The early 1920s were the gilded age for the Ku Klux Klan, as many successful and powerful people were either openly Klansmen or sympathetic to the cause. The organization boasted a membership of 3 million nationwide, including prominent community leader…
Lie detector tests have become a popular cultural icon — from crime dramas to comedies to advertisements — the picture of a polygraph pen wildly gyrating on a moving chart is a readily recognized symbol. NYPD criminologist Roy Post invented his own vers…
These rare photos from the end of the 19th century capture a range of Bedouins at a time of change. As modern governments projected their power into previously ungovernable tracts of the desert, many Bedouins chose or were forced to abandon a purely nom…
Once the United States abandoned neutrality and declared war on Germany in April 1917, thousands of German commercial sailors were unlucky enough to be docked at American ports, including the crew of the world’s largest passenger ship, the SS Vaterland, wh…
Recreational cannabis smoking took on a negative connotation in the American cultural imagination when people began to associate it with Mexican immigrants arriving in the US. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, a wave of Mexican immigrants poured int…
Remnants of the glorious Viking past are scattered throughout the countryside of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Particularly in Sweden’s Uppland province, there are thousands of stones carved with runic inscriptions dating from the Bronze Age up to modern ti…
These images are part of the book Weird War Two, a book from the Imperial War Museums that explores the stranger side of the Second World War. A war as extensive and long-lasting as World War II produces an incalculable number of artifacts. And museums …
Ladies, this is how you land a man in 1938-style. We always find these vintage “dating tips” for single women hilarious. Just think about it: “Don’t drink too much, as a man expects you to keep your dignity all evening. Drinking may make some girls seem cle…
In 1919 Chicago was in the throes of an exhausting heatwave. Thousands flocked to the beaches lining Lake Michigan for some relief. Among them: a group of black boys that included 17-year-old Eugene Williams. Eugene, who was on a raft, inadvertently dri…
These pictures show what was acceptable in the 1980s at Spring Break. Mostly from Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, these show a party scene that seems alien, the kind of en masse binge-drinking you could have before the intervention of social media. T…
These propaganda paintings show how North Korea views America and by association the West. They depict the alleged mass murder of Sinchon civilians between October and December 1950. The regime claims that around 35,000 people were brutally tortured and…
Blow dryers were invented in the late 19th century. The first model was created by Alexander F. “Beau” Godefroy in his salon in France in 1890. His invention was a large, seated version that consisted of a bonnet that attached to the chimney pipe of a g…
Born in Wisconsin in 1868, Edward Sheriff Curtis took to photography at an early age. In 1895 he photographed Princess Angeline, the daughter of the Duwamish Chief Seattle, for whom the city was named. That encounter sparked Curtis' lifelong fascination…
Football, or “American football” as the rest of the world calls it, can be traced to early versions of rugby football and association football. Both games have their origin in multiple varieties of football played in Britain in the mid-19th century, in …
The events of 1942 were crucial in the way that World War Two played out. The first Americans arrived in England in January - 'Overpaid, oversexed - and in North Africa Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps began their counter-offensive, capturing Tobr…
The once-impoverished region of Landes in southwestern France consisted of very flat and marshy terrain and barely even had any roads to speak of, which made moving around somewhat problematic. To navigate the soft and unsteady heathlands, shepherds dev…
In the 19th century, there were no real institutions to regulate the advertising claims of health products. In such a climate, a popular so-called “patent medicine” market flourished. Manufacturers of these medical products often made misleading claims …
These rare color views of the capital (then known as Constantinople) of the Ottoman Empire at the close of the 19th century were produced using the Photochrom process. The technique applies layers of artificial color to a black and white image with surpris…
After the Second World War, America's love affair with the automobile was in full swing. You could drive through about anything – movie theaters, car washes, restaurants, banks, and...even churches. That’s a very American way to attend church. These rar…
It was June 1980, just six months after the Soviet Union had invaded its southern neighbor to forestall the collapse of a pro-Soviet government in Kabul. Condemned by an Islamic war tribunal for denouncing nine families to the Russians, the man in the p…