The Statue of Liberty, officially Liberty Enlightening the World, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and Gustave Eiffel, was a gift to the United States from the people of France in 1886. With a tablet inscribed with the date of America’s independen…
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. …
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 April 26, 1986, a series of explosions destroyed Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4, and several hundred staff and firefighters tackled a blaze that burned for 10 days and sent a plume of radiation around the world. More than 50 reactor and emergency workers were ki…
It began with a simple boycott of Jewish shops and ended in the gas chambers at Auschwitz as Nazi Germany attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe. In January 1933, after a bitter ten-year political struggle, Adolf Hitler came to …
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…
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 1)…
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 ph…
After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese quickly gained control over a huge area of the Pacific, from the Philippines to Burma to the Aleutians to the Solomons. While the Japanese enjoyed the advantage of interior lines of communication, they had somewhat overe…
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…
In December of 1991, as the world watched in amazement, the Soviet Union disintegrated into fifteen separate countries. Its collapse was hailed by the west as a victory for freedom, a triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, and evidence of the superi…
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…
Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania for 21 years, earning a reputation as a brutal dictator. During his reign, he developed the largest network of spies in Eastern Europe, silenced his opposition with a secret police force known as the Securitate, and eventual…
In 1939, photographer Dorothea Lange passed through Oregon’s Willamette Valley, documenting life during the Great Depression. While traveling, she paused to observe a string bean harvest, where a large influx of temporary workers had arrived to pick crops f…
The Eastern Front between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union witnessed some of the most barbaric and intense fighting of World War II. In August 1939, these two powerful nations struck a shocking nonaggression pact, agreeing to a ten-year period without conf…
Born in 1935, Elvis Aaron Presley, also known mononymously as Elvis, was an American singer and actor who left an indelible mark on the world of music and entertainment. Recognized as the "King of Rock and Roll," he is celebrated as one of the most influent…
Travel back in time with stunning vintage portraits that offer a captivating glimpse into the diverse cultures of the world, from Brazilian headhunters, Persian hermits to Indian snake charmers, over a century and a half ago. Frank Carpenter embarked on h…
These captivating photographs from the LIFE archives provide a unique window into mid-20th century China, during a period chronicled as “the last days of Shanghai”. The images were taken by photographer Jack Birns, who was sent to China to take pictures and…