In the 1920s and 1930s airship mooring masts were built in many countries. A mooring mast is a mast or tower that contains a fitting on its top that allows for the bow of the airship to attach its mooring line to the structure. When it is not necessary …
In the early 20th century, polio was one of the most feared diseases in industrialized countries, paralyzing hundreds of thousands of children every year. A highly infectious disease, polio attacks the nervous system and can lead to paralysis, disabilit…
On 6 October 1889, the Moulin Rouge (English: The Red Mill) opened in the Jardin de Paris, at the foot of the Montmartre hill. Its creator Spaniard Joseph Oller and his manager Charles Zidler were formidable businessmen who understood the public's taste…
During the Great Depression, millions of people were out of work across the United States. Unable to find another job locally, many unemployed people hit the road, traveling from place to place, hoping to find some work. A few of these people had cars, …
A picture of a crowd in New York and there is not one unhatted head. Margaret Bourke-White shot this bird’s-eye-view of Manhattan’s Garment District —specifically 36th St. between 8th and 9th Aves.—for a FORTUNE magazine story titled “Cloak and Suit”. Wha…
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…
There was a time when building a car meant starting from almost nothing. No rulebook, no safety standards, no established idea of what a car was even supposed to look like. Engineers, inventors, and backyard dreamers all threw their wildest ideas at the…
At the turn of the twentieth century, one woman carried a camera into one of the most remote and unforgiving landscapes on Earth, and what she brought back changed how the outside world understood the people who had long called it home. These photographs, i…
There is a group of people who have lived in the northern reaches of Japan for thousands of years, predating the nation itself, yet most of the world has never heard their name. The Ainu are among the oldest indigenous communities in East Asia, and the rare…
Before Hawaii became the 50th star on the American flag, it was already something close to paradise in the popular imagination. The color photographs taken across the islands in the 1950s do something remarkable: they pull viewers into a world that feels bo…
Few photographers have captured the soul of a civilization at the precise moment it began to change. Antoin Sevruguin was one of them, an artist whose lens bore witness to the twilight of an ancient empire and the quiet upheaval of modernity pressing agains…
From the wreckage of the 1929 stock market crash, a new American obsession was born. As the economy crumbled, the companies that survived found themselves locked in fierce competition, and many turned to the power of design to stay relevant. Everyday object…
Hollywood has always been a place of illusion — carefully constructed personas, fabricated romances, and studio-engineered narratives designed to keep audiences captivated and ticket sales climbing. But behind the velvet ropes and the camera flashbulbs, cou…
The golden era of American organized crime unfolded not in shadowy back alleys alone, but in broad daylight—through police mugshots, courtroom photographs, and news images that captured mobsters with an audacity that would seem unthinkable today. These men …
The acrid smoke hung thick in dimly lit basements across America's cities, where customers from society's highest and lowest rungs sought refuge in clouds of vaporized opium. These haunting photographs capture a shadowy chapter of American history when unde…
In an era when a family of four is considered average, photographs of households with ten, twelve, or even twenty children seem almost unfathomable. Yet for most of American history, sprawling families weren't just common—they were the expected pattern of l…
Well before the celebratory ceremonies of 1959, Hawaii occupied a complex and often uncertain place within the American story. Annexed by the United States in 1898, the islands spent more than six decades as a U.S. territory, shaped by global events, cu…
The leisure suit was impossible to miss in the 1970s. Worn in offices, nightclubs, and everywhere in between, it became a defining look of the decade and a clear break from the stiff formality that had dominated men’s fashion for generations. Comfortable, a…
Few figures from classic Hollywood remain as emotionally resonant as Judy Garland, whose image in vintage photographs captures both the brilliance of stardom and the weight it carried. An American actress and singer with a career that stretched across four …
Christmas is usually associated with comfort and cheer, but these images tell a very different story. Far from the warm and jolly figure known today, vintage photographs reveal a version of Santa Claus that feels unsettling, awkward, and sometimes outright …