Like pieces of amber that showcase prehistoric organisms, tens of thousands of glass-plate negatives from the defunct Chicago Daily News serve as glimpses into a lost world:
 
• It’s July 1915, and rescuers scramble onto the hull of the capsized excursion boat Eastland as hundreds of passengers lie drowned within.
 
• Crowds of fans perch on rooftop bleachers to watch their beloved Cubs – in 1908, outside the baseball team’s earlier home, West Side Grounds.
 
• A nattily dressed Al Capone confers with a slick-looking attorney in 1929, but his swagger won’t last. A mere two years later, the mob boss would be convicted of federal income-tax evasion and imprisoned.
 
These are among the crisp black-and-white images that have been resurrected for “Chicago Under Glass: Early Photographs From the Chicago Daily News.”  The Chicago History Museum, which owns the newspaper’s vintage photo archive, commissioned local authors Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan to comb through 57,000 surviving images spanning 1900 to 1930.
 
The 250 photographs they chose for their resulting volume depict a gritty burg evolving through cultural upheavals and technological advances. Some of the buildings and vistas look vaguely familiar today, but the fashions and hairstyles surely don’t.
 
“We haven’t been exposed to that many pictures from this era,” Cahan said. “This is kind of an unknown period – I know that sounds funny – but also really the beginning of the modern age because of the car.”
 
The characters who populate these antique Chicago landscapes include politicians and activists, captains of industry and anarchists, deviants, immigrants and national celebrities.
 
In one 1929 shot, silent screen actress and Chicago native Gloria Swanson visits her second-grade classroom on the Northwest Side. Pilot Charles Lindbergh, still swimming in the triumph of making the first trans-Atlantic flight, appears before a packed Comiskey Park in 1927.
 
Not all of the images are pretty, and some seem downright grotesque today. In a 1908 photo, a police captain poses with the corpse of a Russian immigrant who allegedly attacked a city official. A bizarre 1905 tableau depicts a wealthy society dame smiling down on a legless child at a charity event.
 
“A lot of these pictures seem kind of foreign, even alien, to our lives today,” Jacob, a Chicago Tribune editor, said. “In another way, there are all these echoes of today -- or today is an echo of back then. For example, all the people being labeled anarchists … if you just take the word anarchy out and put ‘terrorist,’ it really kind of sounds familiar today.”
 
The venerable Daily News, which operated for a century before closing in 1978, is perhaps best remembered for being home to “Front Page” co-author Ben Hecht and, later, columnist Mike Royko. But at the dawn of the 20th century, it also was on the vanguard of photojournalism, sending photographers out with bulky cameras and glass negatives to document events.
 
Even with the crude “point and shoot” methods of the era, the newsmen yielded some surprisingly compelling compositions. Still, as Cahan and Jacob point out, it took time for Daily News editors to appreciate the medium. The paper buried photos inside when it presented front-page coverage of the Eastland maritime disaster on the Chicago River. Fourteen years later, when Capone’s gang perpetrated the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, images about the story were splashed onto Page 1.
 
The newspaper donated its glass plates to the history museum in 1960, and the images burned into them were reproduced for a digital archive in the late 1990s. Cahan and Jacob painstakingly researched their favorite photos, many of which never actually made the newspaper.
 
The pithy captions they produced for "Chicago Under Glass" offer fascinating anecdotes. For example: The mental hospital outside the Cubs’ early stadium may have inspired the phrase “out of left field.”
 
“I think we really write history books, but we camouflage them with lots of pictures,” Cahan said.
 
 
 
Mike Ramsey can be reached at (312) 857-2323 or ghns-ramsey@sbcglobal.net <mailto:ghns-ramsey@sbcglobal.net> .