On May 1, 1903, an African-American man named Will West entered the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth. Like any other new prisoner, West was subjected to the standard admission procedure: prison clerks took photographs, a physical description, and …
January 28, 1986, was an exceptionally cold day in Florida, where freezing weather is rare. The beaches near the Kennedy Space Center were crowded with people who had come to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger, which had been postponed on sev…
The boy and girl looked toward the camera. They were just old enough to understand the task assigned to them: to stand very still, with arms linked, and direct their gaze to the contraption in front of them. Isaac was eight and Rosa, six. How two former…
For e brief time, early in the twentieth century, Coney Island was the most dazzling spectacle in the world — a wonderland of light, imagination, and ingenuity that seemed to herald an emerging nation’s promise at the dawn of the century that it would come t…
In 1938, photographer Ben Shahn of FSA traveled to the small town of London, Ohio, and captured the residents as they strolled through the town’s main streets. The town was struggling economically and the welfare of the residents had declined rapidly over the …
The Hollywood sign may be unique among American icons. It is a landmark whose white letters are familiar around the world as the prime symbol of the movies. Day after day tourists with cameras wander into surrounding Griffith Park or troll up and down the …
Skylab was America’s first step toward making space something other than a nice place to visit. Developed in the shadow of the Apollo moon missions and using hardware originally created for Apollo, the Skylab space station took the nation’s astronauts from…
On September 11, 2001, US President George W. Bush went to Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Florida to meet students and staff and to bring attention to his plans for education reform. It looked like another regular day. That all changed after 8:46 a…
The Golden Gate Bridge is unquestionably an American icon whose symbolism power rivals that of the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty, in part through its representation of optimism, a distinctly American trait. Its visual linkage of form and n…
Ellis Island served as the United State’s largest immigration station, processing up to 12 million people between 1892 and 1954. These historical photos were taken between 1906 and 1914 by amateur photographer Augustus Sherman. Sherman was an untrained,…
By 1930, Texas was already the nation’s leading oil producing state, yet East Texas remained the only area of the state that had not obtained high-volume oil production in spite of having the state’s first oil discovery. This changed when on October 3, 1930…
On January 30, 1864, Harper’s Weekly started to publish portraits of children captioned “Emancipated Slaves—White and Colored,” as part of a publicity campaign to raise funds for schools for recently emancipated slaves in New Orleans. The children feature…
When an amateur inventor and designer named Earl Silas Tupper first invented Tupperware around 1942 (from a refined version of polyethylene that he referred to as “Poly-T: Material of the Future), he envisaged the total “Tupperization” of the American home…
This black and white image, taken by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, is the only known photograph of JFK and Monroe together. Monroe is still wearing the infamously tight-fighting, sheer rhinestone-studded dress she wore when singing earlier at M…
Before anyone ever heard the word “cowgirl,” there were women who ventured west. Most traveled with their families on covered wagons, beginning in the 1840s. They moved from crowded eastern cities to settle in western states such as Kansas, Nebraska, Color…
It’s difficult to convey to a modern audience the emotional impact of the stock market’s gyrations in the 1980s, or indeed in any distant decade because the most popular measures of market value have grown so much in the intervening years. For example, …
The process that led up to the national park idea is complex. From arts and literature came the Romantic movement, which encouraged the experience of the mountains and wilderness. Authors like Henry Davia Thoreau and Washington Irving exhorted Americans to…
For thousands of years, warships were built of wood and powered by human muscles and the wind. Gunpowder carved the first niche for chemical energy and machine-made materials, but successfully mounting and using cannons aboard ships still required vast amo…
During the Second World War, the United States government encouraged the American people to participate in scrap drives, a way for everyone to contribute to the war effort. By recycling unused or unwanted metal for example, the government could build ships…
Pennsylvania’s rich coal mining history dates back centuries to the late 1700s and boomed between 1870 and 1930. The pictures collected in this article were taken by John Collier, an Office of War Information photographer, and capture the gritty life of miners…