Here's a precursor to the Seinfeld episode in which George converts to Latvian Orthodox:

Latvian Orthodox Father: Is there one aspect of the faith that you find particularly attractive?

George: I think the hats. The hats convey that solemn religious look you want in a faith.  Very pious.

The Clothes of Religion by Wilfrid Philip Ward, 1886.

From the 1959 Ole Miss yearbook.

You've heard of Drinking in Remembrance of the Dead, but what if the dead are drinking in remembrance of you?  From Nebelspalter, 1913.

Fortune cookie messages.  From The Link, 1954.

From Cine-Mundial, 1935.

What a lie that we have equal work and play time.  The typical 8 to 5 workday is 9 hours, and that doesn't include time to get ready or commute.  Nor does it acknowledge that some (many) people need more than 8 hours of sleep.  It's all an ugly lie.  Also, if every day is a giant pie, no wonder so many folks stuggle with weight management.  From The Business of Life by A. B. ZuTavern and A. E. Bullock and illustrated by Leo Thiele, 1936.

From Swarthmore's 1932 yearbook.

A cat deity looms over a goat, as if to illustrate advice for brightening up a party.  From Spellbound, 1976.  (Courtesy of Archive.org.)

"And there is more to be and no longer time to play."  From Washington College's 1969 yearbook.

From Cine-Mundial, 1935.

From Colorado College's 1907 yearbook.

From L'Assiette au Beurre, 1912.

The soul carries a paddle, apparently.  From Saint Leo's 1972 yearbook.  Whether for payback or peace of mind, see How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

From Lustige Blätter, 1919.

We only partially follow the caption to this photo, with its Timothy Leary-esque language (even after having read all of Leary's books).  From Worcester Polytechnic's 1971 yearbook.

Though L. Frank Baum himself said that he derived the wizardly name Oz from a filing cabinet labeled "O-Z," we know that the letters M and N are at the middle of the alphabet, not O.  The secret answer is that just beyond the corner of Dorothy's Kansas lie the Ozark mountains, and the arc of the "Oz ark" is a rainbow.

From Fliegende Blätter, 1847.

We analyzed this photo with our custom Uncanny Detector app, and though the figure in the mirror is not a ghost, she is eerily not a reflection, either.  In other words, she wasn't in the room opposite the looking glass.  From Peace College's 1970 yearbook.

A life-like portrait of the Grim Reaper.  From Ric et Rac, 1931.

From Lehigh's 1917 yearbook.

From Lustige Blätter, 1919.

From Barnard's yearbook of 1917.

"Is the belief in Hell passing away?"  From The Literary Digest, 1900

Our custom widget that checks for duplicated images suggested this unlikely pairing.  Click each image for its source.

From Le Journal Amusant, 1906.

We're delighted by this review of our dictionary of all-consonant and all-vowel words:

I like writing with funny words. Words that every spell checker hates and people give me endless sass about. This book helps me live my dream of lifting eyebrows while also allowing me to say, "I'm not the only one who uses it."

From Greensboro's 1932 yearbook.

We encountered and determined the cause of a temporal anomaly in the town of Clayton, New Mexico.  A streetside clock displays faces with no hands, bizarrely distorted numbers, as well as incorrect times.  As constant investigators of such phenomena, we diagnosed the source of the problem at a glance.  Directly below the troubled timekeeper is an old sculpture of a dinosaur.  That relic, itself conjuring a past that is forever timeless, is the cause of the pole clock divergence, magnified by the site's proximity to the extinct volcano Capulin.  Though the cause is simple enough, great mysteries yet abound, for precisely how and why do relics have the power to disrupt the flow of time?

From "The Flying Hat," by Vincent Cornier:

***

The only usual sounds were the far-away drone of traffic in Oxford Street and the solemn snoring of that in Edgeware Road.

***

[The flying hat] sped along; it seemed a ball of blackness, madly sportive.

From Swarthmore's 1932 yearbook.

From Lustige Blätter, 1919.

Our custom widget that checks for duplicated images suggested this unlikely pairing.  Click each image for its source.

From Kladderadatsch, 1920.

Fairy in the Spider's Web by A.L.O.E., 1887.

"Hotel plans ballroom on springs."  From Popular Mechanics, 1914.

Here'a a library ghost from the University of Maryland, College Park yearbook of 1976.  Whether for payback or peace of mind, see How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

There are two very different depictions of the golden fleece in this yearbook, one light and one dark.  From the UNC yearbook of 1940.

"Singapore—a mango breakfast in July."  From A Trip Round the World in 1887-8 by William Sproston Caine and illustrated by John Pedder (1888).

From Lustige Blätter, 1906.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to see the fine line between a veterinary clinic and a military hospital. From L'Assiette au Beurre, 1906.