On January 15th, 1919, in what was probably the most bizarre disaster in United States' history, a storage tank burst on Boston's waterfront releasing two million gallons of molasses in a 15 ft-high, 160 ft-wide waves that raced through the city's north en…
In the grand scope of the history of medicine, the relationship between doctors and patients has changed quite a bit in recent decades. For a long time, physicians were the authority on health. Patients trusted in their doctors' education and expertise …
In 1966 Mao Zedong, the Communist leader of China, started a political campaign that became known as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Mao called on China's youth to help him purge capitalist influences and bourgeois thinking in government, teaching,…
This is the story of how the famous boxer Muhammad Ali convinced a suicidal young man to come down off the ledge. On January 19, 1981, The Los Angeles Times photographer Boris Yaro heard reports of a suicidal jumper on the radio. His editor wasn’t in…
TIME magazine decided to create a list of the 100 most influential pictures ever taken. They teamed up with curators, historians, photo editors, and famous photographers around the world for this task. "No formula makes for iconic photos," the editors said. …
The first therapeutic uses of light (so-called light therapy) date back to the end of the twentieth century, when a Danish researcher, Niels Ryberg Finsen, showed that light stimulates the immune defenses and enables the fight against infections. The tr…
Every war combatant highly appreciated the need for an unbreakable code that would help them communicate while protecting their operational plans. The U.S. Army knew where to find one: the Navajo Nation. Philip Johnston, a civil engineer for the city of…
Let’s imagine that World War II wasn't about invading countries, killing people, and achieving world domination. Instead, it was a fashion contest to create the most stylish military pictures. In other words - let’s think that the objective was for ordi…
Helene Mayer, remains one of the Olympics’ great mysteries. She was, by definition of German law at the time, part-Jewish, which had cost her most of her citizenship rights. Her country’s press was forbidden to mention her name. Once she had been one of…
The Great Kanto Earthquake, sometimes called the Great Tokyo Earthquake, rocked Japan on September 1, 1923. The city of Yokohama was hit even worse than Tokyo was, although both were devastated. It was the deadliest earthquake in Japanese history. The e…
Born in 1907, Frida Kahlo lived for just 47 years. Andre Breton summed up Kahlo as “a ribbon around a bomb.” Here are some facts about the woman remembered as one of Mexico’s greatest artists. Kahlo lived most of her life in pain, the effect of contract…
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…
In the days before video games, amusement arcades were filled with a panoply of analog entertainment, from shooting galleries to skeeball to mechanical fortune tellers to endless varieties of pinball. These photographs of a conspicuously empty Wonderlan…
Dunkirk was the largest of the multiple evacuations of British, French and Belgian troops from Northern France following the Allied loss of the Battle of France. Over the course of the evacuation, 330,000 men were transported from Dunkirk and the surroundi…
Apollo 11 was the climax of the Apollo program, which pushed human spaceflight forward faster than ever before. In October 1968, the first crewed flight of the Apollo program lifted off; less than a year later, Apollo 11 launched. Within just a few s…
It’s 1918 and France was caught in the final year of World War I. American photographer Lewis Hine traveled across the country for the American Red Cross, documenting their work with refugees, orphans, and wounded soldiers. Lost for decades, his poignant w…
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, …
In 1966, Italy was rocked by one woman’s courageous efforts to challenge the country’s treatment of rape victims — the lessons of which are sadly still relevant. Franca Viola became the first Italian woman to refuse a "rehabilitating marriage" ("matrimo…
These photographs, taken for LIFE magazine in the fall of 1969, explored the "freaky new freedoms" of fashion seen on high school students across the United States. Some of the women show the strong influence of the “hippie” movement—long hair, beads, f…
This interesting picture shows a supposed Civil War veteran from Florida enjoying himself next to a fighter jet. Claiming to be a member of the Confederate Army, William Lundy was 107 when this photo was snapped for an article in the Boston Traveller in 19…