In 1955, photographer Charles Hewitt visited Salvador Dalí and his wife (and muse) Gala at their home to shoot photos for a British editorial magazine called Picture Post. The famous artist posed up showing his surreal personality and didn’t miss this oppo…
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…
The airship R33 was built by Armstrong Whitworth and was completed after the end of the First World War. Her first flight was in early 1919. She was sent to Pulham airship station where she clocked up over 300 flying hours in tests and the training of crew…
A few months before Pearl Harbor was attacked, LIFE magazine ran a black-and-white photograph of an up-and-coming movie actress named Rita Hayworth. The redheaded beauty was kneeling on a bed made up with satin sheets, her silky nightgown is white, with bl…
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 …
On May 23, 1914, the SS Komagata Maru, a steamship carrying 376 passengers of Punjabi passengers - largely Sikhs but also some Hindus and Muslims - arrived on the west coast of the Dominion of Canada. Based on laws implemented to limit the immigration of I…
This extraordinary accident occurred on October 22, 1895 at Montparnasse, then known as Gare de l’Ouest. The drive of the express train from Granville to Paris, hoping to make up time for its 131 passengers, increased the train’s speed and the air brake failed…
The Battle of Cable Street was a clash between anti-fascist protestors and the British Union of Fascists on Sunday 4 October 1936. The BUF was an organization inspired by Mussolini’s Blackshirts, and allegedly included 50,000 members at its height before b…
The use of mechanical means for the application of exercise in therapeutics was first systematized and employed in a complete way by Dr, Gustav Zander, of Stockholm, about 1857. Zander’s vision of regular exertion using machines to honor health and well-be…
The samurai were a class of people who served the aristocracy with arms. The word first appeared in a document of the Heian period; before that time such people had been called mono-no-fu or bushi. Mono means ‘thing’ and fu means ‘man’; that is, men who deal…
The Messerschmitt KR200 microcar was, and remains, the most evocative example of the bubble car genre; a tiny, instantly recognizable, three-wheeled tandem-two-seater, bearing of the aviation’s most potent brand names. Targeting solid German citizens too p…
Death masks are fascinating but slightly haunting relics from an age before photos. Until cameras rendered them redundant, it was common for notable people to have metal, wax or plaster applied to their face when they had died, creating a “death mask”. …
These vivid color images show the everyday life and the ancient landmarks of Rome in the 1890s. While transportation and engineering show the first sign of the modern world, the Eternal City still demonstrates its glorious past. The old photographs depi…
Princess Diana visited the United States in early November 1985 with her husband Prince Charles. The royal couple stayed at the White House, where they attended a gala dinner on 9 November. The 24-year-old Princess was photographed dancing with the acto…
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 …
There are very rare occasions when people can see a new volcano emerging from virtually nowhere. Considered by some as one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World, Parícutin volcano is undoubtedly one of the wonderful geomorphological landscapes of the Globe…
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…
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…