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…
In the early 1910s, photographer Harry Pollard traveled around Canada to take a series of photographs of the natives, who are one of the first people who settled in Western Canada and Alberta. These photographs capture, among others, people from Tsuu T’…
These rare historical photographs were taken from 1873 to 1877 and are part of Street Life in London, a book that was one of the first examples of social documentary photography. The authors, photographer John Thomson and journalist Adolphe Smith, aimed to…
These mugshots of Edwardian Britain depict minors arrested for petty crimes and are part of a wide photographic collection of Tyne Wear Archives. The age of the subjects starts from 12 years old to 21 which was the legal age of adulthood. These minors were…
By the outbreak of the Second World War, Poland’s Military Aviation, quite commonly and incorrectly called the Polish Air Force, was inferior in every aspect. From having the world’s first all-metal built and fastest fighter plane in the mid-1930s to flyin…
The story behind the famous picture of two Armenian women posing with their rifles is complicated and still mysterious. The picture was taken in 1895, during the Hamidians massacres where thousands of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were assassinated. T…
Sami, the chimpanzee of Belgrade Zoo, became a media sensation when he managed to escape twice in February 1988. He had a thoughtful walk around Central Belgrade before being captured after long “negotiations” with the zoo director, Vuk Bojović. Sami wa…
By the late eighteenth century, Egypt had been reduced to nothing more than an impoverished and neglected corner of the Ottoman Empire, crippled by endless power struggles among its Mamluk leadership. Then in 1798, Napoleon arrived at the head of a Fren…
In this article, we’ve collected a few rare photographs from the 1870s taken by Shinichi Suzuki (1835-1918) who photographed Japan for a foreign newsmagazine called The Far East. After his lumber family business was destroyed by a tsunami in 1854, Suzuk…
For thousands of years, warships were built of wood and powered by human muscles and the wind. Gunpowder carved the first niche for chemical energy and machine-made materials, but successfully mounting and using cannons aboard ships still required vast amo…
During the Second World War, the United States government encouraged the American people to participate in scrap drives, a way for everyone to contribute to the war effort. By recycling unused or unwanted metal for example, the government could build ships…
These amazing color photos of Belfast capture the shipyards, the lively streets, the everyday life, the fashion, and document a city worlds away from the one we know today. The pictures were taken by documentary and Press photographer, Bert Hardy, who's be…
Winter brings a unique set of risks and challenges for firefighters ranging from mild inconvenience to extreme danger. When temperatures reach below zero degrees, the battle is against the elements and the flames. Everything moves slower in extreme cold…
Pennsylvania’s rich coal mining history dates back centuries to the late 1700s and boomed between 1870 and 1930. The pictures collected in this article were taken by John Collier, an Office of War Information photographer, and capture the gritty life of miners…
On a lazy Sunday afternoon in September 1942, photographer Marjory Collins wandered around New York City’s Central Park capturing a series of incredible images. The amazing and quasi-candid shots show families, friends, kids, lovers, and sailors enjoying a sun…
These mugshots of Auschwitz guards were published by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance and you can see the evils that run the deadliest concentration camp of the Second World War. The full database contains over 25,000 records that cover person…