The Great Kanto Earthquake, sometimes called the Great Tokyo Earthquake, rocked Japan on September 1, 1923. The city of Yokohama was hit even worse than Tokyo was, although both were devastated. It was the deadliest earthquake in Japanese history. The eart…
Born in 1907, Frida Kahlo lived for just 47 years. Andre Breton summed up Kahlo as “a ribbon around a bomb.” Here are some facts about the woman remembered as one of Mexico’s greatest artists. Kahlo lived most of her life in pain, the effect of contracting…
From the days of catapults and trebuchets, military men have dreamed of the ultimate weapon that could smash an enemy’s wall, castle, or defensive stronghold. For a span of eighty-five years, that weapon was the railroad gun, large enough to do substantial…
During the Second World War, the Soviet Union used more women in combat than any other country. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women sprang to join the war effort, enlisting as nurses, clerks, cooks, manufacturing etc. Among them were hundreds of remarkab…
Most of these rare and relatively intimate pictures of the Imperial Romanov family were taken by the head of the family and Russia's last tsar himself, Nicholas II. An insatiable photographer, the tsar took great care of his pictures, filing them carefully…
When President Truman moved into the executive mansion in 1945, they found the White House badly in need of repair after twelve years of neglect during the Depression and war. Floors groaned and creaked, winds blew in and out, strange sounds echoed in unus…
Though there were drive-ins as early as the 1910s, the first patented drive-in was opened on June 6, 1933 by Richard Hollingshead in New Jersey. It offered room for 400 vehicles. He created it as a solution for people unable to comfortably fit into smaller…
Cuba's reputation as an exotic and permissive playground came to light in the 1920s, when the country became a favorite destination for robber barons and bohemians. Hotels, restaurants, night clubs, golf clubs and casinos sprung up in Havana catering to th…
Disneyland was dedicated at an "International Press Preview" event held on Sunday, July 17, 1955, which was open only to invited guests and the media. Although 28,000 people attended the event, only about half of those were invitees, the rest having purcha…
These rare pictures depict the final days of 400 years of Turkish rule over Jerusalem. In its long history, the inhabitants and rulers of the city of Jerusalem have changed countless times, from ancient pagans to Biblical Israelites to Byzantine Christians…
In 1933 Adolf Hitler commissioned automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche to develop a “People's Car” (literally a VolksWagen). The Volkswagen would need to be capable of carrying a family of five at sustained speeds of 100km/h (62 miles per hour), with a fu…
The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy fractured the nation just two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and five years after his brother John F. Kennedy was killed. But RFK’s funeral, particularly the train that took his body from Ne…
DeLorean DMC-12, an innovative sports car, produced from 1981–1983, with gull-wing doors and stainless-steel body panels. It should have been the commercial coup of the century, leading to massive worldwide sales. For this was the car chosen to star in the…
The Battle of Midway was a turning point in the Pacific War. Before the Battle of the Coral Sea on 7-8 May 1942, the Imperial Navy of Japan had swept aside all of its enemies from the Pacific and Indian oceans. At the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese …
In the days before video games, amusement arcades were filled with a panoply of analog entertainment, from shooting galleries to skee-ball to mechanical fortune tellers to endless varieties of pinball. These photographs of a conspicuously empty Wonderland …
Dunkirk was the largest of the multiple evacuations of British, French and Belgian troops from Northern France following the Allied loss of the Battle of France. Over the course of the evacuation, 330,000 men were transported from Dunkirk and the surroundi…
On July 23, 1967, a police raid on an unlicensed bar resulted in the arrest of 82 black residents, sparking outrage across the community and resulting in one of the largest riots in Detroit and in US history. For five straight days rioting and looting enve…
By the time the first Japanese bomber appeared over Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, tensions between Japan and the United States had been mounting for the better part of a decade, making war seem inevitable. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief o…