In the summer and fall of 1940, German and British air forces clashed in the skies over the United Kingdom, locked in the largest sustained bombing campaign to that date. Victory for the Luftwaffe in the air battle would have exposed Great Britain to in…
During the early twentieth century, Howard Carter, a British Egyptologist, excavated for many years in the Valley of the Kings—a royal burial ground located on the west bank of the ancient city of Thebes, Egypt. When Carter arrived in Egypt in 1891, he …
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict. The crisis was unique in a…
The Germans, as the only colonial power amongst the Central Powers, used plenty of African soldiers of their Schutztruppen in the African theatres of war, but they had never planned to deploy these troops in Europe and would not have been able to do so dur…
It was the night of June 29, 1941, in the foothills of Murmansk, Soviet Union. Commander Oberleutnant Rode ordered some officer candidates "Gruppe Ostermann" to climb "Ridge Musta" to a height of 122m and scout the situation and then report back to him and…
The three groups displayed on the poster are, from top to bottom, "ostbaltische Rasse" ("East Baltic race"), "ostische Rasse" ("Alpine race"), and "dinarische Rasse" ("Dinaric race"). All these three groups were considered part of the sub-races of the Cauc…
The Battle of the Somme, also known as the Somme Offensive, was one of the largest battles of the First World War. It was fought by the armies of the British and French empires against the German Empire and it took place between 1 July and 18 November 1…
Boris Yeltsin, who became president of Russia in 1991, was one of the most complex political leaders of his time. A longtime Communist Party leader, he was an important leader in the reform (social improvement) movements of the late 1980s and 1990s. Yel…
This photograph shows soldiers of the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900, left-to-right: Britain, United States, Australia, British India, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Japan. This was a British propaganda photo where the British requested the height…
On 2 October 1940, Ludwig Fischer, Governor of the Warsaw District in the occupied General Government of Poland, signed the order to officially create a Jewish district (ghetto) in Warsaw. It was to become the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. All…
The Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection features color photographic surveys of the vast Russian Empire made between ca. 1905 and 1915. In those years, photographer Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian E…
The soldiers in the picture were executed after a military trial found them in violation of the Hague convention concerning land warfare, article 23: "It's especially forbidden [...], to make improper use of a flag of truce, of the national flag or of the …
After the Polish-Lithuanian insurrection of 1863, the Russian Imperial government intensified its efforts to Russify the Lithuanian population and alienate it from its historic roots, including the Roman Catholic faith, which had become widespread during t…
The 1989 Hillsborough disaster was an incident that occurred during the FA Cup semi-final match on 15 April 1989 at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England. The crush resulted in the deaths of 96 people and injuries to 766 others. The victims suf…
In the early 1930s, the German military began seeking out new weapons which would not violate the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Assigned to aid in this cause, Captain Walter Dornberger, an artilleryman by trade, was ordered to investigate the feasibil…
Herbert List was a German photographer, who worked for magazines, including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Life, and was associated with Magnum Photos. He traveled regularly between Greece, Italy, and Paris until the outbreak of World War II, when he settled …
On the road to Civil Rights, even children became public figures, such as six-year-old Ruby Bridges, who integrated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans on November 14, 1960. Ruby was born in Tylertown, Mississippi, to Abon and Lucille Bridges. …
In February 1954, actress Marilyn Monroe traveled to Korea to entertain the American troops. She performed a quickly thrown-together show titled Anything Goes to audiences which totaled over 100,000 troops over 4 days. The tour was also a chance for …
An Australian soldier, George "Dick" Whittington, is aided by Papuan orderly Raphael Oimbari, at the Battle of Buna-Gona. Whittington died in February 1943 from the effects of bush typhus, this little-known killer of many Allied and Japanese soldiers in th…
Built as the birthday present to Stalin on his seventieth birthday (December 21st, 1949), the Stalin Monument in Budapest has become the iconic scene of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. The monument was erected on the edge of Városliget, the city park of…