Elizabeth Taylor, born in 1932, was a British-American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. She then became the highest-paid movie star in the 1…
Jayne Mansfield (born in 1933) was an American actress, singer, nightclub entertainer best known for her bombshell curves and film roles during the 1950s and 1960s. A sex symbol while under contract at 20th Century Fox, Mansfield was known for her well-publ…
In October 1949, the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong claimed victory and formed the People’s Republic of China. Socialist regimes now held power across one-fifth of the globe, ruling a combined population of almost 800 million people. Maint…
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…
Claude Joséphine Rose "Claudia" Cardinale (15 April 1938 – 25 September 2025) was an Italian film actress. She starred in several acclaimed European films of the 1960s and 1970s, acting in Italian, French, and English-language productions. Born and r…
David Douglas Duncan was a renowned war photographer and photojournalist, who first encountered Picasso in 1956 when he infamously rang the doorbell of La Californie, the artist’s home in Cannes. At the time, Picasso was in the bathtub and allowed Duncan to…
Bruce Lee (Chinese name Li Jun Fan, born in 1940) was a Hong Kong and American martial artist, martial arts instructor, actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and philosopher. He was the founder of Jeet Kune Do, a hybrid martial arts philosophy drawing fr…
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…
In his lifetime, Arnold Schwarzenegger has worn many shoes. A former champion builder to a Hollywood action icon to a politician, Schwarzenegger has been them all, and more. He has won several titles from Mr. Universe to Mr. Olympia during his bodybuilding …
Brigitte Bardot was born in September 1934 in Paris and is a French actress, singer, and model. Famous for portraying sexually emancipated personae with hedonistic lifestyles, she was one of the best-known sex symbols of the late 1950s and 1960s. Bardot…
Helen Mirren was born in London to a Russian-born father and a Scottish mother. The family’s last name was Mironoff until Helen’s father decided to Anglicize it when she was 10 years old. She joined Britain’s National Youth Theatre at age 18 and the Royal S…
The flight attendant occupation took permanent shape in the 1930s as “women’s work,” that is, work not only predominately performed by women but also defined as embodying white, middle-class ideals of femininity. As the nascent commercial aviation indus…
Before the they walked on the moon on July 20, 1969, the Apollo program astronauts trained in Flagstaff, a small city nestled in a forest of ponderosa pines at the base of the San Francisco Peaks, Arizona’s tallest mountains. In fact, all 24 astronauts …
This card was used by police in the Soviet Union to identify different nationalities by facial phenotypes. Originally it was developed by a group of Soviet criminologists based on various mugshot collections. The exact date is unknown, however, based on…
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 diff…
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, creating …
The Amphicar was manufactured in West Germany and first made an appearance in America at the 1961 New York Auto Show. Originally designed by Hanns Trippel, these amphibious cars hit the US market from 1961 to 1967. Most notable for their ability to crui…
In 1966 Mao Zedong, the Communist leader of China, started a political campaign that became known as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Mao called on China's youth to help him purge capitalist influences and bourgeois thinking in government, teaching,…
The Anglo-French Concorde was co-developed by BAC, a forerunner of BAE Systems, and Aerospatiale, now a part of Airbus, and has a storied history. New technology was required throughout the plane. A distinctive design innovation was the plane’s droop no…
Since the early 1900s Bell Telephone Laboratories or Bell Labs, has been a major source of technological experimentation and change. Bell Labs has sponsored research far beyond the limits of its original focus, the telephone. From telephones to radar to co…