50 Years Ago No. 2

“Viceroy cigarettes ad” Life volume 71, no. 13, September 24, 1971.

angst: \ ˈäŋ(k)st , ˈaŋ(k)st \
: a feeling of anxiety, apprehension, or insecurity

The last eighteen months mark a period unlike any that most people living today have ever experienced. While the United States has been one of the countries hardest hit, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have been worldwide.

With an estimated population of 332,762,582,³ 12.6% of the U.S. population have been infected and 0.2% have died.⁴

That’s one in eight people in this country that are documented as having been infected.  One in four hundred and ninety-three have died.

A much larger percentage of the population suffered from other pandemic-related effects. In the spring of 2020, 43 states ordered residents to stay home and required the closure of nonessential businesses, precipitating an economic crisis. In April 2020, unemployment rose to 14.7%.  Millions lost jobs, struggled to pay rents, mortgages, and other bills, and had to rely on food banks—in 2020 one in seven individuals were food insecure. Over 2 million households fell at least three months behind on their mortgages. Many Americans continue to suffer from mental health challenges that are “a result of financial hardships, illness and death, social isolation, and a remote/virtual work and school environment.” In February, it was estimated that over 20% of adults were experiencing some kind of pandemic-related psychological distress.⁵

Complicating matters further, in the U.S., the public health crisis got caught up in the divisive politics that has overwhelmed the country in recent years.

The exact impact politics has had and continues to have is difficult to assess because pandemic tracking data—what there is of it— is subject to delays and uncertainties.  Mask-wearing opposition is sometimes political, but determining the extent of mask use and how that affects the spread of COVID is hard.  Vaccination rates at the county level can be correlated to the current pandemic status, including hospitalizations and deaths, all of which can also be correlated with the 2020 county-level election results. This epidemic has been turned into a pandemic of the unvaccinated and vaccine opposition is highest on the political right.⁶

Even though we mostly stay home, are vaccinated, and wear our masks when we do go out, all of this is exhausting.  We pay attention to what’s going on and are generally COVID knowledgeable.  It’s disheartening to see the trends, disheartening to hear the excuses, disheartening to hear vaccine-hesitant and anti-vaxxers changing their tune after getting deathly sick or after a loved one has died.

It’s disheartening to see political positions on vaccination and masking affect public health.

…disheartening.

…angst.

1. Morehead, Allison. “Why ‘the Scream’ Has Gone Viral Again.” The Conversation, May 25, 2021. https://theconversation.com…the-scream…viral-again.
2. Spinney, Laura. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018.
   The nineteenth century saw two flu pandemics. The first, which erupted in 1830, is said to have ranked in severity – though not in scale – with the Spanish flu. The second, the so-called ‘Russian’ flu that began in 1889, was thought to have originated in Bokhara in Uzbekistan. It was the first to be measured, at least to some extent, since by then scientists had discovered what a powerful weapon statistics could be in the fight against disease. Thanks to the efforts of those early epidemiologists, we know that the Russian flu claimed somewhere in the region of a million lives, and that it washed over the world in three waves. A mild first wave heralded a severe second one, and the third was even milder than the first. Many cases developed into pneumonia, which was often the cause of death, and this flu didn’t only claim the elderly and the very young – as in a normal flu season – but people in their thirties and forties too. Doctors were unsettled by their observation that many patients who survived the initial attack went on to develop nervous complications, including depression. The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch may have been one of them, and some have suggested that his famous painting, The Scream, sprang from his flu-darkened thoughts. ‘One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below,’ he wrote later. ‘I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord – the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream.’ By the time Munch wrote those words, the pandemic was over, and so was the millennia-long struggle between man and flu. In the next century, the twentieth, science would conquer the crowd diseases once and for all.
3. “U.S. and World Population Clock.” United States Census Bureau. Accessed September 19, 2021 23:52 UTC. https://www.census.gov/popclock/.
4. “ COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU).” ArcGIS dashboards. Accessed September 19, 2021. https://www.arcgis.com….
   As of 10:21 UTC, 42,085,958 had been infected in the United States and 673,763 had died
5. Dhongde , Shatakshee, and Brian Glassman. “Multidimensional Hardship in the U.S. during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division. United States Census Bureau, August 17, 2021. Accessed September 19, 2021. https://www.census.gov….
6. Bump, Philip. “Analysis | Republicans Are Still a Bigger Obstacle to Vaccination than Black Americans.” The Washington Post, September 15, 2021. Accessed September 20, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com….

50 Years Ago No. 2
Vintage Camping No. 2

Popular Science vol 199, no. 3, September 1971. page 29

So… printer ink cartridges ain’t cheap!

A set of replacement cartridges runs about $40 on Amazon for my current all-in-one printer.

I’ve been having problems with my 8-year-old printer and, as inexpensive as printers can be, replacing it would likely be cheaper than having it fixed — though I have no clue on where to take it to get it fixed.¹

A good rule of thumb is, if the printer repair costs more than half of what it would cost to get a new machine, then perhaps you should buy a new one.²

Buying another similar inexpensive printer that uses expensive ink cartridges is a path I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down again.  I knew that there are printers that use ink tanks instead of replacement cartridges, so included them in my research.

Epson has multiple models of their EcoTank printers. Each has four tanks: black, yellow, magenta and cyan.  The ink that is provided with each printer prints the equivalent of what about 90 individual cartridges would.

I ordered the Epson EcoTank ET-3760.  With an auto document feeder, a high-resolution scanner, and auto 2-sided printing, it’s certainly more than we need for a home printer, but with the immense savings we should see with not having to replace cartridges, I thought, “Why not?”

A question I have, though, is “Why was this delivered by the US Postal Service?”

A large box like that is normally delivered by UPS.

Hmmmmm…..

1. I just did an online search and there are several places locally.  However, I’ve already got the new printer and I doubt that getting the old one repaired would have been cost effective.
2. Wiffler, Ross. “Should You Consider Printer Repair or Just Get a New One.” Common Sense Business Solutions, January 27, 2019. https://commonsensebusinesssolutions.com….

    

Dust, Drought, Depression, and War No. 18¹

1. Each blog post in this project is an exploration of something from the almost 16 years between the crash of the stock market in 1929 and the end of World War 2 in 1985—no limits, no specific focus.  The arc of the project will be the depression, the dust, the drought, and the war, but there were a lot of other aspects in the America of those times.
2. Historically, the word missile referred to any projectile that is thrown, shot or propelled towards a target; this usage is still recognized today.
   • “Missile.” Wikipedia, as edited August 19, 2021. Accessed September 13, 2021. https://en.wikipedia…Missile.
3. “Smoke and Fire Reach Toward the Sky as Atomic Bombs are Dropped on Japanese Cities.” The New York Times. August 12, 1945. page 28. Accessed September 13, 2021. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com…page28.
4. “War News Summarized.” The New York Times, August 12, 1945. page 1. Accessed August 13, 2021. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com…page1.
5. One of my sources for inspiration for posts is a randomized list of about 365 dates between Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, and September 2, 1945, the end of the Second World War. Today’s post started from that list—August 12, 1945.  I then did a Google image search and a Google topic search on the date but found nothing of immediate interest there.  The next stop was The New York Times online archives for August 12, 1945. There are a lot of potential candidates in those headlines.  I generally look for something that is relatively short or something that leads to another avenue of research, such as the USS Thresher (SS 200) blog post.

Royalty-free images by Mike¹ — No. 154 of over 1200 images

Redbreasted Nuthatch, West Central Arkansas, November 2, 2007

Red-breasted nuthatch²

The red-breasted nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) is a small songbird. The adult has blue-grey upperparts with cinnamon underparts, a white throat and face with a black stripe through the eyes, a straight grey bill and a black crown. Its call, which has been likened to a tin trumpet, is high-pitched and nasal. It breeds in coniferous forests across Canada, Alaska and the northeastern and western United States. Though often a permanent resident, it regularly irrupts further south if its food supply fails. There are records of vagrants occurring as far south as the Gulf Coast and northern Mexico. It forages on the trunks and large branches of trees, often descending head first, sometimes catching insects in flight. It eats mainly insects and seeds, especially from conifers. It excavates its nest in dead wood, often close to the ground, smearing the entrance with pitch.

Post Endnotes

1. I am sharing some of my public domain images in periodic blog posts.
2. “Red-Breasted Nuthatch.” Wikipedia article most recently edited July 7, 2021. Accessed September 10, 2021. https://en.wikipedia…nuthatch.

Series Notes:

• This image is also shared as public domain on Pixabay, Flickr, and Pinterest.
• Images are being shared in the sequence they were accepted by Pixabay, a royalty-free image-sharing site.
• Only images specifically identified as such are public domain or creative commons on our pages.
• All other images are copyright protected by me, creative commons, or used under the provisions of fair use.

Drought, Dust, Depression, and War No. 17
The Bitter Years No.2¹

The boy in this image was a subject in at least two of the numerous photos taken in the Omar, West Virginia area in 1935 and 1938 by photographers employed by the federal government in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. There is no background information on this boy available online, who he was then, or what became of him later.

The visits to Omar were part of a larger effort that would take thousands of photographs across America between 1935 and 1943.  Fifteen photographers took over two thousand photographs in West Virginia alone.³

Photographs from the Omar area visits are included in history books, photographic art books, other print media, and, today, on many websites.  Many have been featured in art museums and other photographic exhibits preserving images of a slice of everyday life in Omar and the vicinity during the Great Depression.⁴

Photographer Ben Shahn, a Lithuanian-born American artist is best known for artworks of social realism, left-wing political views, and a series of art  lectures published as The Shape of Content.⁵ 

While Shahn was primarily an artist, in the early 1930s he became interested in photography, capturing street-level views of life in New York neighborhoods.^{6, 7}

In late September 1935, Shahn left New York to work for the Resettlement Administration.  He worked as an artist in the agency’s Special Skills Division and was an unofficial, part-time member of Roy Stryker’s photographic section.⁸

His first photographic assignment gave him the opportunity to travel for a month through the southern United States where photographing scenes of rural poverty exposed him to lives far different from what he had known living in New York.⁹

Shahn later did a painting (1946) called Hunger in which some think the subject resembles the child in the photo.¹⁰ The image was used by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in a voter registration drive.¹¹  It was reproduced in Look magazine in 1947, along with six others “to illustrate a hostile editorial provocatively titled ‘Your Money Bought These Paintings’.”¹² The original painting is in the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art’s permanent collection at Auburn University.¹³

1. The 1962 exhibition, “The Bitter Years 1935-1941,” was Edward Steichen’s last as Director of the Department of Photography at New York’s  Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The images in the exhibition were personally selected by Steichen from 270,000 photos taken for the Farm Security Administration by a team of photographers employed between 1935 and 1941 to document (primarily) rural America during the Great Depression.
2. Poos Françoise. The Bitter Years: Edward Steichen and the Farm Security Administration Photographs. New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2012. page 58
3. “The Omar Project: Not a Simple Story.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed September 12, 2021. http://www.wvculture.org…omar….
4. “Introductory Notes: The Omar Project: Not a Simple Story.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed September 12, 2021. http://www.wvculture.org…omar.
5. Shahn, Ben. The Shape of Content. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. (checkout available at Internet Archive)
6. Shahn had pursued art and, with his wife, made “the traditional artist pilgrimage,” via North Africa and Europe, and had studied great European artists Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Klee.  Dissatisfied with his work inspired by his travel, he redirected his efforts toward a realistic style he used to contribute to social dialog.
   • • “Ben Shahn.” Wikipedia, edit as of July 18, 2021. Accessed September 12, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org…Shahn.
7.  In the early 1930s, though known as a painter, muralist, and graphic artist, Shahn was making formidable photographs. Between 1932 and 1935, Shahn’s street photography showed life in New York city through “the prosaic activities and expressive gestures of ordinary people.” He also “documented demonstrations for expanded work-relief programs and protest marches against social injustice…”  His New York photography addressed such topical issues as unemployment, poverty, immigration, and social reform and their connection to race and class.
   • “Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times.” Grey Art Gallery, September 13, 2016. Accessed September 12, 2021. https://greyartgallery.nyu.edu/….
8. Gertz, Stephen J. “Book Illustrator Ben Shahn Does Poster.” Booktryst, May 16, 2013. http://www.booktryst.com/….
9. “Ben Shahn’s New York…”
10. “Omar Project: Photos (Page 3).” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed September 12, 2021. http://www.wvculture.org…photos3.html.
11. Gertz.
    “…’it represents, perhaps, the best of Shahn’s poster work. One cannot soon erase the memory of the hollow-eyed young face begging for peace. Nowhere is Shahn’s genius for drawing more evident than in the thrust of the pleading hand…Using the image of this child in the context of an election campaign seems to say that in a democracy the first step toward healing the ravages of war is to exercise one’s right to vote’ (Kenneth W. Prescott, The Complete Graphic Works of Ben Shahn, p. 132)”
12. Bailey, Julia Tatiana. “’Realism Reconsidered’: Ben Shahn in London, 1956 – Essay.” Tate, 2019. https://www.tate.org.uk….
13. Shahn, Ben. “Hunger.” Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, 1946. Accessed September 12, 2021. http://jcsm.auburn.edu….

50 Years Ago No. 1

Civil War Era Photographic Portraiture No. 4
Originally Published in American Civil War Chronicles

Title: [Five enlistees from Co. K, 11th Ohio Infantry Regiment, one in uniform and three in hickory shirts, at Camp Dennison, three with bayoneted rifles]
Date Created/Published: [United States], [May 1861]
Medium: 1 photograph : ambrotype ; plate 82 x 70 mm (sixth plate format), case 92 x 80 mm + 1 manuscript fragment.
Summary: Photograph shows soldiers who enlisted Greenville, Ohio, identified as (left to right) Lieutenant Wesley Gorsuch, Private Francis M. Eidson, unidentified soldier, Brigadier General Joseph Washington Frizell, and Doctor Squire Dickey, a surgeon candidate who did not muster.
Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ppmsca-55740 (digital file from original)
Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.
Access Advisory: Use digital images. Original served only by appointment because material requires special handling.
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
Notes:
….Title devised by Library staff.
….Date and soldiers’ identifications from: “Through The Camera’s Eye: Part One, Ohio Soldiers 1861,” by Larry M. Strayer and Brad L. Pruden. Military Images, volume XXVII, number 1, July/August 2005, page 6.
….Text on manuscript fragment: “Left, Capt. Gorsuch, Colonel Frazell, 3rd unknown, 4th Frank Eidson, private Squire Dickey, surgeon. Company from Greenville, Ohio.”
….Case: Berg, no. 4-17G.
….Gift; Tom Liljenquist; 2017; (DLC/PP-2017:171, formerly deposit D073)
….More information about this collection is available at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.lilj
….Purchased from: Larry M. Strayer, June 2017.
….Forms part of: Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs (Library of Congress).
….Forms part of: Ambrotype/Tintype photograph filing series (Library of Congress)

Library of Congress file permalink

___________
Mike’s notes:

Note – This image has been digitally adjusted for one or more of the following:
– fade correction,
– color, contrast, and/or saturation enhancement
– selected spot and/or scratch removal
– cropped for composition and/or to accentuate subject

Before retouching: