These photos, taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein, show cowboys and dudes from the Quarter Circle U Ranch in Big Horn County, Montana as they gather their herds for the seasonal roundup. Roundups were held within a specific r…
These photos, taken from a book on phrenology, are packed with strange theories and a whole host of strange illustrations. Published by Chicago phrenologist L.A. Vaught in 1902, the book lays out the 42 known elements of human nature (including Acquisitiven…
These pictures are not staged and show Tippi Hedren, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, with her husband, Noel Marshall, her daughter, actress Melanie Griffith, and their lion, Neil. In 1969, Hedren and Marshall were filming in Africa and came across…
Mississippi’s Tatum Salt Dome in rural Lamar County near Hattiesburg was the site of two nuclear test explosions in the mid-1960s. The Salmon test on Oct. 22, 1964 and the Sterling test on Dec. 3, 1966, were conducted to help determine whether and how nuc…
Mug shot photography revolutionized crime investigations and enabled the police to keep visual records of the arrested criminals. Beginning in the mid-1800s, police photographed the faces of known criminals. Called "mug shots" (after the British slang w…
A cucumber forms a bulbous nose; the open maul of a wolf simulates an eye; a striking iron is an ear; a shark is a mouth; a pile of books composes a torso. These are some of the startling details in the composite paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1…
During World War II, letters were essential for soldiers and sailors stationed overseas. The average soldier wrote six letters a week. Those letters took anywhere from 1 to 4 weeks to cross the ocean to the United States. Each letter received at home assure…
The Great Migrations from 1910 to 1960 brought hundreds of thousands of African-Americans from the South to Chicago, where they became an urban population. They created churches, community organizations, businesses, music, and literature. African Americans …
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 …
The Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw (or Kwakiutl) are Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous people. Most live in British Columbia on northern Vancouver Island and the adjoining mainland, and on islands around Johnstone Strait and Queen Charlotte Strait. Originally made up…
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…
William Patrick Stuart-Houston (né Hitler), son of Alois Hitler Jr, was the half-nephew of Adolf Hitler. He was born in the Toxteth area of Liverpool, England, in 1911, in a house that was, ironically, later destroyed in a German air raid. Alois Hitler …
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…
When the Irish talk about the “Land War,” they have in mind either three phases of anti-landlord agitation in the late nineteenth century, or, more narrowly, the first of these phases, which lasted from 1879 until 1882. The movement emerged during a sev…
For thousands of years, humans could only speculate what the Earth looked like. This changed on August 23, 1966, when the world received its first view of Earth taken by a spacecraft from the vicinity of the Moon. The photo was shot from a distance of a…
A NASA tech briefing "Using Spider-Web Patterns To Determine Toxicity" was published in April 1995. The work was done by researchers at Marshall Space Flight Center to see how various substances — including caffeine — affect spider web patterns. Accordi…
Stonehenge, on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire in southern England, is certainly one of the most well-known and well-studied prehistoric megalithic monuments. Scholars had determined that there was a very long process of construction and use of Stonehe…
Advertising has become an integral part of our socio-economic lives and it’s carefully designed to speak to the hearts and minds of consumers. It taps into our psyche, hopes, dreams, goals, and fears. In this article, we will flip through the pages of h…
Jayne Mansfield (born in 1933) was an American actress, singer, nightclub entertainer best known for her bombshell curves and film roles during the 1950s and 1960s. A sex symbol while under contract at 20th Century Fox, Mansfield was known for her well-publ…
In the late nineteenth century, the photography of criminals became as standardized as anthropological photography, largely because of the work of Paris police official Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914). Son of Louis Adolphe Bertillon, a well-known anthrop…