The Holocaust was a gradual process. The Nazis didn't start mass extermination when they got into power. But gradually prepared the population by dehumanizing the Jewish people. Segregation, as shown in this photo, was part of this. The point was not to…
Before the days of computers, employees at NASA would have to go about conveying their knowledge in a much more laborious way: chalk, board, and likely tears. The scientists used math and physics to calculate complex spacecraft trajectories, navigation …
Conrad Schumann was immortalized in this photograph as he leapt across the barricade that would become the Berlin Wall. The photo was called “The Leap into Freedom”. It became an iconic image of the Cold War. Born in Zschochau, Saxony during the middle …
At the end of World War II, the city of Dresden was in ruins, all its buildings destroyed and thousands of civilians dead. The scale of the death and destruction, coming so late in the war, along with significant questions about the legitimacy of the ta…
Pictured here in September 1939, Einstein relaxes on the beach near his Long Island summer home with friend and local department store owner David Rothman. After some initial confusion in the store resulting from Einstein’s thickly accented request for …
The photo was taken by the Irish photographer Colman Doyle. The original caption: "A woman IRA volunteer on active service in West Belfast with an AR18 assault rifle”. The IRA regularly conducted “show of arms” displays, showing off their modern and numero…
Finnish defenders sometimes, though very rarely, took fallen frozen Russian soldiers and posed them upright as psychological warfare. Although rare, a few cases have been documented. Common Russian soldiers and Finnish troops had a great deal of respect…
One day after France signed the armistice with Germany in June 1940, Adolf Hitler celebrated the German victory over France with a triumphant tour of Paris. Hitler surveying his conquest with his various companions and became one of the most iconic ph…
This image might be one of the most impressive photographs of all time. While it might just look like a regular Polaroid of some industrial sludge in a rundown warehouse, you’re looking at the epicenter of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Known as “the E…
In this photograph, a Red Army soldier is seen marching a German soldier into captivity after the Battle of Stalingrad. The Germans were being rounded up prior to marched to death. The Battle of Stalingrad was amongst the bloodiest battles ever fought in t…
The Trooper is black. Standing in front of him and touching his shield is a curious little boy dressed in a KKK hood and robe. In this picture, innocence is mixed with hate, the irony of a black man protecting the right of white people to assemble in prote…
Death mask of Napoleon, taken a day and a half after he died on the island of St. Helena at age 51. His eyes are closed, lips slightly parted, and his shaven head is tilted backward, resting on a pillow garnished with a tassel at each corner. Napoleon's or…
Bison were hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century and were reduced to a few hundred by the mid-1880s. They were hunted for their skins, with the rest of the animals left behind to decay on the ground. Hides were prepared and shipped to the east…
Captain Nieves Fernandez, the only known Filipino female guerilla leader and formerly a school teacher, shows US Army Pvt. Andrew Lupiba how she used her long knife to silently kill Japanese soldiers during the Japanese occupation of Leyte Island. Image ta…
Frenchman crying as the flags of fallen France were marched through the streets of Marseilles on their way to Africa. The man’s face conveys a sense of grief so profound as to transcend our expectations. The photo is nicknamed "The weeping Frenchman" and b…
Post First World War Germany was hit by one of the worst cases of hyperinflation in recent history. The German mark fell from 4.2 marks to the dollar to 8.91 marks per dollar during the First World War but paying war reparations caused an economic collapse…
Here Fidel Castro is seen smoking a Cuban cigar and wearing two Rolex watches in the Kremlin while he chats with Khrushchev, in front of a Karl Marx picture. The non-verbal body language in this photo is absolutely fascinating. Notice everybody in the r…
On February 14, 1884, Theodore Roosevelt received a terrible news, his wife and mother died within hours of one another in Roosevelt's house in New York City. His mother, age 50, succumbed to typhus, and his wife Alice died at the age of 22 giving birth to…
The Heavy Gustav, was completed towards the end of 1940 and the proof rounds were fired early in 1941 at the Rugenwalde Artillery Range. Both Hitler and Albert Speer, later to be his armaments minister, attended the occasion. Named after the head of the…
Collins took this picture of the Lunar Module, containing Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong with Earth in the background, during the Apollo 11 mission. This makes him the only person ever to have lived who was not inside the frame of the photo. Matter cannot …