In the early years of the 20th century, a number of circuses toured Northern Ireland providing entertainment, tricks, and a lot of excitement for the crowds. Though the dim lighting condition inside the circus’ tent prevented images from being made of t…
Umbrella Rock on top of Lookout Mountain was one of the more iconic tourist spots from the 1880s through the 1940s. These images, assembled by Chattanooga’s local historical organization Picnooga, capture almost 60 years of photo opportunities on Umbrel…
Dorothy Counts made national news in September 1957, when at the age of 15, she became one of the first and, at the time, the only black student to enroll in the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School in Charlotte (North Carolina). This came nearl…
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…
No one expected the 1969 Woodstock concert and festival to draw a crowd estimated at half-million — nor that the gathering would become a legendary touchstone for the counterculture of the 1960s and a unique event in the history of music. Held in the open a…
Stereographs were a very popular form of photography in the 19th century. Photographers would take two nearly identical images which, when printed side by side, would appear as a three-dimensional image when viewed through a set of special lenses called a ster…
In the 1970s, New York City was a broken, ungovernable metropolis barreling into anarchy. New Yorkers remember this decade as the bleakest, most crime-ridden, and most uncertain time the city has ever faced. It was a time of economic, criminal, and cultura…
During the rule of Queen Victoria (1837 1901), the British shipbuilding industry experienced great strides. Especially after the Industrial Revolution, wooden shipbuilding techniques which had lasted for millennia were radically changed with the introduct…
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…
Starting from the 1890s, the famous Dutch impressionist painter George Hendrik Breitner (1857 – 1923) used his camera to record the everyday life in the streets of Amsterdam. He found photographs to be a useful tool for capturing fleeting conditions of …
More so than any war in history, World War II was a woman’s war. Women, motivated by patriotism, the opportunity for new experiences, and the desire to serve, participated widely in the global conflict. Within the Allied countries, women of all ages pro…
The Golden State got its nickname from the Sierra Nevada gold that lured so many miners and settlers to the West, but California has earned much more wealth from so-called “black gold” than from metallic gold. When Europeans finally arrived in Californi…
These vintage photographs show the airship Graf Zeppelin LZ 127 flying over Chicago in August 1929, on the American leg of its round-the-world trip. The crew flew the airship low over the city and the crowds were mesmerized by the sight. This is how the…
Although the birth control pill and other hormonal contraceptive devices are modern inventions, birth control forms have been around for thousands of years. The earliest known recordings of birth control methods date back to ancient Mesopotamia, around …
In this collection, creepy vintage photographs show anything from the primitive Halloween costumes of the past to Victorian-era portraits where something doesn’t feel quite right. Perhaps it’s grainy black and white, sometimes sepia feel to them. Or maybe b…
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, strongmen more often exhibited their incredible power as circus performers and entertainers than as competitive athletes. Originating in Europe and spreading to the United States, physical culturists incl…
In the summer of 1975, at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, a team of NASA and Stanford University researchers led by physicist Dr. Gerard O’Neill imagined what the future space colonies would look like. The goal was to build a 10,000-person or…
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…
In 1972, the United States federal government, which was looking to document living conditions among Native American communities, employed the services of photographer Terry Eiler to visit the south-west of the country and give an outsider view into the li…
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…