This picture preserves a moment few cameras ever caught — Foxy Boxing: Here are some women boxing on a roof in 1938. Made in 1938, it is the kind of image that turns a date in a history book into something you can actually see.
The 1930s were shadowed by the Great Depression, which put a quarter of American workers out of a job at its worst point. Yet the same decade produced streamlined trains, record-setting aircraft, grand public works, and a flood of documentary photography as magazines like LIFE sent cameras into everyday America.
Pictures of ordinary life are some of the most valuable historical documents we have. Grand events were always going to be recorded, but a normal day — how people worked, dressed, shopped, and passed the time — survives only when someone happened to point a camera at it.
