Born into a wealthy, Russian-speaking family that settled in Berlin after the Bolshevik Revolution, the photographer Roman Vishniac traveled extensively in Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, photographing pious and impoverished Jews. The images he created, which were widely distributed in the postwar period, shaped popular perceptions of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. He came to America in 1940 and after the war worked extensively in photomicroscopy, building on his earlier training in biology, zoology, and endocrinology.
When the Dodge Brothers expanded into full-scale automobile manufacturing on a new campus in Hamtramck, Michigan, in 1910, Albert Kahn designed some of the buildings in what was then a state-of-the…
Henriette de Lemos Herz (1764–1847) was a Berlin salon hostess famed for her beauty and literary engagement. She was highly educated, especially in ancient and modern languages. Following her marriage…
A sick woman in a squalid rear tenement, so wretched and so pitiful that, in all the years since, I have not seen anything more appealing, determined me, within half an hour, to live on the East…