Balloon weddings were once all the rage. When flight was a novelty in the 19th century, these “destination weddings” became quite the spectacle.
The Sept. 27, 1888 wedding of Margaret Buckley and Edward T. Davis drew an estimated 40,000 people, who watched as the couple took to the air after their ceremony at the Rhode Island State Fair.
Their honeymoon-by-sky hit a snag, though, when the balloon landed in a swamp that evening. The passengers had to cling to the ropes above the basket to stay out of the water—and decided to finish the trip by train.
Later, the couple reenacted their wedding for a photographer in a studio, which is how we have this photo in our National Air and Space Museum.
This pastry princess—check out that crown!—is from the Sally L. Steinberg Collection of Doughnut Ephemera in our National Museum of American History’s Archives Center. (Steinberg also considered herself a doughnut princess, as her grandfather Adolph Levitt was America’s original “doughnut king,” having developed the automatic doughnut making machine and founded the modern American doughnut industry.)
Panoramic images from the 1906 World Series, October 9-14. The series pit the two Chicago teams—the Cubs vs. the White Sox—against one another. It was each team’s first appearance at the World Series, with the White Sox taking the big win.
Courtesy of Digital Commonwealth and the Boston Public Library.
Up until the 1970s, color photography was rare. Thus, our vision of history is so often in black and white only. Rare colorized historical photos are our only chance at seeing what the world really looked like…and, boy, was it spectacular.
Municipal Theatre, Odessa, Ukraine. Silver gelatin print, taken from a photo album kept by an unknown person with photographs of sights in Odessa, Ukraine. ca. 1900-1910. Collections of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
