Shorpy is an online archive of thousands of high-resolution photos from the 1850s to 1950s. Our namesake, Shorpy Higginbotham, was a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago. 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.)
This amazing site has over 5,300 pictures, many of them from a long time ago. It’s really a great trip through America’s history, in photographs. An appropriate sample photo would be this one, taken circa 1900. “Heat wave. Free ice in New York.”
It looks really authentic, because, well, it is.
Shorpy was also voted one the best blogs of 2010 by Time Magazine. You can follow them on Twitter here.
Enjoy!
Site of the Week: Shorpy
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