Musical accompaniment: Elvis Presley, Stranger in the Crowd

 

I usually feel uneasy in big crowds though sometimes–like New Year’s Eve–it’s exciting to be part of one!

While I might find crowds to be intimidating, pictures of groups of people are usually fascinating. In old pictures, you can discern some things about a person we have no other way of knowing. How tall they are, how they interact with others… Everyone in the picture came to be there by a unique series of events and usually there isn’t one uniform emotion on their faces.

Group of people sitting on a stack of logs at the Grandview farm. The barn is in the background. Harry S. Truman at the extreme left and Mary Jane Truman is seated in the middle. The rest are unidentified.

A daffodil party in New York City in 1909. Has anyone heard of a daffodil party before?

Franklin D. Roosevelt with other unidentified people in Hyde Park, 1900.

1920 group portrait by Jessie Tarbox Beals of friends in her Fifth Avenue studio.

At present, I don’t have more information on this one but I plan to look! For now, we know it originally came from Bain News Service and is called “Crowd awaiting kidnappers trial.” It’s dated December 14, 1910.

This next one, also from Bain News Service, is called “Crowd outside prison, penitentiary outbreak.” The photograph is undated.

Just hours left in 2024! If you set New Year’s resolutions, did you achieve them this year?