From the early days of flight and the "golden age of travel", to modern-day airlines, air travel has changed a lot over the past century. Through this photo collection, we take a journey through time to show you what air travel looked like from the 1930s to…
William Bullard, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, worked as a photographer without a studio, visiting clients around the town with his camera strapped to his bicycle. From 1897 to 1917, Bullard, who was white, took portraits of his predominantly black …
By the early 1900s, household electricity and running water started to become a norm in the Western world. Industrialization brought the evolution of kitchen design to a new era. Factories mass-produced fixtures, ever-more modern appliances, cabinetry, li…
Albert Einstein is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quant…
These vivid photos from inside the 1972 Texas State Fair exhibition hall show people sampling a wide variety of the products of their state, from eggs and beef to pecans and spring water. The Dallas State Fair & Exposition, to which the present State Fa…
The Sámi form an indigenous ethnic group that settled in wide areas of Norway, Sweden, northern Finland, and on the Kola peninsula in Russia. It is difficult to establish their number, because ethnic definitions may vary, and the choice of identifying o…
Chariot racing was one of the most popular sports in the ancient Olympic Games and it was dangerous to both drivers and horses as they often suffered serious injury and even death. Two-wheeled carriages were drawn by horses and raced around a stadium ca…
Picasso’s self-portraits are important because they span his entire career, and we can trace how his manner of self-depiction changed over time. It’s interesting to compare the self-portraits from, for instance, the Blue Period to those done when he was…
On August 25, 1914, the German army ravaged the Belgian city of Leuven (Louvain). Virtually the entire city center was systematically destroyed by the German occupying forces. The fire destroyed more than two thousand buildings and 248 citizens were killed…
In the early years of the 20th century, a number of circuses toured Northern Ireland providing entertainment, tricks, and a lot of excitement for the crowds. Though the dim lighting condition inside the circus’ tent prevented images from being made of t…
Local historians routinely disagree on how many Cliff Houses have been built in the wind-beaten northwestern edge of San Francisco. Three is the most common answer, some argue that four is correct, and even fice has its partisans. But everyone does agre…
The Golden State got its nickname from the Sierra Nevada gold that lured so many miners and settlers to the West, but California has earned much more wealth from so-called “black gold” than from metallic gold. When Europeans finally arrived in Californi…
Before the invention of motorized chainsaws and logging machinery, the hard work of felling trees was done by the lumberjacks using hand tools such as axes and saws. The work was difficult, dangerous, intermittent, low-paying, and involved living in pri…
USS Brooklyn, the third United States Navy armored cruiser, was completed in 1896 in Cramp, New York, and named after a famous quarter of the City. Recognizable by her three very tall funnels, she embodied grace and might, being the tallest, fastest cruiser…
Although the birth control pill and other hormonal contraceptive devices are modern inventions, birth control forms have been around for thousands of years. The earliest known recordings of birth control methods date back to ancient Mesopotamia, around …
It was a blast heard around the world. News of what happened when two ships collided in the harbour of the historic port city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on December 6, 1917, made headlines worldwide. In times of war, accidents happened in busy seaports, and …
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, strongmen more often exhibited their incredible power as circus performers and entertainers than as competitive athletes. Originating in Europe and spreading to the United States, physical culturists incl…
These amazing vintage photos show what it was like to go holiday shopping in New York City in the 1910s. At the turn of the century, department stores in NYC amped up window displays in an attempt to charm window shoppers into actually coming into the store…
Starting in 1897 and continuing through 1930, the hilly topography of central Seattle was radically altered by a series of regrades, in what might have been the largest such alteration of urban terrain at the time. The regrading strategy was adopted for…
These color pictures of the vibrant landscapes and towns of Switzerland were created using the Photochrom process, a technique that colorizes monochrome images with precision. While the prints may deceptively look like color photographs, but in fact, ar…