In the early 20th century, sports rapidly grew into a beloved pastime for the rising middle class, and few captured this cultural shift as beautifully as Jacques Henri Lartigue. A passionate sportsman himself, Lartigue's photography provides a window in…
On Christmas Eve in 1971, Juliane Koepcke, who was just 17 years old at the time, was the sole survivor of LANSA Flight 508, which was traveling from Lima, Peru's capital, to Panguana. Following a lightning strike that caused the plane to disintegrate mid-a…
Photography has come a long way since its inception, and the journey has been marked with some remarkable milestones. From the earliest forms of photographic processes to the revolutionary digital age, photography has been a driving force in the way we …
In 1972, a plane crashed into the Andes and the survivors resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. This is the story of the 16 survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which was chartered to take an amateur rugby team from Montevideo to Santiago, Chile, and …
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…
When World War II ended in 1945, the industrial war machine did not stop overnight. Estimates of the value of the probable surpluses have ranged from a low of $25 billion to a high of $150 billion. The surpluses included almost every conceivable article…
Between the 1860s and 1930s, the monowheel (also referred to as a monocycle) was frequently suggested as a serious new form of transportation. Numerous inventors came up with their own versions of the monowheel, some human-powered, some electric, some w…
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…
The history of the Vietnam War is one that has been complicated by politics, and it is a history that is still being written and rewritten. The war involved a fratricidal conflict between the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and …
It’s difficult to convey to a modern audience the emotional impact of the stock market’s gyrations in the 1980s, or indeed in any distant decade because the most popular measures of market value have grown so much in the intervening years. For example, …
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…
The flight attendant occupation took permanent shape in the 1930s as “women’s work,” that is, work not only predominately performed by women but also defined as embodying white, middle-class ideals of femininity. As the nascent commercial aviation indus…
In 1942, shortly after the US entry into the war, the Navy established a special group called the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit to document and publicize its aviation activities. The main purpose of this photographic unit was to promote the recruitme…
Observation was an incredibly important role in aerial warfare in World War I. All major combatants used observation balloons to observe their enemies’ trench lines and troop movements. These hovering mammoths were used for directing artillery, which re…
The R100 airship was built as part of a British government programme to develop airships to provide passenger and mail transport between Britain and the countries of the British Empire, including India, Australia, and Canada. Originally, it was proposed…
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…
Ever since the car was invented, man has dreamt of taking it to the skies. The idea of a flying machine that one can drive dates back further to the nineteenth century—the concept was first patented in 1910. Engineers returned again and again to the con…
During the Second World War, the Soviet Union used more women in combat than any other country. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women sprang to join the war effort, enlisting as nurses, clerks, cooks, manufacturing etc. Among them were hundreds of remarkab…
At the end of the war, millions of people were dead and millions homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and much of the European industrial infrastructure had been destroyed. The Soviet Union, too, had been heavily affected. Borders were redrawn …
The decisive year was 1968. In the early morning of 30 January, Vietcong forces launched the Tet Offensive, named for the Vietnamese holiday then being observed. In coordinated attacks throughout South Vietnam, the Vietcong assaulted major urban areas a…