These shocking rare photographs show how so-called 'human zoos' around the world kept 'primitive natives' in enclosures so Westerners could gawp and jeer at them. The horrifying images, some of which were taken as recently as 1958, show how black and As…
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. …
From the days of catapults and trebuchets, military men have dreamed of the ultimate weapon that could smash an enemy’s wall, castle, or defensive stronghold. For a span of eighty-five years, that weapon was the railroad gun, large enough to do substant…
These photos picture the overflow filling facility that the FBI’s Identification Division started using during World War II for the purposes of clearance needs of the armed services. The building is the DC Armory, a multi-use arena facility — and someti…
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 …
By the beginning of 1945, the war which Germany had unleashed throughout the world had come back to consume it. In sharp contrast with what had occurred in 1918 in 1945, Germany fought, literally, to the bitter end. The Germans held out, although by ear…
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The battles on the Eastern Front constituted the largest military confrontation in history. They were characterized by unprecedented ferocity, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, …
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…
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…
Herbert List was a German photographer, who worked for magazines, including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Life, and was associated with Magnum Photos. He traveled regularly between Greece, Italy, and Paris until the outbreak of World War II, when he settl…
The invention of the cannon in the 12th century revolutionized warfare, and soon after, this powerful weapon found a horrifying use – executions. Cannons became instruments of torture, with condemned prisoners strapped to their muzzles and blasted to pieces…
Soviet soldiers openly sexually harass a passing German woman near the West Hall section of the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof central railway terminus. As Allied troops entered and occupied German territory during the later stages of the war, mass rapes took pla…
Chased by youth armed with clubs, this woman is fleeing from a "death dealer" whose left leg can be seen at the left-hand edge of the photograph. The Lviv pogroms were the consecutive massacres of Jews living in the city of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), per…
The photograph was taken by Alice Seeley Harris, the man's name is Nsala. Here is part of her account (from the book “Don’t Call Me Lady: The Journey of Lady Alice Seeley Harris”): He hadn't made his rubber quota for the day so the Belgian-appointed o…
Between 1928 and 1932, two enormous wooden ships, which once belonged to Emperor Caligula, and had lain on the bottom of the Lake Nemi for over nineteen hundred years, were salvaged in what was perhaps the greatest underwater archaeological recovery ever a…
After Nguyen Ngoc Loan raised his sidearm and shot Vietcong operative Nguyen Van Lem in the head he walked over to the reporters and told them that: “These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think Buddha will forgive me”. Captured on NBC TV cameras an…
After the Civil War, the availability of natural resources, new inventions, and a receptive market combined to fuel an industrial boom. The demand for labor grew, and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many children were drawn into the labor for…
This seal was actually a seal to King Tut’s fifth shrine. The king was buried in a series of four sarcophagi, which were in turn kept inside a series of five shrines. This unbroken seal stayed 3,245 years untouched. The late discovery of Tut’s tomb resu…
The embassy is an official state function and since the Third Reich outlived Hitler by six weeks, it would be odder if they did not raise the flag when the head of state died. Actually, Hitler's death wasn't officially announced until May 1st, but the O…