In 1942, Office of War Information photographer Alfred T. Palmer visited Fort Knox and captured these spectacular photos of tank crews in training. With the outbreak of World War II in Europe, the American Army prepared with the creation of the Armored Forc…
These incredible vintage photos show how one of the world's greatest engineering feats was created in 1906-1915 to bring water to New York City. In 1905, the city's newly established Board of Water Supply launched the Catskill Aqueduct project, which wo…
Frank Hurley was an Australian photographer who became the Australian Imperial Forces’ second official war photographer. When he arrived at the Western Front his rank was honorary captain, but the troops, seeing how he took risks to get his pictures, du…
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 (…
Starting in 1897 and continuing through 1930, the hilly topography of central Seattle was radically altered by a series of regrades, in what might have been the largest such alteration of urban terrain at the time. The regrading strategy was adopted for…
The Maya people have been called many names over the years, such as “the mysterious Maya” and “the magnificent Maya,” and many scholarly books have been written about this ancient Mesoamerican civilization. Many years before European explorers came to t…
The racetrack on top of a factory is actually a very famous now-defunct Fiat factory located in the city Turin in North Italy. When Giovanni Agnelli, the CEO of Fiat, had visited the Ford factory in Detroit, he then decided to expand production by adopt…
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…
By the late eighteenth century, Egypt had been reduced to nothing more than an impoverished and neglected corner of the Ottoman Empire, crippled by endless power struggles among its Mamluk leadership. Then in 1798, Napoleon arrived at the head of a Fren…
These amazing photochrom postcards of New York City were procured by the Detroit Publishing Company and offer a spectacular view of the Big Apple in natural colors. In 1898, the modern City of New York was formed with the consolidation of Brooklyn (unti…
In the final winter of World War II, the eastern German city of Dresden was reduced to rubble, killing tens of thousands and sparking a bitter debate over whether the attack was justified. Dresden was the capital of the state of Saxony, situated on the …
The Battle of Ciudad Juárez marked the end of the first phase of the Mexican Revolution. It was fought between federal forces loyal to President Porfirio Díaz and rebel forces of Francisco Madero. Diaz's 34-year dictatorial rule met with much opposition…
The 1889 World Fair in Paris was symbolically important, since the year 1889 marked the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, and the Fair was announced as a celebration of the event. It attracted more than thirty-two million visitors. The mos…
These are rarely seen color pictures from the Second World War featured in the book “The Second World War in Colour” by the Imperial War Museum. Many are being published for the first time and shed light behind the scenes of the conflict. Color film was…
The South Fork Dam was built between 1838 and 1853 by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to provide water for the operation of the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal between Johnstown and Pittsburgh. Though the dam had been built accordin…
On September 16, 1920, as hundreds of Wall Street workers headed out for lunch, a horse-drawn wagon parked in front of J. P. Morgan Bank — the world’s most powerful banking institution. Inside the wagon, 100 pounds (45 kg) of dynamite with 500 pounds (2…
By the 1890s postcards were widely available throughout continental Europe. The postcards appealed to tourists looking for a souvenir of their travels abroad. Although travel was still largely limited to elites, it was becoming more accessible to the middl…
The events of 1942 were crucial in the way that World War Two played out. The first Americans arrived in England in January - 'Overpaid, oversexed - and in North Africa Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps began their counter-offensive, capturing Tobr…
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 f…
The Statue of Liberty, officially Liberty Enlightening the World, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and Gustave Eiffel, was a gift to the United States from the people of France in 1886. With a tablet inscribed with the date of America’s independen…