I have been spending the last few days steeped in history, reading Wyoming newspapers that are over 125 years old. They've been put online as part of the terrific Wyoming Newspapers Project.

So I was in a historical frame of mind when I stumbled across the North Carolina State Archives' Flickr page at  http://www.flickr.com/photos/north-carolina-state-archives/. It looks like the Archives have been uploading photos here for just over a year; there are over 1700 images available at the moment. I found photographs as recent as the 1970s and as early as around 1900.

Flickr allows users to create "Sets"; groups of photographs around one particular topic. the NC State Archives' sets include tobacco farming (48 photographs), historical images of Raleigh (about 100 photographs), and NC furniture manufacturing (85 photos.) And, hey, this is North Carolina, so there are also sets for barbecue, the Wright Brothers, and O. Henry.

You can also do a keyword search if you like. Strangely I did not get any results for Hazel (as in Hurricane Hazel) but hurricane brought me 21 results, with images mostly from Hurricane Donna and Hurricane Connie. Searching for fire found 11 results, including a dramatic photo of an electrical pole ablaze and some cool old fire trucks.

Unfortunately many of the image titles aren't very useful ("PhC8_827") so pay attention to the image tags on the right side of the Flickr screen if you want to find similar photographs. I found browsing through tags a little more useful than trying to come up with my own keywords, but properly browsing and appreciating this site will take several hours, I think.