During the Victorian era of the 1800s, Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt threw open the Gates of Egypt’s history for the Europeans. At that time, mummies were not accorded the respect that they deserved from the European elites and in fact, mummies could be …
On April 27, 1926, the Cañon City Daily Record ran a surprising bulletin on its front page. Right under a notice that the local junior high school was putting together a variety show, the local newspaper of the small central Colorado town printed the headl…
Open air schools were purpose-built educational institutions for children, that were designed to prevent and combat the widespread rise of tuberculosis that occurred in the period leading up to the Second World War. The schools were built on the concept…
The shot was taken on Einstein’s 72nd birthday right after an event in his honor was finished at Princeton on March 14, 1951. While walking with Dr. Frank Aydelotte, the former head of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Mrs. Aydelotte back to their c…
The Reichstag fire came amid “a campaign of unparalleled violence and bitterness” by then-Chancellor Adolf Hitler, in advance of an approaching German election, and it turned a building that was “as famous through Germany as is the dome of the Capitol in W…
The Nazi booth at a radio exhibition which started in Berlin on August 19, 1932. The booth was designed as propaganda of the Nazi gramophone plate industry which produced only records of the national socialist movement. Propaganda was an essential tool …
Attendants from the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College Of Surgeons packing up some of the 3,000 human skulls stored in a shed in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, before their transfer to the Natural History Museum, July 1, 1948. The skulls include those…
In the early 20th century, polio was one of the most feared diseases in industrialized countries, paralyzing hundreds of thousands of children every year. A highly infectious disease, polio attacks the nervous system and can lead to paralysis, disabilit…
This picture shows the end of a brutal boxing match between Ray Campbell and Dick Hyland. Take a look at the condition of the two fighters, battered, bloodied, bruised, and staring down at each other at the end of the fight. Boxing in those days was …
There's always been something romantic about football under lights. This striking photograph is captured as 62,000 fans fill the Arsenal Football Stadium in Highbury, North London to see Arsenal challenge the Glasgow Rangers. It is Arsenal's second matc…
On Wednesday, May 13, 1981, Mehmet Ali Agca pulled a gun and shot Pope John Paul II during a procession in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, Italy. Though critically wounded, the Pope survived four gunshot wounds to his abdomen. Following the shooting, …
This picture is widely considered the photo that changed the face of AIDS. It showed AIDS victims as humans and people with families. The biggest opponents of doing anything about AIDS, anything at all, were conservatives trumpeting family values. This …
The Kayan Lahwi people, also known as Padaung, are an ethnic group with populations in Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand. Padaung women are well-known for wearing neck rings, brass coils that are placed around the neck, appearing to lengthen it. The women we…
The appearance of German bombers in the skies over London introduced a new weapon of terror and destruction in the arsenal of twentieth-century warfare. This concentrated direct bombing of industrial targets and civilian centers began on 7 September 194…
Guardian Angels first made an appearance on the New York subway in 1979 in an attempt to quell rising levels of violence. As in all of New York, crime was rampant in the subway in the 1970s. Thefts, robberies, shootings, and killings became more frequen…
In June of 1963, Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk Thích Quang Duc burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Saigon. He was attempting to show that to fight all forms of oppression on equal terms, Buddhism too, needed to have its martyrs. …
An American corporal aims a Colt M1895 atop a Sri Lankan elephant. The reason why the corporal is atop the elephant is a mystery but elephants were never a weapons platform adopted by the US Army. It’s probably a publicity picture, not something the arm…
Members of the French Resistance are photographed in the midst of a battle against German troops during the Liberation of Paris. We see a man in makeshift army fatigues to the left and a young man on the right. Then, most strikingly, we see a woman in s…
A shell shocked soldier in a trench during the Battle of Flers-Courcelette during the Somme Offensive in September 1916. His eyes express the madness of the war. The soldier looks like he has gone insane from what he has seen. At that moment in time eve…
Bison were hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century and were reduced to a few hundred by the mid-1880s. They were hunted for their skins, with the rest of the animals left behind to decay on the ground. Hides were prepared and shipped to the East…