Peep at These Fantastic Vintage City Panoramas

Britain's Daily Mail introduces us to a fantastic digital archive of vintage city panoramas housed at the Library of Congress. About a quarter of the roughly four thousand images in the collection are devoted to cityscapes — incredibly wide sweeps of downtown areas trapped in time circa one hundred years ago. Good luck getting anything done this next hour. (For enlarged images, click through the call numbers below each image.)

Some of the images are stunning simply as classic looks at a familiar place. Others have clear historical value as glimpses into the ongoing process of urban development — like this series of panoramas of Duluth, Minnesota, from 1870 to 1913. Still others document cities at their most vulnerable points: Chicago during the great fire of 1871, for instance, or San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906.