(Australian Rules) Melbourne football Team, 1902. “The team members are wearing lace-up football Guernseys.”

“Australian Rules football was invented in Melbourne in the 1850s and codified in 1859, making it the oldest code of football in the world. Although the Wurundjeri people of the Melbourne area played a similar game called marn-grook, Australian Rules football was first played amongst Melbourne’s private schools (Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar School) as a way of keeping the cricket players fit through the winter.”

(via Museum Victoria )

petit-poids:

Artoria Gibbons

Artoria was a tattoo attraction that worked for 35 years in circus and carnival sideshows. Artoria was the stage name for Mrs. C. W. (Red) Gibbons.

Artoria was born on a farm in upper Wisconsin. Her parents were poor and by the age of 14 she decided to leave home. When she was interviewed by Arthur Lewis, writer and author of the book, Carnival, she said: I never been no place in my life. While hanging around a local carnival sideshow she met Red Gibbons. Him and me got to talking, tole me the show didn’t have no tattooed lady and would I like to be one. Said he was the tattoo artist and if I let him tattoo me I could join the show and see the world. Well that’s what I done. We was married soon after that and we both had a good life. There ain’t hardly no place in the country I ain’t been to but when he died (late 1940’s) I went into retirement out on the west coast. 

Artoria’s tattoos were amazing: magnificent reproductions of paintings by Raphael and Michelangelo and a few patriotic designs but for those few exceptions the main inspiration is Italian. My husband done everyone of them, she said proudly. They’re all masterpieces. He was crazy ‘bout eyetalian (sic) painters. 

firsttimeuser:

“Sinful Berlin - The Twenties: Sex, noise, doom,” (book title)

“Sündiges Berlin - Die zwanziger Jahre: Sex, Rausch, Untergang”

Interior of Flett and Sons, Bridge Street, Kirkwall

(via Orkney Archive - get dusty: Don’t You Sometimes Wish That Shops Still Looked Like This?)

warbyparker:

The U.S. Forest Service’s 1946 safety flyer “What To Do When Lost In The Woods” unintentionally offers general words of wisdom for times of trouble: “Don’t yell, don’t run, don’t worry, and above all, don’t quit.”

willigula:

Motor Boating magazine, 1916

gosh!

blackandwtf:

In 1936, Post Office rules stated that game, including rabbits, could be posted with nothing but a neck label as long as ‘no liquid is likely to exude’. 

(via kateoplis)

fallingandlaughing:

A novel strategy by Pears’ Soap: tell your potential customers what hideous monsters they are! Found in an 1892 issue of The Idler.

beatonna:

Yesterday’s Papers is a pretty great collection of items from newspapers past.  I picked this image to represent it because it is more hilarious than all the others.

questionableadvice:

~ The Young Man’s Guide, by William Alcott, 1846

note to self: start using “I would as soon take a companion from the streets” as an exclamation of disgust.

p.s. attn: lazy-hoor, being-here, etc.

amoderndandy:

jaynajaynajayna:

When Joseph-Nicephore Niepce took the first photograph in 1828, his photographic plate required an exposure of eight hours. That exposure time was drastically reduced across the course of the nineteenth century, so that by the 1890s the Collodion process had cut exposure times to two or three seconds.

Nevertheless, a three second exposure meant that subjects had to stand very still to avoid being blurred, and holding a smile for that period was tricky. As a result, we have a tendency to see our Victorian ancestors as even more formal and stern than they might have been.

These pictures are drawn from the Flickr group “The Smiling Victorian” and show a perhaps surprising side to the people who’s “now” was a hundred years before our own.

This reminds me of a B.A. thesis a friend of mine is currently writing on the “Invention” of Victorianism by Modernist writers in the early 20th century.

willigula:

“Shipwrecked sailors attacked by man-eating sharks” - illustration from Sea and Land: An Illustrated History by JW Buel, 1887

xostitches:

Mermaids! 
from Peter Pan (1924, dir. Herbert Brenon)

(Source: oldhollywood)

fallingandlaughing:

From Dictionary of American Slang, 1960, more on which soon.

thewidowflannigan:

…. swoon!

ivynoelle:

Frances Benjamin Johnston, Self Portrait (c. 1895)

“[Johnston] presents herself with beer mug in one hand, cigarette in the other, and skirt scandalously hiked up above the ankles. On one of her fingers are several rings from male suitors she had rejected.” (Martin W. Sandler, Against the Odds: Women  Pioneers in the First Hundred Years of Photography)

Badass of the day: Frances Benjamin (muthafuckin’) Johnston.

i’m hoping the row of photos on the mantlepiece are a sort of gallery of spurned suitors.