In the late 19th century, the miracle device called the telephone had been invented but the simple concept of undergrounding telephone cables had eluded engineers. Due to technical limitations of the earliest phone lines, every telephone required its own p…
Some 250,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia overnight from August 20 to 21, 1968, to halt a blossoming political and cultural liberalization, bringing an abrupt end to the Prague Spring and tightening the Kremlin's grip. The first month…
A rare and disturbing picture, so much about this it's still a mystery. We don't know what became of the skull—or, indeed, what became of the young woman herself, or the man who sent it to her as a "gift" from the Pacific in the midst of World War II. The…
A lone African-American boy, left foreground, stands in a sparse crowd that turned out to hear Dr. Lycurgus Spinks, imperial emperor of one of the several Ku Klux Klan groups active in the South, speak to 56 members of his Invisible Empire, Jackson, Miss. …
In 1908, the National Child Labor Committee hired Lewis Hine, a New York sociologist and photographer, to document the exploitative working conditions of child laborers in dozens of occupations, from mining and manufacturing to farming and newspaper selling.…
Jean-Bédel Bokassa was a military officer and the head of state of the Central African Republic from his coup d'état on 1 January 1966. But being President wasn’t enough so in 1976 he proclaimed himself emperor of the nation, which renamed the Central Africa…
The Lodz ghetto became the second largest ghetto created by the Nazis after their invasion of Poland – the largest was the Warsaw Ghetto. The ghetto was only originally intended to a be a temporary feature in Lodz but the sheer number of people involved mean…
The bookmobile was travelling library often used to provide books to villages and city suburbs that had no library buildings. It went from a simple horse-drawn cart in the 19th century to large customised vehicles that became part of American culture and r…
At the end of the war, millions of people were dead and millions homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and much of the European industrial infrastructure had been destroyed. The Soviet Union, too, had been heavily affected. Borders were redrawn and h…
The Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937 brought an end to the age of the rigid airship.The disaster killed 35 persons on the airship, and one member of the ground crew, but miraculously 62 of the 97 passengers and crew survived. Aft…
During the late 70’s and early 80’s, New York City’s subway system was one of the most dangerous places a person could be. Lucky for those of us who never had the chance to see it, Swiss photographer Willy Spiller was there, and the dark and atmospheric se…
In 1963, at the height of the Cold War, Heinz Meixner planned a daring escape from East to West Berlin, all in the name of love. While working in the communist east, he’d met Margarete Thurau and they’d fallen in love. But politics and concrete threatened …
The first "strongwomen" appeared in the 19th century, but were almost unheard of until much later. The appearance of strong women became more prevalent in sporting events and were also a common attraction in circuses where they would showcase their superhu…
The United States entered World War I in 1917 as an associated power on the allied side of Britain and France. By the time that World War I came around, the United States was a leader in the recently discovered art of movie making and the new profession of…
For centuries, Romani tribes had been subject to antiziganist persecution and humiliation in Europe. They were stigmatized as habitual criminals, social misfits, and vagabonds. After Hitler's rise to power, legislation against the Romani was increasingly bas…
From 1981 to 1984, the photographer Bud Glick worked for the New York Chinatown History Project (NYCHP) — today the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) — capturing the lives of the neighborhood’s denizens. From intimate portraits of people in their apartme…
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, many Americans were distrusting and fearful of Japanese-Americans living in the U.S. The Federal government took the unprecedented step of ordering some 110,000 Japanese aliens and American citizens o…
Starting with the Invasion of Sicily in July of 1943, and culminating in the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion of Normandy, Allied forces took the fight to the Axis powers in many locations across Western Europe. The first Allied troops landed on the Italian p…