Category: Retronaut

Flood paris Retro Retronaut Vintage

The Seine is overflowing, but these archival photos of 1910 Paris show this has happened before

sudshr47 January 24, 2018

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The Seine is flooding in Paris, but it’s not the first time.

On Tuesday, the Seine’s water level was sitting at 16 feet — the current flood emergency level is “orange,” the highest warning below “red.” But in 1910, Parisians had to hop aboard rowboats, make deliveries through windows, and construct makeshift pathways through the City of Lights when the Seine rose to 28 feet, causing what’s known as the Great Flood of Paris. 

Italian weekly newspaper La Domenica del Corriere published an illustration of the floods on its front cover on Jan. 30, 1910. It’s a wildly over-the-top but undeniably effective representation of the city’s situation: Citizens tumbling out of trains into row boats, using wood for pathways and being carried above the water level. Sure, it’s artistic license in action, but it gets the point across. Read more…

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History Native Americans Retronaut World War Ii Wwii

The Navajo code talkers that helped the U.S. win WWII

sudshr47 November 28, 2017

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c. 1943

Navajo code talkers Cpl. Henry Bake, Jr. and PFC George H. Kirk transmit messages during combat on Bougainville.

Image: Fotosearch/Getty Images

Shortly after the entry of the United States into World War II, Philip Johnston approached the Marine Corps with a proposal that could help tip the scales in the Pacific Theater.

Johnston was the child of missionaries, and had grown up on a Navajo reservation. He was one of just a handful of outsiders who could speak the Navajo language fluently.

He proposed developing a code based on this language, one that could be transmitted and decrypted quickly and orally on the battlefield — and that would be virtually impossible for the Japanese to crack. Read more…

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History Italy Rape Culture Retronaut Women S Rights

The woman who defied Italian tradition by refusing to marry her rapist

sudshr47 November 5, 2017

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Franca Viola.

Image: Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images

Last month, actress and director Asia Argento voiced her disgust with criticism from the Italian public after she came forward with rape allegations against Harvey Weinstein. “Italy is far behind the rest of the world in its view of women,” she told the press of her native country.

50 years ago, Italy was rocked by one woman’s courageous efforts to challenge the country’s treatment of rape victims — the lessons of which are sadly still relevant

In 1966, Franca Viola became the first Italian woman to take to court a cultural convention that would have her marry her rapist. With the eyes of a nation upon Viola, her statement to her rapist from the stand became a rallying cry for other women to follow suit. Read more…

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Food History New York City Restaurants Retronaut

Coffee, conversation, and community: Inside NYC’s vanished cafeterias

sudshr47 November 5, 2017

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Image: Marcia Bricker Halperin

One frigid day in February 1975, Marcia Bricker Halperin, a budding street photographer, was shooting storefront windows on Kings Highway in Brooklyn. With her fingers practically frozen to her Pentax, she slipped into a Dubrow’s Cafeteria to defrost.

I took a ticket from the man at the door and found myself looking out at a tableau of amazing faces between the coffee urns and steam tables teeming with choices and the muraled walls under high ceilings with modernist, space-age lighting.
Marcia Bricker Halperin

Image: Marcia Bricker Halperin

Image: Marcia Bricker Halperin Read more…

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1970s Chicago History New York Retronaut

Lush color photos capture the cityscapes of New York in Chicago in the ’70s and ’80s

sudshr47 November 4, 2017

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1984

Dave’s Restaurant, New York.

Image: Wayne Sorce/Joseph Bellows Gallery

Born in Chicago in 1946, Wayne Sorce studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and went on to have a distinguished career in photography.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Sorce explored the urban landscapes of New York and Chicago with his large format camera, making precisely balanced compositions of color, geometry, and light that also recorded the era’s particular styles of signage, advertising, and automobile design.

Wayne Sorce: Urban Color, an exhibit of cityscapes by Sorce and his contemporaries, is on display at Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla, California through Nov. 30. Read more…

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Future Future Tech Futurism History Retronaut

What people in 1900 thought life would be like in the technological paradise of 2000

sudshr47 November 4, 2017

Personal flying machines.Image: Hildebrands/Public DomainIn 1900, German chocolate company Hildebrands produced a series of postcards imagining the wonders of life in the year 2000.The optimistic renderings envisioned people in Victorian fashions enjo…

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