Gapers Block published from April 22, 2003 to Jan. 1, 2016. The site will remain up in archive form. Please visit Third Coast Review, a new site by several GB alumni.
✶ Thank you for your readership and contributions. ✶
Thursday, April 25
American Environmental Photographs, 1891-1936 is a digital collection of nearly "4,500 photographs documenting natural environments, ecologies, and plant communities in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century." The images, which range from ecological settings, individual plants and natural landscapes, are from the Department of Special Collections at the University of Chicago Library. You may search or browse the collections by subject or geographic area. The collection includes more than 700 photos documenting Illinois, and, as is often the case with old photographs, you get the eerie feeling you are looking at natural environments that no longer exist.