The rapid rise of automobiles at the turn of the 20th century presented an immediate problem: where to park all these vehicles roaming the streets? The concept for vertical parking garages was and is driven by two factors: a need for parking spaces and …
Advertising has become an integral part of our socio-economic lives and it’s carefully designed to speak to the hearts and minds of consumers. It taps into our psyche, hopes, dreams, goals, and fears. In this article, we will flip through the pages of h…
Raquel Welch (born Jo Raquel Tejada in 1940) is an American actress and sex symbol who took the worldwide media by storm after the 1966 release of a movie poster featuring her natural assets in a wild and woolly prehistoric bikini. She was the oldest of thr…
Sophia Loren (born in1934, Rome, Italy), is an Italian film actress who rose above her poverty-stricken origins in postwar Naples to become universally recognized as one of Italy’s most beautiful women and its most famous movie star. She was named by the Am…
Clint Eastwood, in full Clinton Eastwood, Jr., (born May 31, 1930, San Francisco, California, U.S.), American motion-picture actor who emerged as one of the most popular Hollywood stars in the 1960s and went on to become a prolific and respected director-produ…
These amazing color photos of Belfast capture the shipyards, the lively streets, the everyday life, the fashion, and document a city worlds away from the one we know today. The pictures were taken by documentary and Press photographer, Bert Hardy, who's…
In the final winter of World War II, the eastern German city of Dresden was reduced to rubble, killing tens of thousands and sparking a bitter debate over whether the attack was justified. Dresden was the capital of the state of Saxony, situated on the …
In the 1950s, the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) – that part of Germany which had been the Soviet Occupation Zone in the post World War Two division of Germany – was threatening to bleed dry, as one in six people fled, usually in search of work und…
In the seventies and eighties, Venice Beach was considered a place of peace, love and roller skates. Venice, originally called "Venice of America", was founded by wealthy developer Abbot Kinney in 1905 as a beach resort town, 14 miles (23 km) west of Los An…
Throughout the 1950s, dead rotting whales toured around Europe to promote the declining whaling industry after World War 2. The story began in Trondheim, Norway, in 1952. A mysterious and as yet unidentified organization harpooned three fin whales off t…
In the 1950s and 1960s, there existed a 'parallel world' of American advertising where mainstream brands targeted the African-American middle and upper classes in lead magazines such as Ebony and Jet. These ads never ran in wider society and show a very differ…
Don Draper of the TV show “Mad Men” might have been fictional, but the reality was that art imitates life in the ad industry. Behind closed doors on Madison Avenue was a powerhouse of agencies where talented men and women reinvented the industry, creati…
The Human Spinning Rotor or simply “The Rotor” was invented by a German scientist, Ernst Hoffmeister, and was financially supported by businessman Carl Friese. They operated a Rotor in West Germany at Oktoberfest in 1949. Hoffmeister and Friese had an a…
When an earthquake ripped through Santa Monica on March 10, 1933, the city was already in bad shape. The quiet community on the Pacific coast had prided itself in being socially elite and culturally refined, but that pride hadn’t stopped the Great Depre…
These propaganda paintings show how North Korea views America and by association the West. They depict the alleged mass murder of Sinchon civilians between October and December 1950. The regime claims that around 35,000 people were brutally tortured and…
Blow dryers were invented in the late 19th century. The first model was created by Alexander F. “Beau” Godefroy in his salon in France in 1890. His invention was a large, seated version that consisted of a bonnet that attached to the chimney pipe of a g…
In 1941, LIFE magazine decided to document the lives of one of the biggest single demographics in the U.S.: the 30 million housewives who did most of the washing, made beds, cooked meals and nursed almost all the babies of the nation, with little help, no …
Following World War II, pressures to recognize, challenge, and change inequalities for minorities grew. One of the most notable challenges to the status quo was the 1954 landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas which que…
The Soviet sniper girl Kyra PetrovskayaKyra was born in 1918 on the coast of the Black Sea in Crimea. Some sources say that her original name was "Cyrus." Her father was a decorated pilot in the Imperial Russian air force, receiving the Order (Cross) of Sa…
The history of women's workwear tells a unique story about the events of the twentieth century and the changing role of women. The amount of control that women have had over their clothes depended largely on what type of job she had. In domestic service…