In the hardships caused by the Great Depression, the American government created the Farm Security Administration to help impoverished farmers get on their feet. One of the FSA’s most notable efforts was its small team of documentary photographers, who travele…
Shortly after the revolution, the new Cuban Castro visited the United States in 1959 at the invitation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Since taking power in January 1959, Castro had infuriated the American government with his policies of n…
It’s hard to believe it, for a brief period of 6 years, it was possible to mail a baby or small child through the U.S. Postal Service. Yeah, you heard it right, it was legal to mail a baby in the United States and it happened more than once and by all a…
These images are part of the book Weird War Two, a book from the Imperial War Museums that explores the stranger side of the Second World War. A war as extensive and long-lasting as World War II produces an incalculable number of artifacts. And museums …
On March 27, 1964, at 5:36 PM, a megathrust earthquake occurred in the Prince William Sound region of Alaska. The epicenter was about 10 km east of the mouth of College Fiord, approximately 90 km west of Valdez and 120 km east of Anchorage. Lasting four…
The largest wooden airplane ever constructed and flown only one time, the H-4 Hercules (nicknamed Spruce Goose) represents one of humanity's greatest attempts to conquer the skies. It was born out of a need to move troops and material across the Atlanti…
Prohibition was the attempt to outlaw the production and consumption of alcohol in the United States. The call for prohibition began primarily as a religious movement in the early 19th century – the state of Maine passed the first state prohibition law …
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…
Born in 1907, Frida Kahlo lived for just 47 years. Andre Breton summed up Kahlo as “a ribbon around a bomb.” Here are some facts about the woman remembered as one of Mexico’s greatest artists. Kahlo lived most of her life in pain, the effect of contract…
The Battle of Midway was a turning point in the Pacific War. Before the Battle of the Coral Sea on 7-8 May 1942, the Imperial Navy of Japan had swept aside all of its enemies from the Pacific and Indian oceans. At the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japane…
At the end of the war, millions of people were dead and millions homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and much of the European industrial infrastructure had been destroyed. The Soviet Union, too, had been heavily affected. Borders were redrawn …
Situated halfway between the city of Medellin and Bogota, the Colombian capital, Hacienda Napoles was the vast ranch owned by the drug baron Pablo Escobar. In the early 1980s, after Escobar had become rich but before he had started the campaign of assas…
These iconic photographs were taken in 1947 at Vienna’s Southern Railway Station, where photographer Ernst Haas witnessed the moving scenes of the return of the first 600 Austrian war prisoners from Eastern Europe. Haas’s images show the anticipation an…
As the Red Army and the Western Allies pressed closer and closer to Berlin suicides grew. Thousands of Germans committed suicide in the spring of 1945, rather than face occupation and the expected abuse by their victors. 3,881 people were recorded as co…
Rudolf Hoess (Rudolf Höss) was the architect and commandant of the largest killing center ever created, the death camp Auschwitz, whose name has come to symbolize humanity's ultimate descent into evil. On 1 May 1940, Hoess was appointed commandant of a …
Pictured here in September 1939, Einstein relaxes on the beach near his Long Island summer home with friend and local department store owner David Rothman. After some initial confusion in the store resulting from Einstein’s thickly accented request for …
Dagen H (H day) was the day, 3 September 1967, on which traffic in Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right. The "H" stands for "Högertrafik", the Swedish word for "right traffic". After all, Sweden’s Scandinavian neig…
"Toffs and Toughs" is a 1937 photograph of five boys: two dressed in the Harrow School uniform including waistcoat, top hat, boutonnière, and cane; and three nearby wearing the plainclothes of pre-war working-class youths. The picture was taken by Jimmy…
The Mangbetu people had a distinctive look and this was partly due to their elongated heads. At birth, the heads of babies’ were tightly wrapped with cloth in order to give their heads the elongated look. The custom of skull elongation called by the nat…
Seen here is an aerial black and white photo of the famous Cologne Cathedral during World War II. The cathedral suffered fourteen hits by aerial bombs during the war. It did not collapse but stood tall in an otherwise flattened city. The twin spires are…