On September 1, 1939, the world was shocked as Nazi troops invaded Poland. Tensions soared in Europe, and world leaders recognized that this invasion could be the final straw that would lead to war. German military leaders had begun planning for war with P…
Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe had her fair share of lovers, none of them stuck around long. She was divorced three times before dying of an overdose at age 36 in 1962. Marilyn's first husband was James Dougherty, a Los Angeles police officer. They…
It began with a simple boycott of Jewish shops and ended in the gas chambers at Auschwitz as Nazi Germany attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe. In January 1933, after a bitter ten-year political struggle, Adolf Hitler came to …
Built in 1874 on the site reserved for an opera house, the Old Cincinnati Library was a thing of wonder. With five levels of cast iron shelving, a fabulous foyer, checkerboard marble floors, and an atrium lit by a skylight ceiling, the place was breatht…
During World War One, large numbers of women were recruited into jobs vacated by men who had gone to fight in the war. New jobs were also created as part of the war effort, for example in munitions factories. The high demand for weapons resulted in the …
Situated halfway between the city of Medellin and Bogota, the Colombian capital, Hacienda Napoles was the vast ranch owned by the drug baron Pablo Escobar. In the early 1980s, after Escobar had become rich but before he had started the campaign of assas…
It’s 1942 and the Germans occupy and dominate the vast majority of Europe. They were there, on the scene, and the local men either were not (dead, in prison camps, in hiding) or were greatly diminished in status. Like soldiers of every army of every per…
In February 1942, in the midst of World War II, the Japanese fleet completely wrecked a combined Dutch-American-Australian-British fleet at the Battle of the Java Sea. This defeat led to the Japanese occupation of the entire Netherlands East Indies. Onl…
In the early 1900s, there wasn’t really such a thing as bodybuilding, there were people who had huge muscles, but they concentrated on traditional strongmen routines. Lifting large boulders, performing impressive feats of strength, and generally enterta…
In 1920, a group of revolutionary socialists attended a meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel in London. The men and women were members of various political groups including the British Socialist Party (BSP), the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), Prohibition and …
The history of medicine is filled with wild stories of bizarre treatments methods and medical procedures that aimed to make people feel better. Some of the stranger treatments of old-time medicine would turn out to be useful; while cautery—heating an ir…
In June 1941 Hitler ordered a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union, and for most of the next year the German army routed the Soviet troops, capturing thousands of square kilometers of their country in the process. In August 1942 the German VI Army had …
After the end of World War II, birth rates in the United States and other Western countries abnormally jumped up in a phenomenon that came to be called the baby boom. Technically, baby boomers are those people born worldwide between 1946 and 1964, the time…
In 1989, Michael Galinsky, then a 20-year-old student, took a month to traverse the U.S. Everywhere he went, he documented the same place: the shopping mall. The results are now an archive of a vanished world, simultaneously familiar and foreign, trivial a…
The history of airships begins, like the history of hot air balloons, in France. After the invention of the hot air balloon in 1783, a French officer named Meusnier envisioned an airship that utilized the design of the hot air balloon but was able to be…
After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, some German Americans formed groups to support the Nazi party in Germany and attempt to influence American politics. The most notorious of these groups was the “German-American Bund”, which tried to model itself as …
The story of the tank began in World War I when armored all-terrain fighting vehicles were first deployed as a response to the problems of trench warfare. In Britain, tanks were first referred to as landships. The Landships Committee was set up in 1915 …
He was the 40th president of the United States, but first, he juggled monkeys for Hollywood. Ronald Reagan started his career in show business in Des Moines, Iowa as a radio announcer for baseball games. In 1937, while in Southern California to cover th…
The lady in the picture with the mirror held above her head – was Mrs. Edna Egbert. The photographer caught her in the ready-to-swing position, as a cop gets ready to dodge. The year was 1942 and Mrs. Egbert was living in the building at the time – No. …
These photographs are taken by George Kennan, an American explorer noted for his travels in the Kamchatka and Caucasus regions of the Russian Empire. In 1864, he secured employment with the Russian–American Telegraph Company to survey a route for a prop…