These amazing color photographs show the streets of Los Angeles between the 1940s and 1960s. During the early 20th century, Los Angeles continued to boom and by the early 1920s, it had overtaken San Francisco in size. By 1939 it had a population of over 1.5…
These disturbing 1970s New York City photos reveal the dark side of a city on the brink of economic and societal collapse. During this decade, the city gained notoriety for high rates of crime and social disorders; the city’s subway system was regarded as…
These fascinating historical photographs depict immigrants and their struggle to land in America in the 1900s. Unprecedented numbers of immigrants flocked to US shores, dreaming of a life of freedom and prosperity. Between 1820 and 1920, approximately 34 mi…
Zoot Suit Riots were a series of conflicts that occurred in June 1943 in Los Angeles between U.S. servicemen and Mexican American youths, the latter of whom wore outfits called zoot suits. The riots took their name from the baggy suits worn by many minority…
These vintage photos, captured by Arthur S. Siegel, offer a snapshot of everyday life in Michigan during the 1940s. Arthur Sidney Siegel began photographing in the mid-1920s as a youth. He studied at University of Michigan, and graduated with a degree in so…
These old photographs of the American frontier capture life and struggle in the Wild West. The completion of the railroads to the West following the American Civil War opened up vast areas of the region to settlement and economic development. The archetypic…
Henry Ford was not the first to create the assembly line, but his car and moving assembly line were certainly the most successful and memorable. After creating his version of the automobile in 1896, Ford moved workshops first to Mack Avenue and later to Piq…
Throughout the decades, a number of important and interesting sites and landmarks have been lost, many due to the urbanization of cities, sometimes they're torn down due to mounting maintenance costs after falling into disrepair, and sometimes they'll fall pre…
These vintage photographs, taken by photographer Alice Austen, capture the working people of New York City. They depict employees, postmen, firefighters, policemen, street cleaners, cab drivers, and other trade people whose work kept the city functioning. S…
On Saturday, July 28, 1945, a B-25 Mitchell bomber traveling at 200 miles per hour (330 km/h) out of Massachusetts headed for Newark Airport got lost in dense fog and flew into floors 78 and 79 of New York City’s Empire State Building, the tallest building in …
In 1953, the biggest vessel to travel the Mississippi River and Illinois Waterway (at the time) managed to wind its way downtown on the Chicago River. This steel hull behemoth was nearly 634 feet long (193m) and 70 feet wide (21.3m) and according to a Chica…
From doll masks to decorated bags over heads to specially crafted outfits, these fascinating and nightmarish photos capture random people donning their Halloween costumes. It has to be said that these vintage photos were taken using much less sensitive ca…
This photo collection shows historic newspaper clippings that feature weird and, sometimes, hilarious reasons for divorce that made local headlines in the early part of the 20th century. By the mid-to-late 19th century, divorce rates in the United States in…
Rainey Bethea (born in 1909) was the last person to be publicly executed in the United States. An African-American male, who was about 26 years old, he confessed to the rape and murder of a 70-year-old white woman named Lischia Edwards, and was publicly hanged…
Las Vegas is known as the city of lights and, at one time, that light was the glow of an atomic detonation in the Nevada desert. Starting in 1951, the US Army began testing nuclear ordnances just 65 miles from Sin City. At night, the glow of the bombs lit u…
During World War II, the U.S. military needed to train hundreds of thousands of civilians and various training methods were born aiming to prepare the troops for the battlefields as quickly and efficiently as possible. Posters, comics, training films, and e…
William Bullard, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, worked as a photographer without a studio, visiting clients around the town with his camera strapped to his bicycle. From 1897 to 1917, Bullard, who was white, took portraits of his predominantly black …
In 1960, photojournalist Ormond Gigli assembled 43 women, dressed them in refined, colorful garb, and situated them in 41 windows across the facade of the classic New York City brownstones. Years later, the image ended up being his most famous artwork. Back…
The Bonneville Salt Flats are in Utah, USA, near the border with Nevada, and as the name suggests it's a very big and very flat area of land. Speed freaks began using the terrain for racing way back in 1912. Since 1935, Bonneville's been one of the prim…
On 9 September 1942, though, something happened that had never happened before: an enemy plane bombed the contiguous United States. There had been rumors of bombers over Los Angeles the previous December, but those were ultimately proven false. And, of cour…