Small Town Noir is dedicated to recovering the life stories behind mug shots from the vanished golden age of one American town. The mug shots on this site were all taken in New Castle, Pennsylvania, between 1930 and 1959, and were rescued from the trash when the town’s police department threw them out.

The information that has been used to reconstruct the stories behind the pictures comes mostly from old copies of the local paper, the New Castle News.

Vintage Ad Browser was created in 2009, and released in 2010, by Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped fame. The site aims to collect vintage ads from a variety of sources, including comic books, CD-Roms, websites, APIs, your submissions, book, magazine and comic book scans, and more.

Ate the moment, Vintage Ad Browser features a browsable and searchable gallery of 123,286 ads.

The most interesting way to study the American Civil War, is to watch the war unfold on the pages of original Harper’s Weekly Newspapers. Harper’s Weekly was the most popular newspaper during the Civil War, and it featured stunning illustrations, and in depth stories on all the important people and events of the war.

The American Civil War Newspapers is a work in progress. Presently 1861 through 1864 are completed, and the 1865 issues through May are complete.

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Portraits of native Americans from the New York Public Library’s collection. From photographers van de Passe, Catlin, Bodmer, Curtis, Moon, and Rinehart.

Pop culture is finally hitting the eject button on the VHS tape, the once-ubiquitous home-video format that will finish this month as a creaky ghost of Christmas past.

After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

“It’s dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt,” said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. “I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I’m done. Anything left in warehouse we’ll just give away or throw

Obama: The College Years

The watercolors that John White produced in 1585 gave England its first startling glimpse of America.

John White wasn’t the most exacting painter that 16th-century England had to offer, or so his watercolors of the New World suggest. His diamondback terrapin has six toes instead of five; one of his native women, the wife of a powerful chief, has two right feet; his study of a scorpion looks cramped and rushed. In historical context, though, these quibbles seem unimportant: no Englishman had ever painted America before. White was burdened with unveiling a whole new realm. More

The words “Last picture taken” before his or her death conjure up many emotions, whether in front of the camera or behind it. This list consists of 10 last time stamps in history taken of and by some fascinating individuals. Link

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Miss Frank E. Buttolph collected thousands of banquet menus between 1851 and 1930. Now, they’re online, thanks to the New York Public Library. Link