PODCAST · history
This Week's Best Old Photos
by Brenda Elthon
Because pictures tell a story better than words. look.substack.com
Episodes
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Photo of the Day
General Douglas MacArthur has come ashore on Luzon, the main Philippine island, among the early waves of the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific war. The assault troops, sprung from an Allied convoy of 800 ships, have met negligible enemy resistance. They have established a 15-mile…
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Photo of the Day
September 18, 1862. A day of great sadness. Thousands of dead and wounded Americans lay on farm fields in southern Maryland. The day before, McClellan’s Army of the Potomac and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had met in battle along southern Maryland’s Antietam Creek. 23,000 men were killed or...
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Photo of the Day
Despite two weeks of Allied aerial bombardment, German forces continue to make gains across all of the Western Front, widening their surprise counteroffensive, launched on December 16, to push the Allies out of the German homeland. The only exception is in Luxembourg and Belgium, where Gen....
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Photo of the Day
It is New Year’s Day 1790. This coming July, the United States will be fourteen years old. The Revolutionary War has been over for six years. The Constitution, whose stated purpose is to ‘establish justice and insure domestic tranquility’ among the people, has been the law of the land for a...
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Photo of the Day
The surprise German offensive begun on December 16, spearheaded by armored columns, has netted the German armies 51 miles of formerly liberated Belgian territory. The two bulges of their armies have now merged. The German objective, according to Allied Headquarters, is to reach the Meuse River…
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Photo of the Day
It is March 1915. And, American newspaper reporter Phil Rader has written a personal account of the Christmas Truce of 1914 for United Press International. Rader was one of a hundred Americans who had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in 1914. On Christmas Day 1914, he was in the trenches of...
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Photo of the Day
It is 1915. The poet, Robert Frost, is writing from his new home, a wooded farmplace in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. A stranger has come from the city and is asking about his trees. “The city had withdrawn into itself And left at last the country to the country; When between whirls of…
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Photo of the Day
Hopes among dreamers that the war would end by Christmas have been dashed as the surprise German offensive through Belgium entered its fifth day. This fight, which some are calling the greatest battle in American history, is Hitler’s last grasp at victory. Hitler has disputed reports that it is...
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Photo of the Day
It is December 1862. A beloved father, prominent in his community and active in progressive politics, has died a sudden, violent death. His daughter, a young woman in her twenties, is inconsolable. The man was killed in action in a Civil War battle in Mississippi. He needn’t have been there. He…
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Photo of the Day
The US Navy Department offered ‘no comment’ to today’s Japanese report that its attack force sunk the battleship USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor six days ago. Japanese air and naval forces continue their attacks on three sides of Luzon, the main island in the Philippines and the home of the capital,...
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Photo of the Day
Samuel Connell writes to President Lincoln in January 1864: ‘Dear Sir, I take the liberty of writing a plan for ending the War. It is simply this: send for Jeff Davis and his Congress and as many of his associates as possible, [General Lee in particular if you can get him to come.] Tell them to...
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Photo of the Day
The city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, is reeling following the harbor explosion three days ago between a French vessel carrying explosives bound for France and a Norwegian relief vessel en route to New York. The explosion flattened schools, railway and waterfront structures, homes and buildings in…
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Photo of the Day
After four days of fog and showers, New Yorkers will enjoy a nice day for Christmas shopping, with afternoon temperatures climbing into the 50s. Most of the rest of the country will see nice weather, too: clear and 45 degrees in St. Louis; partly cloudy and 73 in Tampa; 39 in Denver. Christmas…
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Photo of the Day
After the Confederate victory in Missouri at Wilson’s Creek, local farmer Mary Phelps heard that Confederate soldiers intended to remove the heart of the fallen Union commander, Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon, and preserve it as a war trophy. The New York Times tells the story: ‘Learning of…
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Photo of the Day
A letter from the California gold fields of 1850. “Dear George, I have passed through so many scenes and changes of condition that I scarcely know what to write. We arrived in the Sacramento Valley in the rainy season. Rain and mud was everywhere. Get full access to History in Pictures at...
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Photo of the Day
These are the main stories reported in the New York Times on November 29, 1941. Background. … The Japanese strike force left Japan for Pearl Harbor on November 26. … Also on November 26, the US Secretary of State delivered a note to Japan’s Washington negotiators stating that peace with the US...
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Photo of the Day
It’s Thanksgiving Day, 1941. The weather is unseasonably warm all across the country: 62 degrees in New York; 60 in Los Angeles; 56 in Phoenix; 36 in Minneapolis. The short-skirted baton-twirlers in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade will introduce Macy’s newest balloon, a seventy-five-foot-tall...
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Photo of the Day
‘By resuming the exchanges, thousands of rugged, strong men [well cared for in the North’s camps] would be sent into the armies of the South… … and no equivalent would be received in the broken-down, emaciated wrecks of humanity that would be sent home from the pens at Andersonville [and other...
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Photo of the Day
It isn’t much to look at: short, stubby, and somewhat difficult to grow. But this little tree is a survivor. When glaciers covered most of the continent during the last Ice Age, a few of these trees survived in sheltered micro-habitats along the continent’s southeast coast. In 1765, King George...
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Photo of the Day
Japan’s emissaries did not meet with Secretary of State Hull today, as was expected, but instead spent the day in internal meetings at their Washington embassy. The emissaries had presented new Tokyo proposals to Secretary Hull yesterday. Difficulties which then arose seem to be the cause of...
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Photo of the Day
Citing the ‘collapse of Russia,’ an ally, and battlefield setbacks in Italy, the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, has called on the US to ‘send as many troops to Europe as possible as early as possible.’ He also urged the rapid completion of promised US shipbuilding and the training and...
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Photo of the Day
It was ten minutes past noon on the 18th when Lincoln boarded the train. With him were his valet, his secretary, an official escort from the Quartermaster’s office, and some invited guests. The six-hour train ride to Gettysburg took Lincoln through small Pennsylvania towns. He used the trip to…
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Photo of the Day
Germany has rejected the offer of Belgium and the Netherlands to mediate a peaceful end to the European war, claiming Britain has already rejected the offer. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and King Leopold III of Belgium, both neutrals, had tendered their offer of mediation to Germany…
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Photo of the Day
The British Foreign Minister has informed the Lincoln Administration of a plot devised by Confederate asylum-seekers in Canada to seize a Lake Erie steamship and rescue Confederate officers now imprisoned on Johnson’s Island, in Sandusky Bay, Ohio. Two thousand rebels are imprisoned there and…
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Photo of the Day
A State Department spokesman announced overnight that Germany has signed the armistice and hostilities will cease this morning at 11:00 AM Paris time. The German Army has refused the pleas of the German Emperor, sometimes called “Kaiser Bill,” to support the continuation of his reign. The Kaiser...
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Photo of the Day
President Roosevelt has announced the arrival of an American military force on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Vichy French territories in North Africa in what has been called ‘the largest single American offensive action in history.’ The offensive’s purpose, Roosevelt said, is to deny…
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Photo of the Day
A Union officer formerly held prisoner in the Confederates’ Libby Prison in Richmond has written a letter to the newspaper’s editor describing the miseries suffered by the hundreds of Union prisoners there. ‘The three rooms on the upper floor contain at least two hundred Union soldiers each. Four...
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Photo of the Day
Some long-ago words from Walt Whitman: “From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently,but with undeniable will,...
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Photo of the Day
French and British troops have arrived in Italy from the Western Front to bolster the Italian army after its blistering defeat in Caporetto cut its troop strength in half. While the German advance into northeastern Italy is said to have been checked, Berlin reports the capture of 200,000 Italian...
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Photo of the Day
The destroyer USS Reuben James has been torpedoed and sunk near Iceland while on convoy duty, becoming the first US Navy vessel lost in the war. U-boats have targeted two other American warships in the same area recently, with one evading attack and the other sustaining damage. While British...
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Photo of the Day
Enough rain has fallen to permit Union engineers to construct a pontoon bridge of seventy-five boats across the swollen Potomac River near Berlin, Virginia. For the past several days, the Army of the Potomac has been marching across this bridge from Maryland into Virginia, where General Lee’s...
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Photo of the Day
On the Western Front, a combined force of French and Belgian troops has achieved a tactical success in Flanders, a region of northern Belgium. There, they captured the strategic Merckem Peninsula, a swampy area near the town of Ypres which is marked by streams and canals. [Ed: The fight in this...
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Photo of the Day
Even as the stock market surged in the 1920s, with stock prices more than quadrupling in value, an economic depression was beginning to take hold on American farms, affecting more than thirty per cent of the US population. The robust prosperity of American farms during the 1910s had been capped…
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Photo of the Day
As cold rains fall, one million French and British troops stand behind France’s Maginot Line and one million German troops stand opposite them behind Germany’s Westwall. Though the distance between them is just a few miles, there is little military activity aside from small skirmishes. While…
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Photo of the Day
It came at the end of a three-month lecture tour across Canada and the US. Nearly everyone Churchill had met on the tour was invested in the stock market. “The housemaid who makes your bed is a stockholder on margin. Workmen of every class, brain or hand, the chauffeur, the tram conductor, the...
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Photo of the Day
Two men taken prisoner in Northern Virginia confessed to Union officers that they had just returned from Richmond, where they had taken a large group of locally-owned enslaved people to prevent losing them under the Emancipation Act. 'By January 1st next year, there will be no Negroes left in…
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Photo of the Day
History offers some clues. In 1979, the 5th Avenue department store, Bonwit Teller, closed down and Trump purchased the property. He wanted to build his flagship Trump Tower on the site. But he needed to rush the demolition of the building to avoid paying real estate taxes on it. The Bonwit…
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Photo of the Day
Heavy gun duels between French and German artillery units have broken out northeast of Ypres, Belgium, and along the banks of the Meuse River, near Verdun. Poor weather has limited aerial activity and there have been no recent infantry engagements. Two German cruisers attacked a neutral...
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Photo of the Day
100,000 German infantrymen have advanced on forward French outposts along a twenty-mile line at the Western Front. While they succeeded in pushing some French troops from German territory, they suffered heavy losses as they approached the main French defenses. German bombers have staged two more...
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Photo of the Day
An example. When Billie Burke portrayed Glinda, the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, she was fifty-four years old. She was in her 36th year as a professional actress. Billie’s career had begun on the London stage in 1903, when she was nineteen. By 1916, she was the highest paid actor in Hollywood....
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Photo of the Day
Major General J.E.B. Stuart and a Confederate force of 1,800 cavalrymen have raided towns and supply depots along a 125-mile track through Pennsylvania and Maryland, successfully avoiding confrontations with thousands of Federal troops encamped there. Stuart’s raiders traveled in a circuit around...
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Photo of the Day
This old man, photographed in the early 1920s, is hauling a wheelbarrow full of mutilated currency to the ‘death chamber’ at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, where it will be destroyed. The photo caption says he has been doing this work for fifty years. If this is correct, then...
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Photo of the Day
Fifty-two years before Trump and the others signed the Sharm El-Sheikh agreement, the four warring parties in Vietnam — the US, North and South Vietnam, and the Viet Cong — signed the Paris Peace Accords. Each agreement, in their time, was hailed across the globe. In the US, the 1973 agreement...
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Photo of the Day
As seasoned German soldiers, fresh from the Polish battlefield, replace reservists along the German defensive Western Wall, Hitler reiterated his claim that Western powers were fomenting a war in which the ‘invulnerable Reich’ and German peoples of Europe would stand united. The Western Powers…
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Photo of the Day
In a fierce two-day battle, Union forces under General Rosecrans have defeated a rebel army seeking to regain control of Corinth, Mississippi, a vital rail hub used to supply Union armies in the Western theater. During the first day of the fight, the rebel force penetrated the Union defensive…
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Photo of the Day
Pay a dime and come inside the tent. It’s your fantasy come true. Beautiful girls wink and tease. And you feel like such a man. That was the pitch at the 1941 Vermont State Fair’s Girlie Show. And they did a good business. Who doesn’t like what that carnival barker is selling? The mistake we make...
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Photo of the Day
In March 1924, nineteen-year-old Madeline Blair, a prostitute who worked the streets of Manhattan under the name “Blackie,” befriended a group of sailors from the USS Arizona who were in town on shore leave. Blackie told the sailors she dreamed of going to California and making it big in the...
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Photo of the Day
Hitler is said to be drafting an address to the Reichstag in which he will propose a ninety-day truce with Britain to negotiate terms for a permanent peace. Should the British reject any such offer, it is expected that the war on the Western Front will escalate immediately. David Lloyd George…
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Photo of the Day
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, John Burns volunteered for service in the Union Army. He was a combat veteran of the War of 1812 and claimed to have also served in 1846 during the Mexican-American War. But he was almost 69, so the the Army rejected him. But when the war came to his hometown...
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Photo of the Day
President Lincoln arrived in Harper’s Ferry by special train from Washington yesterday. After reviewing Federal troops, Lincoln visited the ruined railroad bridge and federal buildings destroyed three weeks ago by General Stonewall Jackson’s Confederate forces. The fight at Harper’s Ferry opened...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does This Week's Best Old Photos have?
This Week's Best Old Photos currently has 50 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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Because pictures tell a story better than words. look.substack.com
How often does This Week's Best Old Photos release new episodes?
This Week's Best Old Photos has 50 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Who hosts This Week's Best Old Photos?
This Week's Best Old Photos is created and hosted by Brenda Elthon.
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