By almost any account, the Godfather films are monuments on the landscape of American cinema. There are, of course, differences of intention and achievement among the three, but the first one, The Godfather (1972), stands out in popular and critical opinio…
The racetrack on top of a factory is actually a very famous now-defunct Fiat factory located in the city Turin in North Italy. When Giovanni Agnelli, the CEO of Fiat, had visited the Ford factory in Detroit, he then decided to expand production by adopting…
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…
Selena was a singer-songwriter who came to be known as the “Queen of Tejano music,” a popular form of music originating in Texas and taking influences from polka, rock, conjunto, and mariachi. An enormously popular singer in Latino communities across No…
This collection includes interesting old pictures of the mountains of the Holy Land that were taken in 1915. The set includes images of Mt. Tabor, Mt. Carmel, Mt. of Olives, Mt. Nebo, and other important landmarks. The lantern slides are provided by Ore…
These beautiful, romantic old postcards show Scotland from a time long gone. Originally published by the Detroit Publishing Company, they were created by image-makers fascinated by Scotland's castles and sweeping landscapes and much of the collection gives…
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…
Arising as a daredevil stunt in the aerial shows of the 1920s, wing walking was the act of moving along the wings of a biplane during flight. It started around 1920 at aerial barnstorming shows and originally began as a demonstration of planes’ balance and…
The Lebanese Civil War was both an internal Lebanese affair and a regional conflict involving a host of regional and international actors. It revolved around some of the issues that dominated regional politics in the Middle East in the latter part of the 2…
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…
Born in 1958 in Bay City, Michigan with the official name of Madonna Louise Ciccone, Madonna was the first daughter of Madonna and Silvio Anthony “Tony” Ciccone. She was nicknamed Nonno to avoid confusion with the elder Madonna, who was of French Canadian desc…
By the first week of September 1914, the Germans had come within thirty kilometers of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. The French and British armies were engaged in fierce fighting with the Germans in the First Battle of the Marne which repelled the G…
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…
These colored photos by Jules Gervais-Courtellemont will take you back through time to see how Paris looked in 1923. The vivid images are produced using the autochrome technique in which the plates are covered in microscopic red, green and blue colored pot…
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…