musings

drtuesdaygjohnson:

pbsthisdayinhistory:

October 1, 1890: Yosemite Established as National Park

On this day in 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed a bill into law creating Yosemite National Park. This law decreed that about 1,500 square miles of public land in the California Sierra Nevada would be preserved for the public trust. 

To learn more about all of America’s national parks, explore Ken Burns’s The National Parks: America’s Best Idea collections.

Photo: Library of Congress

The federal government’s system of “preservation” meant claiming lands and outlawing, by means of the US cavalry’s force, hunting and gathering within those lands. This specifically targeted the Yosemite Indians, a conglomerate of tribes who used the land for sustenance and settlement. America’s views of the west’s wilderness as “pristine” and “untouched by man” was contradicted in light of native settlements and their relationship with land. American’s obsession with and interpretation of wilderness and preservation was ultimately used to dislocate and vilify American Indians’ way of life.

Images such as this one were essentially propaganda at the time, promoting a false reality of a pristine, uninhabited landscape, void of human settlement and exploitation—except for the occasional white visitor, there to embrace a “true” wilderness of his own.

(via johnmyersart)

One of the first flights of the Wright Flyer I, December 17, 1903, Orville piloting, Wilbur running at wingtip.

(Source: loss-of-control, via dreaminginthedeepsouth)

(Source: m3zzaluna, via elyann)

undr:

Stanley Kubrick

Portogallo, 1948

alwaysalwaysalwaysthesea:

lauramcphee:

Girl at the tracks, c1930 (via holdthisphoto)

(via kleidersachen)

luzfosca:

Harold Cazneaux

Sydney Bridge, Bridge pattern, Arch of steel, 1934

(via shiigeru)

lostsplendor:

T Strap Palette, 1920s (via)

(via lustforthemoonlight)

luzfosca:

A jewish boy playing a violin to support himself in the warsaw ghetto, poland, February 1941

Photo by galerie bilderwelt and joe j. heydecker

Thanks to m3zzaluna

v

solituderecifetoile:

Boys Going to Work at Warren Mfg. Co. 1909

photos by Lewis Hine

v

(via goodmemory)

undr:

Arthur Leipzig

Tops, 1950

From Growing Up in New York

(via liquidnight)

(via darkerangels)

luzfosca:

Franz Renson

La Grande Ville, 1940s

Thanks to dlpalinckx

(Source: wonderfulambiguity, via luzfosca)

firsttimeuser:

Norman Parkinson. Career that spanned seven decades

(via darkerangels)

(via justcallmegrace)

luzfosca:

Wayne F. Miller

Naples Children, 1944

(Source: luzfosca)