The photograph is taken during a battle of Saipan that claimed the lives of 22,000 Japanese civilians – many by suicide – and nearly all 30,000 Japanese troops on the island. Of the 71,000 American troops who landed on Saipan, 3,426 perished, while more th…
In May 1910, European royalty gathered in London for the funeral of King Edward VII. Among the mourners were nine reigning kings, who were photographed together in what very well may be the only photograph of nine reigning kings ever taken. Of the nine sov…
The picture was taken during the Battle of Verdun, one of the deadliest battles of the Great War. The concentration of so much fighting in such a small area devastated the land, resulting in miserable conditions for troops on both sides. The shells turn…
At 1:10 a.m. on May 9, 1945, night owls in the USSR heard a radio report that Nazi Germany had officially surrendered to the Soviet Union. Up to 30 million soldiers and civilians were dead, the Soviet Union had lost a third of its national wealth, citie…
Originally intended to prevent crime and drunkenness, it soon became clear that Prohibition did just the opposite, as illegal speakeasies became prevalent and bootlegging essentially led to the establishment of organized crime in the United States. Iron…
This last known picture of Hitler was taken approximately two days prior to his death as he stands outside his Berlin bunker entrance surveying the devastating bomb damage. With Germany lying in ruins after six years of war, and with defeat imminent, Hitle…
The nuclear test of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon was codenamed Trinity, but the atomic device was nicknamed The Gadget. The date of the Trinity test is usually considered to be the beginning of the Atomic Age. The gadget was an implosion-typ…
Although Adolf Hitler claimed the Germans were of a superior Aryan race of white, tall, blonde hair, blue-eyed individuals, he himself was of modest height, blue-eyed, and brown-haired. Traudl Junge, his last secretary often told in interviews, that peo…
On 28 June 1919, the peace treaty that ended World War I was signed by Germany and the Allies at the Palace of Versailles near Paris. Allied interests were represented by the ‘Big Three’: British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Premier George …
B-25 Mitchell, nicknamed Ruthless Ruth, pulls up after making a skip-bombing run on Japanese coastal defense vessel No. 134. The plane was flown by USAAF Lieutenant Louie A. Mikell of the 499th Bomb Squadron (Bats Outa Hell), part of the 5th Air Force. …
The B-32 Dominator was a heavy bomber made for United States Army Air Forces during World War II, and had the distinction of being the last Allied aircraft to be engaged in combat during World War II. The B-32 Dominator was initially intended as insuran…
Albert Einstein, whose theories exploded and reshaped our ideas of how the universe works, died on April 18, 1955, of heart failure. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the ev…
In an event that is widely acknowledged to have sparked the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of Emperor Franz Josef and heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was shot to death along with his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sar…
This detonation, known as the Baker Test, was part of Operation Crossroads in Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. The purpose of the tests was to investigate the effect of nuclear weapons on warships. The Crossroads tests were the first of many nuclear tests h…
In the summer of 1911, the American archaeologist Hiram Bingham arrived in Peru with a small team of explorers hoping to find Vilcabamba, the last Inca stronghold to fall to the Spanish. Traveling on foot and by mule, Bingham and his team made their way…