These stunning photographs of car wrecks in the 1930s were captured by Leslie Jones, a famous photographer who worked for the Boston Herald-Traveler from 1917 to 1956. Jones documented daily life in Boston and surrounding areas and some 40,000 of his negati…
This collection of hand-tinted lantern slides depicts popular tourist destinations in Norway around the turn of the 19th century. The collection consists of slides produced by at least two British photographers – professional photographer Samuel J. Beck…
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, photographer Clifton R. Adams was commissioned by the National Geographic to document life in England. Adams’ beautiful autochromes—a process of producing color images by using potato starch—present images that capture…
The Spacelander bicycle was designed by Benjamin Bowden for the 1946 exhibition Britain Can Make It. Originally known as the Classic, the streamlined design was said to represent what the bicycle of the future was supposed to look like. Its curving line…
January 28, 1986, was an exceptionally cold day in Florida, where freezing weather is rare. The beaches near the Kennedy Space Center were crowded with people who had come to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger, which had been postponed on sev…
There has always been great interest in domesticating and training zebras as riding and harnessing animals. In the 1760s, French naturalist Buffon believed that zebras could replace horses and there were rumors in Paris that the Dutch had already trained a…
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…
Pam Grier is an American actress, who came to limelight after starring in numerous blaxploitation films, such as ‘The Big Bird Cage’, ‘Coffy’, ‘Foxy Brown’ and ‘Sheba Baby’. Criticized for her blaxploitation roles, she made a comeback with Quentin Tarantino…
Skylab was America’s first step toward making space something other than a nice place to visit. Developed in the shadow of the Apollo moon missions and using hardware originally created for Apollo, the Skylab space station took the nation’s astronauts from…
He was “the Eighth Wonder of the World,” the biggest attraction in the history of professional wrestling. At seven-foot-four (2.23m), 450 pounds (205kg), André the Giant was a living, breathing legend, the kind of make-believe figure usually encountered on…
In his lifetime, Arnold Schwarzenegger has worn many shoes. A former champion builder to a Hollywood action icon to a politician, Schwarzenegger has been them all, and more. He has won several titles from Mr. Universe to Mr. Olympia during his bodybuilding …
Brigitte Bardot was born in September 1934 in Paris and is a French actress, singer, and model. Famous for portraying sexually emancipated personae with hedonistic lifestyles, she was one of the best-known sex symbols of the late 1950s and 1960s. Bardot…
Arising as a daredevil stunt in the aerial shows of the 1920s, wing walking was the act of moving along the wings of a biplane during flight. It started around 1920 at aerial barnstorming shows and originally began as a demonstration of planes’ balance …
These are rarely seen color pictures from the Second World War featured in the book “The Second World War in Colour” by the Imperial War Museum. Many are being published for the first time and shed light behind the scenes of the conflict. Color film was…
James Gillingham lived in Chard, England, where he had a small shoe-making business called “Golden Boot”. His career in prosthetics began in 1865 when he produced an artificial arm for a local cannoneer who had been injured in an accident but was given …
In 1950, Coca-Cola decided to start a big marketing campaign targeting the drink to the people of France. The LIFE magazine photographer Mark Kauffman was there to photograph the genuine reactions of French people trying the drink for the first time. …
In 1902, a French manufacturer released a set of trading cards designed by artist Albert Bergeret that imagined the "women of the future" (original: Les Femmes de l’Avenir). These cards depict various, imagined occupations that would have seemed fantast…
Genevieve Naylor was born in 1915 in Springfield, Massachusetts. She attended Miss Hall's School and later, at age 16, the Music Box, an art school, where she studied painting. It was at the Music Box that Genevieve met Misha Reznikoff, her teacher. Two y…
The 1977 blackout that hit New York was a crisis that came amidst a sweltering heatwave, a financial downturn, rising poverty and inequality, and an atmosphere of gloom that had already settled on the city. The 25-hour outage began around 9:30 p.m. on J…
These rare color views of the capital (then known as Constantinople) of the Ottoman Empire at the close of the 19th century were produced using the Photochrom process. The technique applies layers of artificial color to a black and white image with surp…