System Metternich posted:

English-German flyer calling for Chicago-based workers to arm themselves and gather at a rally which would later escalate into a shootout known as the "Haymarket massacre" (Chicago, 1887)

Catboy Autonomist posted:

This is a photograph from 1857 of Shimazu Nariakira, the damiyo of the Satsuma Domain in Japan, taken just four years after Commodore Perry's arrival and 11 years prior to the Meiji Restoration. It was the first ever photograph to be successfully created in Japan, and was taken by one of his retainers, who had already obtained an early imported camera from the West in 1848 and had been experimenting with it for many years without any instructions or training on how to even operate it. The photo was later lost for over a century until it was rediscovered in an abandoned warehouse by chance in 1975.

Alhazred posted:

Walter Rothschild riding his giant tortoise

Government Handjob posted:

It is worth mentioning that the Haymarket Massacre ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair ) is why we have the International Worker's Day (May 1st).

To contribute here is one of the earliest Norwegian photographs, showing the Royal Castle in Oslo somewhere between 1840 - 46.

System Metternich posted:

Very cool! Going southwards (and paging Krankenstyle to this thread), this appears to be the earliest photograph made in Denmark, showing Ulfeldts Plads in Copenhagen, probably around June 1840:



There is even a person visible! If you look closely, there is a guy sleeping at the foot of the statue which is why the long exposure didn't fail to catch him.

System Metternich posted:

Very cool! Going southwards (and paging Krankenstyle to this thread), this appears to be the earliest photograph made in Denmark, showing Ulfeldts Plads in Copenhagen, probably around June 1840:



There is even a person visible! If you look closely, there is a guy sleeping at the foot of the statue which is why the long exposure didn't fail to catch him.

Lord Lambeth posted:

similarly, you can see a shoe shiner in one of the first photos taken by Louis Daguerre

Say Nothing posted:

Eugen Sandow was the first bodybuilder to appear on film. He was filmed by Thomas Edison himself.



Edison and Sandow.

ExplodingSims posted:

Wow, I thought he was just someone made up for the Venture Bros.

Ommin posted:

I'm having some difficulties pulling images from this site, so I will just link it. I recently rediscovered this curated archive from The New York Times. It has some gems.

http://livelymorgue.tumblr.com/about

quote:

Sept. 1, 1915: “Germans lately do not capture a number of Frenchmen but they succeeded to capture five warlike French dogs,” read a curiously light caption accompanying this photo, taken while a world war was raging. “The dogs however, do not feel very cross with their captors.” Photo: The New York Times

Ultimate Mango posted:

Did he win by default because his opponents could only hit him beneath the belt?

Or did he just beat the tar out of everyone he faced?

Good photo either way.

Platystemon posted:

trickybiscuits posted:

buglord posted:

Great thread! My old one died in its infancy. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com has a lot of good stuff too, along with some interesting (albeit short) write-ups accompanying the pictures.

The pic of Archbishop José Maria Yerovi makes me really uncomfortable. I really hope that wasn't publicized at the time. Do you have any more information on what happened with that? Some googling brings up things in Spanish, so I couldn't get really far. Christ almighty that is some really morbid stuff.

Khazar-khum posted:

At the time, photography of the dead was done to make a 'last look' possible. Thanatos.com has an excellent selection, though be forewarned: the majority are of young children, dead from the same diseases anti-vaxxers want to return.

Exhuming a body for a ritual of some kind was not unknown. People were exhumed to be executed, like Cromwell. If you were considered holy, you might be exhumed to see if you were an Incorruptable--ie, perfectly preserved--and thus eligible for sainthood.

Inez de Castro, wife of King Pedro of Portugal, was exhumed so she could be crowned. She had been murdered, which set off a terrible war; once peace was restored, the victorious Pedro ordered her to be dressed as queen and placed on her throne. All members of the court had to bow and kiss the ring on her hand.

buglord posted:

Great thread! My old one died in its infancy. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com has a lot of good stuff too, along with some interesting (albeit short) write-ups accompanying the pictures.

The pic of Archbishop José Maria Yerovi makes me really uncomfortable. I really hope that wasn't publicized at the time. Do you have any more information on what happened with that? Some googling brings up things in Spanish, so I couldn't get really far. Christ almighty that is some really morbid stuff.

quote:

To comply with [the papal] disposition, on March 5, 1869, almost two years after his death, José Ignacio Checa y Barba proceeded to exhume the body of Yerovi, who with great pomp was placed in the Cathedral, seated in an armchair, invested with vestments and pontifical insignia. Miraculously and to the delight of the Catholic Church and all the faithful, the corpse still maintained its flexibility and there was no sign of decomposition in it.

In 1954, eighty-seven years after his death, when the apostolic process for his beatification was started, in the presence of Cardinal Carlos María de la Torre from Quito his tomb was opened in search of relics, but a new miracle had been performed to attest to his sanctity: The corpse was still intact.

System Metternich posted:

Short and to the point, I see

I posted some imo really fascinating photos of a Peruvian village in the 1960s along with the corresponding backstory in the old Christianity thread over in A/T some time ago, might as well repost it here now that the original thread is closed:

By chance I stumbled upon a digital collection of gorgeous photos today that depict a bygone time of a very foreign (to Western eyes, that is) variety of syncretised Catholicism, but also gives fascinating insights into how the Catholic Church succeeded and failed in the specific context of 20th century Peru.

Chuschi is a small village of maybe 1,300 people deep in the Peruvian Andes at an elevation of about 11,000 feet, situated right in the middle of the province of Cangallo where even nowadays the vast majority of people speak a Quechua dialect instead of Spanish. Back in the late 60s, an American anthropologist called Billie Jean Isbell spent a long time in the village community and observed both its daily life and its varied rituals, taking lots of photos in the progress. Here are some of the 1967 Corpus Christi celebration:





There was a procession, of course, where figures of various saints were paraded through the village as part of elaborate floats which were built by the mayordomos, i.e. local elites who also organised the entire fiesta.

The procession wasn't the most important part of the ritual, at least not for the villagers. What really was at the centre for them was the invasion of the sallqaruna, the "savage people". The sallqaruna were llama herders who lived permanently in the puna grasslands of the high Central Andes, even higher than the village itself. They were neither regarded as a different caste nor a different ethnicity by the villagers, but due to their geographical isolation they were regarded with suspicion at best and open hostility at worst, and many people in the village believed them to be were-llamas, a shameful condition created by unbecoming sexual conduct.





The central part of the ceremony was the ritual invasion of Chuschi by villagers diguised as sallqaruna. In the upper image you see a little boy playing the part of a sallqaruna, riding on horseback into the village; the other picture shows the ritual descent from the puna of the whole group.



Part of the play was the sounding of the alarm, when villagers blew their waqarapuku.

There are no more (good) photos of the ceremony, but after the arrival of the sallqaruna it also involved the "savage men" ritually despoiling a statue of the Blessed Virgin, their being "chased off" and a bullfight.

There is also another wonderful photo of a funeral ceremony I wanted to show you:



The important thing here is that this is not a priest, but a "simple" villager conducting the funeral rites, albeit one who had been identified by the community as a religious specialist. In this shot you can see him carrying a cross and sprinkling the funeral bier with holy water; Isabell tells us that he was reciting "Latin" prayers during that time, or at least prayers in a language that was supposed to approximate actual Latin (the square quotes were used by Isabell herself).

Why now a layman and not an ordained priest? Well, this has a twofold story behind it: on the one hand, this probably represents a surviving remnant of pre-Columbian funeral rites in which the priest isn't actually supposed to play a part. On the other hand, Chuschi was and is situated in the Archdioce of Ayacucho which used to be regarded as the most Catholic part of Peru, but also the diocese with the most conservative clergy. While other dioceses in Peru picked up liberation theology and its predecessors at an early date and put a lot of effort into caring for the poor and downtrodden, especially in rural regions like the Andes, the clergy of Ayacucho continued to display an almost colonial mindset, where priests mostly came from Spanish or at least mestizo background and represented the social, ethnic and economic elite with little regard for the worries of their flock.

In the specific case of Chuschi, at the time the photo was taken the parish was administered by Father Chávez, a priest who originally hailed from the coastal Áncash region and came to the village in 1963. Like his predecessors, Father Chávez enjoyed the benefits of his office in the form of 100 acres of the best land and a large herd of 800 livestock cared for free of charge by the villagers. Even though by the standards of the time and region this made him a very wealthy man, he also charged the villagers for basically everything: Baptising children? Money, please. Performing a wedding? You better believe that'll cost you. He read up to three Masses a day, each one lasting a whopping five to eight minutes (!) and charged the villagers through the nose for each one of them. Even the accessories you can see in the photo above - the cross, the aspergillum, the bier and even the black cloth - had to be rented from the priest for a fee. No wonder that the villagers wanted to minimise Father Chávez' involvement!

Small wonder too, that in a region where a priest conducting himself like this was sadly not the exception but the rule, a great deal of resentment quickly grew. It is no coincidence that it was Chuschi where in 1980 the maoist insurgency known as the "Shining Path" began its decades-long bloody war with the state that left tens of thousands dead, and that it was the region of Ayacucho where the fighting was the heaviest. While in other parts of Peru, the clergy would denounce all violence on both sides, both by the Shining Path and the military government (sometimes at great personal danger), the Ayacuchan clergy would instead throw its weight fully behind the local government even though everybody knew that its death squads were at least as violent and brutal against the peasants as the Shining Path insurgents were (Chuschi itself suffered from that, when in 1991 government militias beat up and arrested four villagers charged with harbouring maoist sympathies. None of them were ever seen again).

Father Chávez wasn't part of that, however. After a while the conflict between him and his flock had grown so bad (not only because of financial arguments, but also because of allegations of general bad conduct levied against him, ranging from public drunkenness to physical violence against his subordinates and even rape), that in 1971 the village petitioned the archbishop for Father Chávez' immediate removal. After the archbishop refused that request, the villagers instead occupied all ecclesiastical grounds and buildings, took over the priest's livestock and unceremoniously forced him to leave the village. No successor priest was able to establish himself, and to this day Chuschi doesn't have a resident priest, relying instead on itinerant priests to perform various rites and doing the rest by themselves. It isn't unique in this regard, however: many other parishes within the Archdiocese of Ayacucho also lost their priests, both due to a lack in vocations and after similar altercations as in Chuschi, and either turned towards evangelical Pentecostalism or created their own, independent version of folk Catholicism that largely has no need for Church hierarchy anymore. If the archdiocese wanted to address that or maybe even stop that development, then it needed to honestly confront its own shady past. There is no sign that it wants to do that, however; instead the former archbishop of Ayacucho and apologist for governmental violence got made cardinal-archbishop of Lima and refuses to even talk about the Shining Path years.

Literature:

• Isbell, Billie Jean: To Defend Outselves. Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village, Prospect Heights 1985.
  
• Flannery, Kent/Marcus, Joyce/Reynolds, Robert: The Flocks of the Wamami. A Study of Llama Herders on the Punas of Ayacucho, Peru, Oxford/New York 2016.
  
• La Serna, Miguel: In Plain View of the Catholic Faithful. Church-Peasant Conflict in the Peruvian Andes, 1963–1980, in: Hispanic American Historical Review 95 (2015), pp. 631-657. (institutional access needed)
  

TheBigAristotle posted:

Can someone post the dude eating rice and making the face? He owns and belongs in every old photo thread

Catboy Autonomist posted:

Here you go:

Khazar-khum posted:

At the time, photography of the dead was done to make a 'last look' possible. Thanatos.com has an excellent selection, though be forewarned: the majority are of young children, dead from the same diseases anti-vaxxers want to return.

Exhuming a body for a ritual of some kind was not unknown. People were exhumed to be executed, like Cromwell. If you were considered holy, you might be exhumed to see if you were an Incorruptable--ie, perfectly preserved--and thus eligible for sainthood.

Inez de Castro, wife of King Pedro of Portugal, was exhumed so she could be crowned. She had been murdered, which set off a terrible war; once peace was restored, the victorious Pedro ordered her to be dressed as queen and placed on her throne. All members of the court had to bow and kiss the ring on her hand.

Zopotantor posted:

The bishop looks like the accused Pope in the painting of the Cadaver Synod.

System Metternich posted:

It was a different time, simply put. Death was no stranger, and if I had to venture a guess I would say that most people would have seen plenty of dead bodies in their lives. Add to this a certain Catholic fascination with death as well as a lack of decomposition being regarded as a surefire sign of holiness, and it becomes clear that there was nothing morbid about that for people, but it was instead a sign of Christian triumph over death as well as a symbol that Yerovi would continue to exercise his episcopal office after death by way of intercession (which, going by Catholic theology, means that the dead shall ask God to favour the living).

Lazlo Nibble posted:

I saw these two pics in close proximity to each other a while back and couldn’t stop imagining the buddy-cop movie.

buglord posted:

Site you linked doesn't lead me anywhere. Would like to see it though! I didn't know people were put on trial or had their statuses amended post-death. Growing up catholic, I knew people could become saints after their death, but I didn't know that they were historically dug up as a way of verifying sainthood.