On July 16, 1945, the United States became the first country to successfully detonate an atomic weapon, signaling the beginning of a new era in warfare and in politics. In the early 1940s, the U.S. government authorized a top-secret program of nuclear t…
By the time of this photograph, AIDS might have been more widely understood, but people were still wary about how it was transmitted because it wasn't widely understood by the general public at the time. Princess Diana was a very important figurehead in…
Serra Pelada was a large gold mine in Brazil 430 kilometers (270 mi) south of the mouth of the Amazon River. In 1979 a local child swimming on the banks of a local river found a 6 grams (0.21 oz) nugget of gold. Soon word leaked out and by the end of th…
Downed U.S. airman Dewey Waddell was taken captive by Vietnamese communist fighters in 1967, and he was released in 1973. The photo, taken by GDR war correspondent Thomas Billhardt, features a female guerrilla holding an American soldier captive and esc…
This picture is taken in the early 1900s at the Wyndham prison. Wyndham is the oldest and northernmost town in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It was established in 1886 as a result of a gold rush at Halls Creek. However, the circumstances an…
The United States Marine Corps Private Theodore James Miller assigned to the 22nd Marine Independent Regiment returns to Coast Guard-manned attack transport USS Arthur Middleton (APA-25) at 1400 hours after two days of combat on Engebi. Engebi was the f…
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 photograph titled A Woman Hitting a Neo-Nazi with Her Handbag, captured by Hans Runesson on April 13, 1985, in Växjö, Sweden, has become an iconic image. It portrays a 38-year-old woman striking a Nazi skinhead with her handbag during a demonstratio…
In the strict world of British military protocol, there are even rules on how to faint with dignity. There are two main reasons why the guards of honor pass out: it can get pretty hot and they'll lock their knees. Usually, it's the combination of both t…
The Solvay Conference, founded by the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay in 1912, was considered a turning point in the world of physics. Located in Brussels, the conferences were devoted to outstanding preeminent open problems in both physics and chem…
On Sunday 24, February 1991, allied forces launched a combined ground, air, and sea assault which overwhelmed the Iraqi army within 100 hours. By 26 February, Iraq had announced it was withdrawing its forces from Kuwait, but still refused to accept all …
The photo is taken during the division training at Neuhammer. The romantic notions that Himmler had about the Bosnian Muslims were probably significant in the division's genesis. He was personally fascinated by the Islamic faith and believed that Islam …
A lone soldier surrounded by a mountain of empty shell cases, France. This lone British soldier up to his knees in spent shell cases offers a striking impression of the destruction that took place on the Western Front. However, this picture only tells h…
The picture/poster shows five men representing five different cultural spheres: an American Indian, an Australian Aborigine, an African, an Asian, and a European. The European, standing in the center, dominates the scene and thus shows the Eurocentric w…
The photos on display here are taken by Hugo Jager, a former personal photographer of Adolf Hitler. He traveled with Hitler in the years leading up to power and throughout World War II. He was one of the few photographers who were using color photograph…
RareHistoricalPhotos.com is a website/blog exclusively dedicated to historical and rare photographs. Each historical photograph has a story to tell, each of them documents a major event in human history, each photo is a way to grasp the full meaning of the pas…
Japanese marines landed north and south of Shanghai. This picture may have been taken on the Jiangsu coast, which is north of the city. Despite the fact that chemical weapons were prohibited by international laws, the Imperial Japanese Army frequently u…
Thatcher is surrounded by troops on a visit to Goose Green in January 1983, where the Parachute Regiment had secured a crucial victory seven months earlier. The war was a turning point in her premiership. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges called …
For decades, rumors circulated in Russia that Joseph Stalin had a “twin” who replaced him during certain situations. Decades after Stalin's death, the decoy finally decided to talk. Felix Dadaev, a former dancer and juggler, had been ordered to work to …
At the end of World War II, the city of Dresden was in ruins, all its buildings destroyed and thousands of civilians dead. The scale of the death and destruction, coming so late in the war, along with significant questions about the legitimacy of the ta…