In 1966 Mao Zedong, the Communist leader of China, started a political campaign that became known as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Mao called on China's youth to help him purge capitalist influences and bourgeois thinking in government, teaching, th…
This is the story of how the famous boxer Muhammad Ali convinced a suicidal young man to come down off the ledge. On January 19, 1981, The Los Angeles Times photographer Boris Yaro heard reports of a suicidal jumper on the radio. His editor wasn’t interest…
The Berlin Wall’s story began in the early hours of August 13th 1961, when the government of East Germany ordered the closure of all borders between East and West Berlin. As the sun rose that morning, Berliners were awoken by the sound of trucks, jackhammers…
Few good things come out of war, and the image of this young couple’s lifeless bodies embracing on the street for days stirs emotions in even the toughest of observers from all sides of the conflict. Slain by snipers' bullets, the childhood sweethearts’ bo…
Prohibition was the attempt to outlaw the production and consumption of alcohol in the United States. The call for prohibition began primarily as a religious movement in the early 19th century – the state of Maine passed the first state prohibition law in …
Ever since the car was invented, man has dreamt of taking it to the skies. The idea of a flying machine that one can drive dates back further to the nineteenth century—the concept was first patented in 1910. Engineers returned to again and again to the con…
The Anglo-French Concorde was co-developed by BAC, a forerunner of BAE Systems, and Aerospatiale, now a part of Airbus, and has a storied history. New technology was required throughout the plane. A distinctive design innovation was the plane’s droop nose,…
TIME magazine decided to create a list of the 100 most influential pictures ever taken. They teamed up with curators, historians, photo editors, and famous photographers around the world for this task. "No formula makes for iconic photos," the editors said. "S…
Since the early 1900s Bell Telephone Laboratories, or Bell Labs, has been a major source of technological experimentation and change. Bell Labs has sponsored research far beyond the limits of its original focus, the telephone. From telephones to radar to c…
The first therapeutic uses of light (so called light therapy) date back to the end of the twentieth century, when a Danish researcher, Niels Ryberg Finsen, showed that light stimulates the immune defenses and enables the fight against infections. The treat…
Before video stores, movies were solely watched in theaters, leaving studios hesitant to embrace video technology and video stores because they feared for losses in revenues. The first VCRs hit the market in 1975, and shortly thereafter the video rental st…
Every war combatant highly appreciated the need for an unbreakable code that would help them communicate while protecting their operational plans. The U.S. Army knew where to find one: the Navajo Nation. Philip Johnston, a civil engineer for the city of Lo…
Let’s imagine that World War II wasn't about invading countries, killing people and achieving world domination. Instead, it was a fashion contest to create the most stylish military pictures. In other words - let’s think that the objective was for ordinary…
These spectacular postcards of France in the last years of the 19th century offer a rare glimpse of French cities in vibrant colors. They were created using the Photochrom process, a technique by which black-and-white photos were imbued with vibrant and li…
Helene Mayer, remains one of the Olympics’ great mysteries. She was, by definition of German law at the time, part-Jewish, which had cost her most of her citizenship rights. Her country’s press was forbidden to mention her name. Once she had been one of Ge…
Nowadays it's hard to believe that thousands of people would be willing to stand out in the cold for hours just to try a McDonald’s hamburger. But when the first McDonald’s arrived in Moscow in 1990, the whole city went mad. The Moscow McDonald’s initia…
The Great Kanto Earthquake, sometimes called the Great Tokyo Earthquake, rocked Japan on September 1, 1923. The city of Yokohama was hit even worse than Tokyo was, although both were devastated. It was the deadliest earthquake in Japanese history. The eart…
Born in 1907, Frida Kahlo lived for just 47 years. Andre Breton summed up Kahlo as “a ribbon around a bomb.” Here are some facts about the woman remembered as one of Mexico’s greatest artists. Kahlo lived most of her life in pain, the effect of contracting…