From January 1918 to December 1920, a deadly influenza outbreak infected 500 million people across the world. Estimates suggest between 50 and 100 million people died from the virus, in other words, up to 5% of the planet's population. It killed more peopl…
Amidst a tangle of wires Dr. Zbigniew Religa anxiously watches a monitor to see how his patient responds after a heart transplant. In the lower right corner, you can see one of his colleagues who helped him with the surgery fallen asleep. The surgery laste…
On April 26, 1986, a series of explosions destroyed Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4, and several hundred staff and firefighters tackled a blaze that burned for 10 days and sent a plume of radiation around the world. More than 50 reactor and emergency workers wer…
At the end of 1950s a real sensation happened in Moscow: Christian Dior models came to visit the capital of the Soviet Union. Muscovites who wandered into GUM, the USSR’s premier department store, were treated to an extraordinary scene: a trio of willowy F…
It is a well-known fact that a cat which is falling upside down, has the ability to turn its body mid-air so that it lands on its feet. In past, many scientists such as George Gabriel Stokes, James Clerk Maxwell, and Étienne-Jules Marey had shown great int…
These photographs, taken for LIFE magazine in the fall of 1969, explored the "freaky new freedoms" of fashion seen on high school students across the United States. Some of the women show the strong influence of the “hippie” movement—long hair, beads, frin…
This interesting picture shows a supposed Civil War veteran from Florida enjoying himself next to a fighter jet. Claiming to be a member of the Confederate Army, William Lundy was 107 when this photo was snapped for an article in the Boston Traveller in 19…
You would think that dueling was an outdated ritual consigned to the 19th century, something that no longer had a place in modern world. However, well into the 20th century official duels were taking place, one of the last between French politicians Gaston…
In the late 19th century, the miracle device called the telephone had been invented but the simple concept of undergrounding telephone cables had eluded engineers. Due to technical limitations of the earliest phone lines, every telephone required its own p…
Some 250,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia overnight from August 20 to 21, 1968, to halt a blossoming political and cultural liberalization, bringing an abrupt end to the Prague Spring and tightening the Kremlin's grip. The first mon…
A rare and disturbing picture, so much about this it's still a mystery. We don't know what became of the skull—or, indeed, what became of the young woman herself, or the man who sent it to her as a "gift" from the Pacific in the midst of World War II. T…
A lone African-American boy, left foreground, stands in a sparse crowd that turned out to hear Dr. Lycurgus Spinks, imperial emperor of one of the several Ku Klux Klan groups active in the South, speak to 56 members of his Invisible Empire, Jackson, Miss. …
In 1908, the National Child Labor Committee hired Lewis Hine, a New York sociologist and photographer, to document the exploitative working conditions of child laborers in dozens of occupations, from mining and manufacturing to farming and newspaper sellin…
Jean-Bédel Bokassa was a military officer and the head of state of the Central African Republic from his coup d'état on 1 January 1966. But being President wasn’t enough so in 1976 he proclaimed himself emperor of the nation, which renamed the Central Afri…
The Lodz ghetto became the second largest ghetto created by the Nazis after their invasion of Poland – the largest was the Warsaw Ghetto. The ghetto was only originally intended to a be a temporary feature in Lodz but the sheer number of people involved me…
The bookmobile was travelling library often used to provide books to villages and city suburbs that had no library buildings. It went from a simple horse-drawn cart in the 19th century to large customised vehicles that became part of American culture and r…
At the end of the war, millions of people were dead and millions homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and much of the European industrial infrastructure had been destroyed. The Soviet Union, too, had been heavily affected. Borders were redrawn and…
The Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937 brought an end to the age of the rigid airship. The disaster killed 35 persons on the airship, and one member of the ground crew, but miraculously 62 of the 97 passengers and crew survived. Af…