On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities, was declared between the Allied nations and Germany in the First World War, then known as “the Great War.” Though the Treaty of Versailles, …
On September 1, 1939, the world was shocked as Nazi troops invaded Poland. Tensions soared in Europe, and world leaders recognized that this invasion could be the final straw that would lead to war. German military leaders had begun planning for war with P…
The Korean War was one of several military conflicts that occurred during the Cold War, as the United States and its allies attempted to stop the spread of communism. This conflict began on June 25, 1950, when North Korea, a communist nation, invaded South…
Late during the summer of 1914, train stations all over Europe echoed with the sound of leather boots and the clattering of weapons as millions of enthusiastic young soldiers mobilized for the most glorious conflict since the Napoleonic Wars. In the eye…
In the spring of 1906 San Francisco was a city boasting 410,000 inhabitants — a world-class metropolis whose citizens, at the dawn of a new century, looked forward with a sense of civic pride and growing confidence. San Francisco’s very existence was th…
Erected in the dead of night on August 13, 1961, the Berlin Wall (known as Berliner Mauer in German) was a physical division between West Berlin and East Germany. Its purpose was to keep disaffected East Germans from fleeing to the West. When the Berlin…
The second part of the American Civil War photo collection covers the people of the Civil War: the generals, slaves, civilians, politicians, and soldiers that lived through those turbulent years. For other parts: The American Civil War in pictures (part…
The Civil War was certainly the most catastrophic event in American history. More than 600,000 Northerners and Southerners died in the war, a greater number than all those who had died in all other American wars combined. (The other parts of these…
The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor began just before 8 a.m. local time Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. For over an hour, in two waves, some 350 Japanese aircraft—having taken off from six aircraft carriers 230 miles north of Oahu—attacked th…
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…
The Soviet War in Afghanistan was a nine-year period involving the Soviet forces and the Mujahideen insurgents that were fighting to overthrow Afghanistan's Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government. The Soviet Union supported t…
By 1945, the Japanese had suffered an unbroken string of defeats for nearly two years in the South West Pacific, the Marianas campaign, and the Philippines campaign. In June, after more than 80 days of fighting, Allied forces captured the Japanese islan…
The internment of Japanese-Americans into camps during World War II was one of the most flagrant violations of civil liberties in American history. According to the census of 1940, 127,000 persons of Japanese ancestry lived in the United States, the maj…
There is a group of people who have lived in the northern reaches of Japan for thousands of years, predating the nation itself, yet most of the world has never heard their name. The Ainu are among the oldest indigenous communities in East Asia, and the rare…
Before Hawaii became the 50th star on the American flag, it was already something close to paradise in the popular imagination. The color photographs taken across the islands in the 1950s do something remarkable: they pull viewers into a world that feels bo…
Photographs have a way of collapsing time, and the ones taken inside the 1980s punk scene do exactly that, pulling you into smoky venues, street corners, and basement shows where a subculture was busy defining itself in real time. These images do not show a…
Beneath the gray concrete and rigid control of the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s, a quiet rebellion pulsed through cellars, abandoned factories, and dimly lit basements. The underground punk scene in East Germany was more than a musical movement; …
Jane Fonda has spent more than six decades in the public eye, and the photographs from her early years offer a glimpse of the woman before the legend fully took shape. Born in New York City on December 21, 1937, she grew up with Hollywood royalty in her blo…
On the morning of June 18, 2023, a small submersible named Titan slipped beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean carrying five people bound for one of the most famous shipwrecks in history. None of them would return. The events of the next four days…
At the height of his power, J.P. Morgan controlled railroads, banks, steel mills, and the financial fate of the United States government itself. He was a man who bent entire industries to his will and whose name alone could calm a national panic. Yet for…