Home for Public Domain Photographs. Free for private and commercial use.
“After midnight, the moon set, and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the esthetic appeal of flying.”- Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart came down in history the first female aviator who flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
From the antiquity of Greek myths such as the legend of Icarus to flying machines of Leonardo da Vinci, people constantly dreamed of ways to reach the clouds. Their dreams first came true on 4 June 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers showed the public their hot air balloon for the first time. That was the beginning of balloonomania.
“The term balloon is not only in the mouth of every one, but all our world seems to be in the clouds,” — the book “London Unmask’d”, 1785
See the whole collection on Picryl: https://picryl.com/collections/hot-air-baloons-history-images
The whole collection is here: https://picryl.com/collections/b-17-flying-fortress
Mighty Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress In WWII – Amazing Picture Collection
Views of Victorian London taken from the Picryl’s collection: https://picryl.com/collections/victorian-times-london-photographs
Las Vegas. Interesting video on Vegas history.
Block books, also called xylographica, are short books of up to 50 leaves, block printed in Europe in the second half of the 15th century as woodcuts with blocks carved to include both text and illustrations. The content of the books was nearly always religious, aimed at a popular audience, and a few titles were often reprinted in several editions using new woodcuts.
Although many had believed that block books preceded Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the first part of the 1450s, it now is accepted that most of the surviving block books were printed in the 1460s or later, and that the earliest surviving examples may date to about 1451.They seem to have functioned as a cheap popular alternative to the typeset book, which was still very expensive at this stage. Single-leaf woodcuts from the preceding decades often included passages of text with prayers, indulgences and other material; the block book was an extension of this form. Block books are very rare, some editions surviving only in fragments, and many probably not surviving at all.
Public Domain Photos 