After Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain traveled twice to the continent hoping to appease Hitler’s aggressive intentions, and to prevent another destructive European war, but with a distinct lack of success. …
These military portraits collected by Christopher B. Steiner, a professor of art history and anthropology at Connecticut College, capture moments of soldiers being goofy while posing with fake military props. Some images appear to be staged to accentuate si…
These posters were published in the Soviet anti-religious magazine, Bezbozhnik (“The Godless”) from 1922 to 1941. The main purpose of the magazine was to thwart any religious beliefs that were supposedly too distracting for the working class. The magazi…
These idyllic photographs, taken by William Morris Grundy, capture the rural life in England during the Victorian era. Born in Birmingham in 1806, Grundy took up photography in 1855 and made dozens of stereoscopic photos, primarily posed genre scenes of…
Spirit photography began in the late 19th century, around the time that the spiritualism movement was gaining traction across Europe and the United States. The photographers who practiced it claimed that they could capture images of portrait subjects and th…
As the consequences of the Great Depression, unemployment, poverty, and the effects of the Dust Bowl ravaged the country in the 1930s, government programs such as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) were established. American photographers were employed to …
During World War II, America’s railroads were an important part of the war effort and it’s estimated that from 1941 to 1945 trains transported close to 44 million American troops. Between the war years of 1942 and 1944, trains carried 98 percent of mili…
At the dawn of the 20th century, automobiles were an infant technology with none of the infrastructure we take for granted today: road maps, traffic signals, pavement, gas stations, fast food, parking lots, expressways, or motels. Most people in the wor…
These photographs, taken by the Lomen family, capture the indigenous Yupik Eskimo and the prospectors of the Gold Rush in Alaska during the early decades of the 20th century. The term "Eskimo" is used in Alaska to refer to arctic Alaskans including Inup…
Fitness, as we know it today, may seem to be a relatively modern invention, but physical exercise obviously goes back much further than that. Starting from the early 20th century, people used elaborate contraptions, painful machinery, bizarre devices, a…
Early on the morning of September 11, 2001, the United States seemed to be just about the safest place in the world to live. The nation hadn’t been attacked on its own soil since the bombing of Pearl Harbor six decades before. War seemed like something t…
Antonio Gaudí started work designing a building in 1883 he originally termed the “church of the poor”. After disagreements between the founding association and the original architect, Gaudí was assigned to lead the project in 1884, and thus produced an ent…
Nobody could tell exactly when it began and nobody could predict when it would end. At the outset, they didn’t even call it a depression. At worst it was a recession, a brief slump, a “correction” in the market, a glitch in the rising curve of prosperit…
In the 1970s, New York City was a broken, ungovernable metropolis barreling into anarchy. New Yorkers remember this decade as the bleakest, most crime-ridden, and most uncertain time the city has ever faced. It was a time of economic, criminal, and cultura…
This collection of photos from Naval Air Station Corpus Christi during World War II shows the American war effort at full speed and the air cadets in training. The facility covered 20,000 acres (81 km2) and had 997 hangars, shops, barracks, warehouses, …
During the rule of Queen Victoria (1837 1901), the British shipbuilding industry experienced great strides. Especially after the Industrial Revolution, wooden shipbuilding techniques which had lasted for millennia were radically changed with the introduct…
Between the 1860s and 1930s, the monowheel (also referred to as a monocycle) was frequently suggested as a serious new form of transportation. Numerous inventors came up with their own versions of the monowheel, some human-powered, some electric, some w…
In the recorded history of Washington, DC the Knickerbocker storm remains unsurpassed, both for the amount of snow it produced and for its devastating toll on human life. The collapse of the roof at the Knickerbocker Theater, which took 98 lives (many of th…
All NASA craft must undergo complete testing through one of the administration’s 42 major wind tunnels and it’s cleared for liftoff once all the parameters are reached. These wind tunnels range from just a few inches wide to cavernous enough to test ful…
In 1907, Joseph “Alligator Joe” Campbell and Francis Victor Earnest Sr. relocated an alligator farm in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to a Los Angeles location adjacent to the Selig Zoo and Motion Picture Studio in Los Angeles. The Alligator farm rented reptiles to th…