“LOST LABOR: Images of Vanished American Workers 1900-1980 is a selection of 155 photographs excerpted from a collection of more than 1100 company histories, pamphlets, and technical brochures documenting America’s business and corporate industrial history.” Over the last 20 years this collection of rare and difficult to find pictures was collected. This unusual historical record of 20th Century America documents many factories, machinery, and jobs that no longer exist.
You’ll want to surf this site from the sidebar, category by category. Even on dial-up the images loaded quickly. The photos you see are haunting, and full of character. You’ll see people hard at work in contrast to modern society where many people are hardly working. We’ve refined work so that machines do most of it for us. But these pictures show exactly what it was like before computers and computerized machinery. They even have pictures of women who worked in factories.
I loved the “Automotive” section—my favorite photo was the “United States Rubber Co. 1947″. If you click on an image it will pop up enlarged and with a caption. My favorite caption was for the American Tobacco Co. The caption was ” The Story of the Lucky Strike.”
This site is flawless in design and has a quality that many sites lack. Everything flows seamlessly.
Check it out after work.