This photograph shows a sailor removing the manacle from a newly freed slave. The picture is part of a small collection donated by Samuel Chidwick to the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth. His father Able Seaman Joseph Chidwick, born in 1881, was se…
Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin's elder son, served in the Red Army during the Second World War, and was captured, or surrendered, in the initial stages of the German invasion of the USSR. There are still many contradictory legends in circulation about the d…
Towards the end of World War II, U.S. intelligence officials were afraid that the German dictator would flee Germany by assuming a disguise. By 1944 the world identified the man largely by his trademark toothbrush mustache and oily side-slicked hair, so…
The trench soldier of World War I had to cope with millions of rats. The omnipresent rats were attracted by the human waste of war – not simply sewage waste but also the bodies of men long forgotten who had been buried in the trenches and often reappeared …
In the early morning of 17 June 1939, Eugène Weidmann became the last person to be publicly executed by guillotine. He had been convicted of multiple kidnappings and murders, including that of a young American socialite. Beginning with the botched kidna…
During the alcohol prohibition (1919-1933), the transportation and brewing/cultivation of alcohol was prohibited. Some people who brewed Moonshine (a type of whiskey) did it in the middle of a forest or meadow. Moonshiners were often sought after by law…
The socialist fraternal kiss became famous via Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev, who were photographed exercising the ritual. During the festivities of the 30th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic of East Germany in 1979, photographer Regis …
The two men in this photograph are Technical Sergeant William E. Thomas and Private First Class Joseph Jackson of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, but at the time of the photograph were part of the 969th Artillery Battalion. Scrawling such messages …
Just before midnight on April 14, 1912, the ocean liner Titanic struck an iceberg. Less than three hours later, she lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, having taken with her more than 1,500 of the roughly 2,200 people on board. The exact size of th…
Vasily Blokhin is recorded as having executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand, including his killing of about 7,000 Polish prisoners of war during the Katyn massacre in spring 1940, making him the most prolific official executioner in record…
Berlin after the War was a post-apocalyptic world. One of the largest and most modern cities in Europe was left a wasteland. There were vast piles of rubble everywhere. Other areas were rows of building walls with collapsed interiors — the skeletons of …
On a hot August night in 1930, a crowd gathered in front of an Indiana jail — men, women, and children shouting and jeering, demanding that the sheriff release his three prisoners. Three African-American teenagers: Tom Shipp, Abe Smith, and James Camero…
The Russians were coming from the East, the Brits and Americans from the West, all with the objective of taking the Chancellery, knowing that would signal the end. So when they both finally met there, and the Nazis were irrefutably vanquished, they must ha…
This sign was posted at the 363rd Station Hospital during World War II, in Papua, New Guinea. It effectively (if morbidly) promoted the use of Atabrine, an anti-malaria drug. Also, it's an example of persuasive advertising where the skulls and the langu…
On April 12, 1980, Samuel Doe led a military coup, killing President William R. Tolbert, Jr., in the Executive Mansion. Twenty-six of Tolbert’s supporters were also killed in the fighting. Shortly after the coup, government ministers were walked publicly a…
French women who befriended the Nazis, through coerced, forced, or voluntary relationships, were singled out for shameful retribution following the liberation of France. The woman photographed here, believed to have been a prostitute who serviced German…
In 1909 a number of Jewish residents decided to move to a healthier environment, outside the crowded and noisy city of Jaffa. They established a company called Ahuzat-Bayit and with the financial assistance of the Jewish National Fund purchased some twe…
Al Capone started one of the first soup kitchens. The kitchen employed a few people but fed many more. In fact, preceding the passage of the Social Security Act, “soup kitchens” like the one Al Capone founded, provided the only meals that some unemployed A…
This seal was actually a seal to King Tut’s fifth shrine. The king was buried in a series of four sarcophagi, which were in turn kept inside a series of five shrines. This unbroken seal stayed 3,245 years untouched. The late discovery of Tut’s tomb resu…
On November 24, 1963, about 300,000 people watched a horse-drawn caisson, which had borne the body of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Unknown Soldier, carry Kennedy's flag-covered casket down the White House drive, past parallel rows of soldiers bearing the …