Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

Clara Cannucciari, the 94-year-old star of Great Depression Cooking with Clara, cooks pizza, one of her favorite foods. Clara likes her pizza pretty simple, the way her mother made it, without “all this fancy stuff that they put in now, we couldn’t afford that, but we were happy with the plain pizza.”

I love Clara, the Italian-American grandma we all had or should have had!

The U.S. National Archives has joined the Flickr Commons. I love the National Archives collection — it was one of the first significant digital collections I discovered online, and I remember how thrilling it was to be able to explore it. I still spend a lot of time on their site, but I’m happy to see them start putting their collections on Flickr, where even more people are likely to find them, and will get busy adding tags, comments, and more information. (They’ve already done a lot!)

The National Archives already has over 3,500 photographs on Flickr; my favorite so far is the one above. Here’s the original title and caption:

Top Women” at U.S. Steel’s Gary, Indiana, Works, 1940-1945
Like Girls from Mars Are These “Top Women” at U.S. Steel’s Gary, Indiana, Works. Their Job Is to Clean Up at Regular Intervals Around The Tops of Twelve Blast Furnaces. As A Safety Precaution, the Girls Wear Oxygen Masks. 1940 – 1945

Links

• National Archives and Records Administration — Official website
• The U.S. National Archives — Flickr photostream
• The U.S. National Archives joins the Commons! — Announcement on the Flickr Blog

A great vintage winter sports shot of a well-dressed bobsleigh team from the Flickr Commons collection of Nationaal Archief, the National Archive of the Netherlands. I think this looks like a still from a screwball comedy film from the 1930s.

“Bobsleigh. Team members of the five men sleigh keeping the sled in balance. Location unknown, 1931.”