The D-Day Invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, was an immense undertaking involving nearly 6,939 Allied ships, 11,590 aircraft, and 156,000 troops. The military term “D-Day” refers to the day when a combat operation is to start, and “H-hour” …
On the evening of October 8, 1871, more than 300,000 weary residents of the great city of Chicago went to bed expecting nothing more than a quiet night’s sleep followed by an ordinary Monday of going to work or tending family. Instead, these unprepared citi…
In this collection, creepy vintage photographs show anything from the primitive Halloween costumes of the past to Victorian-era portraits where something doesn’t feel quite right. Perhaps it’s grainy black and white, sometimes sepia feel to them. Or maybe b…
In 1972, the United States federal government, which was looking to document living conditions among Native American communities, employed the services of photographer Terry Eiler to visit the south-west of the country and give an outsider view into the li…
Dubbed by the media as the “world’s largest log cabin,” (actually, second largest), the Forestry Building was constructed as part of Portland’s Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905. The cabin was an enormous structure, measuring 206 feet long (…
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…
The crinoline appeared on the fashion scene in the mid-1800s and took its name from the French word crin (“horsehair”), a stiff material made using horsehair — and "linen." A crinoline (hoop) is defined as a framework consisting of round/oval circles (s…
Manzanar, Spanish for “apple orchard,” began soon after 1900 in the dream of a fruit-growing empire and today is a national symbol of America’s decision at the onset of World War II to confine thousands of its citizens of Japanese ancestry behind barbed wi…
With the rise of the daily newspapers in the 1880s, more than half of all newspapers in the United States were sold by newsboys (and a few newsgirls). Newspapers that previously had appeared only in morning editions began to be offered in afternoon edit…
The boy and girl looked toward the camera. They were just old enough to understand the task assigned to them: to stand very still, with arms linked, and direct their gaze to the contraption in front of them. Isaac was eight and Rosa, six. How two former…
The history of the Vietnam War is one that has been complicated by politics, and it is a history that is still being written and rewritten. The war involved a fratricidal conflict between the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and …
In 1955, photographer Charles Hewitt visited Salvador Dalí and his wife (and muse) Gala at their home to shoot photos for a British editorial magazine called Picture Post. The famous artist posed up showing his surreal personality and didn’t miss this o…
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…
The samurai were a class of people who served the aristocracy with arms. The word first appeared in a document of the Heian period; before that time such people had been called mono-no-fu or bushi. Mono means ‘thing’ and fu means ‘man’; that is, men who dea…
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…
Selena was a singer-songwriter who came to be known as the “Queen of Tejano music,” a popular form of music originating in Texas and taking influences from polka, rock, conjunto, and mariachi. An enormously popular singer in Latino communities across No…
Ellis Island served as the United State’s largest immigration station, processing up to 12 million people between 1892 and 1954. These historical photos were taken between 1906 and 1914 by amateur photographer Augustus Sherman. Sherman was an untrained,…
The Lebanese Civil War was both an internal Lebanese affair and a regional conflict involving a host of regional and international actors. It revolved around some of the issues that dominated regional politics in the Middle East in the latter part of th…
These colored photos by Jules Gervais-Courtellemont will take you back through time to see how Paris looked in 1923. The vivid images are produced using the autochrome technique in which the plates are covered in microscopic red, green and blue colored …
This black and white image, taken by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, is the only known photograph of JFK and Monroe together. Monroe is still wearing the infamously tight-fighting, sheer rhinestone-studded dress she wore when singing earlier a…