous. One of these boys said, "Ain't hardly a day goes by that someone don't get pinched or hurt." "I got my leg jammed a while ago and was laid up a week." Location: Bessie Mine, Alabama. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1910. View full size