It was the night of June 29, 1941, in the foothills of Murmansk, Soviet Union. Commander Oberleutnant Rode ordered some officer candidates "Gruppe Ostermann" to climb "Ridge Musta" to a height of 122m and scout the situation and then report back to him and…
The most fascinating part about this picture is how it conveys the rapid social evolution from the era of the old west to the incredible technological advancement of the 20th century. You have to remember, this picture was taken only four years prior to Wo…
These photos taken by Johannes Hähle depict the civilian population of Kharkov under occupation by Nazi Germany (all pictures are taken in October and November 1941). As a member of Construction Battalion 146, Hähle participated in the invasion of Franc…
The three groups displayed on the poster are, from top to bottom, "ostbaltische Rasse" ("East Baltic race"), "ostische Rasse" ("Alpine race"), and "dinarische Rasse" ("Dinaric race"). All these three groups were considered part of the sub-races of the Cauc…
In a photo that somehow comprises both tenderness and horror, an American Marine cradles a near-dead infant pulled from under a rock while troops cleared Japanese fighters and civilians from caves on Saipan in the summer of 1944. The child was the only …
What use is an inflatable dummy tank in a very real war? A lot, if the enemy believes that it’s real. During both World Wars, Allied forces made use of dummy versions of the British heavy tanks. These were constructed from a wooden framework and covered wi…
Few men over the last century can have experienced such a change of fortune as Philippe Pétain. During the First World War, Pétain was hailed as the ‘Saviour of Verdun’, helping the French keep the Germans at bay during the 1916 Battle of Verdun. In May 19…
In the first days of July 1917, a spontaneous uprising erupted in Petrograd. The July Days, as this uprising became known, was fuelled by several factors: the Provisional Government’s attempt to escalate the war effort, a collapse in the government ministr…
The internment of Japanese-Americans into camps during World War II was one of the most flagrant violations of civil liberties in American history. According to the census of 1940, 127,000 persons of Japanese ancestry lived in the United States, the maj…
As casualties mounted during the Second World War, Germany was forced to call up ever-younger conscripts to fill the ranks of the Wehrmacht. So dire was the situation at the end of 1944, that boys born in 1928 were called up to serve the Fatherland. The…
In the spring of 1891, the 23-year-old Russian prince Nicholas went to Far Eastern Russia for ceremonies in Vladivostok marking the start of the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. On his way (by sea) he made an official visit to Japan. The Rus…
Hoover Dam is as tall as a 60-story building. It was the highest dam in the world when it was completed in 1935. Its base is as thick as two football fields. Each spillway, designed to let floodwaters pass without harming the dam itself, can handle the …
A Japanese plane caught squarely by antiaircraft fire leaves a trail of smoke and flame as it falls toward the ocean. The pilot might have already been dead by the time the bomber was going down; getting knocked out would probably be a small mercy compared…
The Battle of the Somme, also known as the Somme Offensive, was one of the largest battles of the First World War. It was fought by the armies of the British and French empires against the German Empire and it took place between 1 July and 18 November 1…
Boris Yeltsin, who became president of Russia in 1991, was one of the most complex political leaders of his time. A longtime Communist Party leader, he was an important leader in the reform (social improvement) movements of the late 1980s and 1990s. Yel…
Women bootleggers enjoyed many advantages over men. Many states had laws specifically prohibiting women from being searched. Sometimes they would hide flasks, even cases, on their persons and taunt male police officers. “A painted-up doll was sitting in…
This photograph shows soldiers of the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900, left-to-right: Britain, United States, Australia, British India, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Japan. This was a British propaganda photo where the British requested the height…
On 2 October 1940, Ludwig Fischer, Governor of the Warsaw District in the occupied General Government of Poland, signed the order to officially create a Jewish district (ghetto) in Warsaw. It was to become the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. All…
The Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection features color photographic surveys of the vast Russian Empire made between ca. 1905 and 1915. In those years, photographer Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian E…
This photo was taken in July 1913 by French photographer Stéphane Passet who was hired by Albert Kahn. Albert Kahn was a millionaire banker who pioneered color photography using the process invented by the Lumière brothers. During his trip through exoti…