This weeks
Sepia Saturday photo was taken at the
Potsdam Conference in 1945. These were the men, the small group of men, who made decisions that would affect the lives of the rest of the world. This is as it always will be. There will always be one group in control while the rest of us get on with our lives.
The photos below were taken long before the Potsdam Conference. These photos were taken long before World War I. But these men, their lives, were still shaped by what happened far from their prairie homes. The decisions made by the ruling class had consequences which directly affected them.
Click on either image to see it larger.
Two men from Nebraska, their photos faded to being merely ghost images, are long forgotten, just as what happened at Potsdam is forgotten. And yet these men are just as much part of our history as the small group of men who made the decisions for the world. All of them gone now, all of them ghosts from the past. But only a handful of men made an indelible mark that the rest of the world remembers. These Nebraska farmers had a much smaller sphere of influence and may not be remembered by anyone.
This week I have I have been featuring photos from an old album that once belonged to Gertrude Helen Rich Bowen. Perhaps you remember past posts about Gertrude the schoolteacher from Nebraska. If not you can see other posts that featured Gertrude by clicking on her name in the labels section.
To see the other posts from the album:
the Rich family, a photo so faded that I had no idea there were so many people in it until I brought it back to life,
the
family home on the Nebraska prairie,
the
barn with the work horses,
and the
children of the prairie.
Over the coming days there will be more images from this album.