In January 1923 France and Belgium invaded the Ruhr, an industrial area of Germany bordering their own countries. The occupation of Ruhr was in response to the Weimar Republic's failure to continue its reparation payments in the aftermath of World War I. …
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…
This set of pictures from 1865 shows the hanging execution of the four Lincoln conspirators: David Herold, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt. Their deaths were a culmination of sorts of a nation ravaged by war, bitter conflict, and the dea…
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 …
This is believed to be the earliest photograph from the ground, 15 minutes after the plutonium bomb detonated over Nagasaki. The destruction was so incredible that there is no count on how many people died that day. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and …
Riding on an exposed vehicle in the Russian Winter, here a combination motorcycle, required protective clothing. This Kradfahrer wears a sentry’s fur-lined overcoat, heavy mittens, the fur-lined cap of the reversible winter suit, which is no doubt being…
The assassins' bullets ended the life of a man who earned a reputation for making bold decisions in foreign affairs, a reputation based in large part on his decision in 1977 to journey to the camp of Egypt's foe, Israel, to make peace. President Sadat w…
This last photo shows Vladimir Lenin in a wheelchair after suffering three stokes in the previous two years. By the end, he was paralyzed and completely mute. Beside him are his sister Anna Ilyinichna Yelizarova-Ulyanova and one of his doctors A. M. Kozhev…
On December 11, 1941, several days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States declaration of war against the Japanese Empire, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, in response to what was claimed to be a series of provocation…
Adolf Hitler chats with his flying aces from Luftwaffe after an awards ceremony (Eichenlaub and Schwertern) at Berghof Obersalzberg on April 1944. All these Luftwaffe officers aces received their Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross of Oak Leaves or Swords …
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. …
This extraordinary picture taken in 1948 by David Seymour, one of Magnum Photos’ co-founders, has since been seen by millions. First, it was published in LIFE magazine where the caption read in part “Children’s wounds are not all outward. Those made in …
In the first decades of the 20th century, the Italian Cavalry School at Tor di Quinto near Rome was - along with the French Cavalry School at Saumur - the leading institution for horsemanship in the world. Tor di Quinto was probably the foremost academy fo…
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…
This photo shows Marlene Dietrich passionately kissing an American soldier as he arrives home from World War II. It seems that the guy on the left holding her up is enjoying the view. It was first published in Life Magazine with the caption: “While sold…
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…
The Falling Soldier became famous for the way it seems to capture, with terrifying immediacy, the moment when a bullet fatally strikes a Spanish Loyalist militiaman; later, it became famous for allegations that the photograph was "faked", or at least (thou…
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…
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 …
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…