America in Color, 1939-1943

An online exhibition at the Library of Congress with seventy color images of rural and small-town life taken for the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information. 

It was hard to choose just a few to show you here, nearly all of them tell a story.  Go check it out for yourself:  the world our parents knew, scenes that were rapidly fading away by the time we baby boomers came along - preserved here at the dawn of the Kodachrome era.

Gravelly Range, Madison County, Montana, 1942

Homesteading family, New Mexico, 1940

Lincoln, Nebraska, 1942

Vermont State Fair, 1941

Bomber factory, Tennessee, 1943

Tank crew at Fort Knox, Kentucky, 1943

Melrose, Louisiana, 1940

Humanity's Heritage Online

Those of you who get a kick out of historical stuff should go check out the new World Digital Library site:

The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site, in a variety of ways. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.

Items on the WDL may easily be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information.

Navigation tools and content descriptions are provided in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Many more languages are represented in the actual books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and other primary materials, which are provided in their original languages.

The WDL was developed by a team at the U.S. Library of Congress, with contributions by partner institutions in many countries; the support of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and the financial support of a number of companies and private foundations.

Here's a quick sampling, there's lots more where this came from.

American history buffs should also check out the Library of Congress American Memory site.