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…
The Hollywood sign may be unique among American icons. It is a landmark whose white letters are familiar around the world as the prime symbol of the movies. Day after day tourists with cameras wander into surrounding Griffith Park or troll up and down t…
The Golden Gate Bridge is unquestionably an American icon whose symbolism power rivals that of the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty, in part through its representation of optimism, a distinctly American trait. Its visual linkage of form and n…
Ellis Island served as the United State’s largest immigration station, processing up to 12 million people between 1892 and 1954. These historical photos were taken between 1906 and 1914 by amateur photographer Augustus Sherman. Sherman was an untrained,…
By 1930, Texas was already the nation’s leading oil producing state, yet East Texas remained the only area of the state that had not obtained high-volume oil production in spite of having the state’s first oil discovery. This changed when on October 3, 1930…
Before anyone ever heard the word “cowgirl,” there were women who ventured west. Most traveled with their families on covered wagons, beginning in the 1840s. They moved from crowded eastern cities to settle in western states such as Kansas, Nebraska, Co…
By the outbreak of the Second World War, Poland’s Military Aviation, quite commonly and incorrectly called the Polish Air Force, was inferior in every aspect. From having the world’s first all-metal built and fastest fighter plane in the mid-1930s to fl…
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…
In this article, we’ve collected a few rare photographs from the 1870s taken by Shinichi Suzuki (1835-1918) who photographed Japan for a foreign newsmagazine called The Far East. After his lumber family business was destroyed by a tsunami in 1854, Suzuk…
The history of Titanic, of the White Star Line, is one of the most tragically short stories ever. The world had waited expectantly for its launching and again for its sailing; had read accounts of its tremendous size and its unexampled completeness and …
From the earliest recognition that a more deadly form of influenza was spreading quickly in fall 1918, US public health authorities recommended masks for doctors, nurses, and anyone taking care of influenza patients. Newspapers provided instructions on …
Don Draper of the TV show “Mad Men” might have been fictional, but the reality was that art imitates life in the ad industry. Behind closed doors on Madison Avenue was a powerhouse of agencies where talented men and women reinvented the industry, creati…
After the Second World War, America's love affair with the automobile was in full swing. You could drive through about anything – movie theaters, car washes, restaurants, banks, and...even churches. That’s a very American way to attend church. These rar…
The Italian Campaign of World War II was the name of the Allied operations in and around Italy from 1943 to the end of the war. Following victory in the North African Campaign, there was disagreement among the Allies on the next step they should take. …
Decades after her death, Eva Braun, the long-time mistress of Adolf Hitler, remains a mysterious and notorious figure. This is the photographic life story of a woman who met Hitler as a teenager and, in the last days of the war, became the Führer’s wife…