Follow Friday – Shorpy.com is my pick today.

Shorpy.com – History in HD is a vintage photo blog I love. It features thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s, available for download. Most of the photographs presented on the website date to the early twentieth century.

The blog is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a child laborer who worked as a greaser in an Alabama coal mine. His portrait is Shorpy.com’s logo. Higginbotham was killed in a mining accident in 1928.

Former newspaper editors Dave Hall and Ken Booth run the site. They note, “Most of the photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs, 20 to 200 megabytes in size) from the Library of Congress research archives.” Other photographs come from a variety of sources, including National Archives. 

In addition to Shorpy’s selections from his own and the Library of Congress collections, there’s also a Member Gallery section where you can upload photos of your own. I uploaded photograph of my grandmother in a Chicago sweatshop, c. 1912. It’s one of my prized possessions.

If you’re looking for visual representations of particular times and places, Shorpy is definitely worth checking out.