In 1932-1933, at the worst point in the Great Depression years, unemployment rates in the United States reached almost 25%, with more than 11 million people looking for work. Farmers who had lost their land and homes to foreclosure as a result of the Du…
On the road to Civil Rights, even children became public figures, such as six-year-old Ruby Bridges, who integrated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans on November 14, 1960. Ruby was born in Tylertown, Mississippi, to Abon and Lucille Bridges. …
In February 1954, actress Marilyn Monroe traveled to Korea to entertain the American troops. She performed a quickly thrown-together show titled Anything Goes to audiences which totaled over 100,000 troops over 4 days. The tour was also a chance for …
The idea for the Empire State Building is said to have been born of a competition between Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors, to see who could erect the taller building. Chrysler had already begun work on…
The Statue of Liberty was completed in Paris in June 1884, presented to America by the people of France on July 4, 1884. The copper statue is of a robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess, who bears a torch and a tabula ansata (a tab…
Private First Class Kerry Nelson, an American M48 tank gunner of the 3rd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, in Vietnam's 'Iron Triangle' during the Vietnam War. The squadron was tasked with securing Route 13, a strategic road north of Saigon, whic…
John Bayard Britton was an American physician who was murdered in Pensacola, Florida, by anti-abortion extremist Paul Jennings Hill. Britton's death was the second assassination of a Pensacola abortion provider in under a year and a half; he had replaced D…
This picture might look like marketing material based on the way she's holding the gun, but that’s a common shotgun technique. In the 1970s this was considered the proper way to shoot a shotgun at close range. As we can see in the picture, the stock goe…
Rockefeller, then vice-president of the United States, was on a campaign swing through upstate New York on Sept. 16, 1976, with Sen. Bob Dole, who had been selected to be President Gerald Ford's running mate for the 1976 election. When someone in a grou…
After four years of blackout, all the lights in Times Square went on as Mayor LaGuardia announced the Japanese surrender. In a celebration mirrored around the world, the New Yorkers took to the Square to celebrate a new era of peace, and hope, the image…
On April 27, 1926, the Cañon City Daily Record ran a surprising bulletin on its front page. Right under a notice that the local junior high school was putting together a variety show, the local newspaper of the small central Colorado town printed the headl…
The photo depicts a South Vietnamese mother fleeing through a river. She and her four children were forced to leave their village, Qui Nhon, near Quinbonso. The U.S. Air Force had asked all inhabitants to evacuate the village because the Vietcong had be…
The SS Morro Castle, named after a fortress that guards Havana Bay, was a luxury cruise ship of the 1930s that was built for the Ward Line for runs between New York City and Havana. On the morning of September 8, 1934, en route from Havana to New York, …
In the wake of JFK’s assassination, people around the world mourned and tried to come to terms with John F. Kennedy’s death. Many found solace in the stoic Kennedy clan. Led by the dignified and unbreakable Jackie Kennedy following the family adage of “…
For six months in the summer and fall of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were “de-watered”, as the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a geological survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion. These stark images r…
In this photograph by Alfred Hart taken between 1865 - 1869, a Native American looks down upon a newly completed section of the Transcontinental Railroad, 435 miles from Sacramento, California. The stark composition of both man and progress facing a dis…
Mary was a five-ton Asian elephant, also known as Murderous Mary, who performed in the Sparks World Famous Shows circus. After killing a trainer in Kingsport, Tennessee, she was hanged in 1916. Her death is sometimes interpreted as a cautionary tale of …
A workman reams holes to the proper size and alignment in the Space Shuttle Main Engine's main injector body, through which propellants will pass through on their way into the engine's combustion chamber. Rockwell International's Rocketdyne Division pla…
During World War II, the now-legendary VIII Bomber Command (often referred to as the Eighth Air Force) served as the principal American force assembled to attack Germany from the air. For several critical years in the early and mid-1941s, B-24 and B-17 …
The term Uncle Sam is reputedly derived from Samuel Wilson, a meat packer from Troy, New York, who supplied rations for the soldiers during the War of 1812. There was a requirement at the time for contractors to stamp their name and where the rations ca…