A century ago, photographers captured a world that looked surprisingly like ours in chaos, but infinitely more formal on camera. A recent photo essay on Kuriositas assembles genuinely dated images from 1926 — mostly drawn from Flickr's The Commons and Wikimedia Commons — to show what ordinary life looked like exactly one hundred years ago. For anyone who loves the kind of travel where you dig into a place's past, it's a fascinating time capsule.
The collection opens in Britain with aviation pioneer CD Barnard fitting flight goggles onto his dog, in a publicity shot for the new London Aviation Club, which aimed to make flying lessons accessible to regular people rather than just the wealthy and the military.
The United States provides most of the human stories. In January, Clement Whirlwind Soldier — a Brulé Lakota from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota and grandson of Chief Spotted Tail — became the first Native American to serve on the Washington DC police force, just two years after the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. The same month, the Seattle Times reported the Charleston craze had reached the cavalry: dancer Dorothea Richmond, formerly of New York's Folies, taught the dance to George, an artillery horse at Fort Lawton, as a publicity stunt for her lessons at the Cinderella.
February brought the Charleston to sport, when instructor Vivian Marinelli put the Washington Palace Club basketball team through dance drills for publicity. Team manager and star player Ray Kennedy, who topped 216 points that season, embodied an era before coaches and front offices existed.
The most travel-relevant images come from Miami. On 6 February 1926, four young women posed on the roof of the Southern Bell Telephone building. Miami's population had exploded from about 30,000 in 1920 to over 100,000 by 1926, driven by the speculative Florida Land Boom, and switchboard operators were in constant demand. The job came with a catch: marriage bars meant women were expected to resign once they wed. Within months, the September 1926 hurricane would devastate the city, kill hundreds and collapse the land boom — pushing Florida into hard years before the rest of the country followed into the Great Depression.
Why should a traveller care? Because 1926 is the year that made modern Florida — and broke it. Walking Miami's Art Deco districts or Reading Florida's boom-era hotels, you're looking at the architectural hangover of exactly this moment. And the photo essay itself is a masterclass in a niche travel skill: digging through public archives like Flickr Commons to trace a destination's history before you visit. Even the details ring true to the era — posed photographs were the norm because each shot cost real money, a world away from today's endless camera rolls.
Kuriositas
