Japan's delegation gather to sign the formal surrender document on the U.S. Navy battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay in a September 2, 1945 file photo. (Photo by Reuters/US Navy)

A woman swigs from bottles of rum and coke before entering the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California April 12, 2015. (Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

A news crew runs from flames southeast of Middletown, Calif., on Tuesday, September 15, 2015, as winds kick up the Valley fire. (Photo by Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Children guarded by Hungarian police play on the ground after being detained along with other migrants who illegally crossed from Serbia to Hungary near the village of Asotthalom, Hungary, September 16, 2015. (Photo by Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

A long time exposure shows a Igloo at the “Igloo village” (Iglu Dorf) in front of the famous Matterhorn mountain in Zermatt, Switzerland, late 28 January 2016. The hotel-igloo village made of snow and ice at 2'815 meters about sea level with a bar, a restaurant, bedrooms and wellness are celebrating their 20th anniversary. For this occasion the hosts built the largest classic igloo with a diameter of 13 meters and a ceiling hight of 11 meters in front of Matterhorn in Zermatt, and they will attempt the world record for this Igloo. (Photo by Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA)

French photographer Laurent Chehere's “Flying Houses” exhibit takes workaday houses and lets them lift the imagination. The exhibit is showing at the Muriel Guépin Gallery in New York. Photo: Laurent Chehere's “Flying Houses”: “The Great Illusion”. (Photo by Laurent Chehere)

With temperatures soaring and summer well underway, countless Americans will be spending their Independence Day weekend at the beach. Here we revisit some classic images from the turn-of-the-century to the 1930's of vacations by the sea, from Coney Island to Santa Monica.

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.