The Great Famine of 1876–78, also known as the Madras famine of 1877, covered a major part of south India and took an estimated 5.5 million lives. The famine ultimately covered an area of 670,000 square kilometers (257,000 sq mi) and caused distress to …
The Second World War changed the United States for women, and women in turn transformed their nation. Over three hundred fifty thousand women volunteered for military service, while twenty times as many stepped into civilian jobs, including positions pr…
The American Civil War lasted for just four years, from 1861 to 1865 and it is often also known as the War Between the States. It was the event where 11 Southern States that supported slavery declared their succession from the United States and announce…
The second part of the American Civil War photo collection covers the people of the Civil War: the generals, slaves, civilians, politicians, and soldiers that lived through those turbulent years. For other parts: The American Civil War in pictures (part…
The Civil War was certainly the most catastrophic event in American history. More than 600,000 Northerners and Southerners died in the war, a greater number than all those who had died in all other American wars combined. (The other parts of these…
After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese quickly gained control over a huge area of the Pacific, from the Philippines to Burma to the Aleutians to the Solomons. While the Japanese enjoyed the advantage of interior lines of communication, they had somewhat overe…
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 culminating in the Tiananmen Square Massacre were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in the People's Republic of China (PRC) between April 15 and June 4, 1989. They were mainly led by Beijing st…
For most of Finland's history, the country had lived on the periphery of world events, but for a few weeks during the winter of 1939-40, Finland stood at the center of the world stage. Finland's stand against Soviet aggression aroused the world's admira…
In the 1860s and 1870s, photographer Timothy O'Sullivan created some of the best-known images in American History. After covering the U.S. Civil War, O'Sullivan was the official photographer on the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Pa…
In the years leading up to the First World War Britain and Germany engaged in a naval arms race. Britain had peaceably enjoyed its status as the world’s dominant naval force since the Napoleonic Wars but Germany now sought to contest that dominance. A n…
Covering 1,216 acres, in Flushing Meadows, New York, the 1939 New York World's Fair, like the legendary Phoenix rising from the ashes, was erected on what was an ash-dump. The theme, "Building the World of Tomorrow" echoed in virtually every corner of the …
Rescued East African slaves taken from a dhow aboard HMS Daphne, a British naval ship used to prevent the transportation of enslaved people. They were freed from Arab slave traders between November 1st and 4th of 1868. The HMS Daphne was sailing along t…
The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor began just before 8 a.m. local time Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. For over an hour, in two waves, some 350 Japanese aircraft—having taken off from six aircraft carriers 230 miles north of Oahu—attacked th…
On January 14th, 1975, Major Peter Makowicka, aged 33, was on a training mission with his Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG 21 plane. During approach on the military airbase Cottbus, German Democratic Republic (Eastern Germany), the plane experienced an open cover l…
While the First World War witnessed the development of modern, technological warfare, it also made unprecedented demands on what we might see as archaic methods of campaigning. Despite the tanks, planes, and machine guns, fighting still depended on the …
In the summer and fall of 1940, German and British air forces clashed in the skies over the United Kingdom, locked in the largest sustained bombing campaign to that date. Victory for the Luftwaffe in the air battle would have exposed Great Britain to in…
When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, the American merchant fleet was caught unprepared to handle a massive sealift of war material. With continental Europe under German control, and Great Britain under devastating air attack, President Frankl…
During the early twentieth century, Howard Carter, a British Egyptologist, excavated for many years in the Valley of the Kings—a royal burial ground located on the west bank of the ancient city of Thebes, Egypt. When Carter arrived in Egypt in 1891, he …
The Soviet War in Afghanistan was a nine-year period involving the Soviet forces and the Mujahideen insurgents that were fighting to overthrow Afghanistan's Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government. The Soviet Union supported t…
The photo first appeared in The Vidette-Messenger of Valparaiso, Indiana on August 5, 1948. The children looked posed and a bit confused as their pregnant mother hides her face from the photographer. The caption read: “A big ‘For Sale’ sign in a Chicago…