Rare historical photographs…

Over at the fascinating slightlywarped.com you can find three incredible pages devoted to “rare” historical photographs…oddball pieces that surprise, delight, and amaze:

http://slightlywarped.com/crapfactory/curiosities/2013/march/rare_historical_photos.htm

In this, the first webpage, I found the following photograph the most fascinating:

Yes, that’s Fidel Castro standing before the Lincoln Memorial after laying a wreath!  Though I knew of his trips to the United States both before and after the Cuban Revolution, this image is so very…odd.

The second page can be found here:

http://slightlywarped.com/crapfactory/curiosities/2013/august/even_more_rare_historical_pictures.htm

Of this group, my favorite has to be:

According to the website, this is a photograph taken in 1893 of three Princeton students after a Freshman/Sophomore snowball fight!  Guess the snowball fight became somewhat…intense.

There is a second photograph in this grouping, however, that I simply have to show:

Believe it or not, that’s a photograph taken in 1894 of Mark Twain in Nikolai Tesla’s lab…with, I’m assuming, Mr. Tesla looking on!  Seems like something you’d see in a steampunk movie.

Finally, we have this, the last of the three pages:

http://slightlywarped.com/crapfactory/curiosities/2013/may/hidden_rare_historical_photos.htm

Of these, easily my favorite photograph, and one I had seen before, is this:

This photograph, taken in 1885, shows the Statue of Liberty nearly completed…while sitting in the middle of Paris.  Sometimes its easy to forget this extraordinary statue was a gift from the French and was constructed over there before being brought over to New York.

As I said before, fascinating, fascinating stuff.