Pictorial Essay Reflects Simpler Times In America

In a poignant reminder of a simpler time in America, when the pace of events was slower and the electronic world of video games, cell phones, and obsessing on the Internet was still well in the future, the Daily Mail has a short pictorial essay depicting children from the first half the 20th century. The pictures were culled from the archives of National Geographic magazine.

The pictures include:

Two boys gazing at a billboard announcing the arrival of the circus in town;

Seven children from a family in Quebec sitting on a wooden fence in the 1930’s;

Four West Virginia boys bobbing for apples in 1939;

Five very young children walking arm-in-arm down a dusty road next to a cornfield in 1919;

Four young Pennsylvania Amish children sitting on a fence in 1941;

Two children holding a puppy while sitting on an old split rail fence in Missouri in 1946;

A mother in Quebec laboring while carrying a milk pail on her shoulders while her children lead a horse in 1950.

Simpler times.