American History as China's Prologue

China's rapid industrialization, while remarkable, is hardly new - and I'm far from the first to realize this. It's sometimes easy to forget that the US was a third world country only a century ago. Check out some of these photos from the US Library of Congress. From Core77 (a design blog I follow):

The Library of Congress is now sharing 1,600 color images from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and about 1,500 images from the George Grantham Bain News Service on Flickr! These particular photos have been extremely popular with visitors of the Library, are available at high resolutions, and have no known restrictions on publication or distribution.

It's nearly impossible not to see at least some similarities in comparing Chinese industrialization to American industrialization.