The cheerful German soldiers in the trenches filled the autumn rains spread the food for their comrades. Water is pumped out of the trench using a mechanical pump. Photo taken during Battle for Velikiye Luki, October 1943. With the advent of mechanized …
Soldiers from the French African colonies holding a position at Boucle du Doubs, near Besancon, France, winter of 1944. These soldiers are part of Senegalese Free French troops. They are armed with a British Bren and an American 1903 Springfield. The…
At a time when censors used a heavy hand to keep the American public from knowing and seeing the carnage in the Pacific during World War II, this ground-breaking photograph of dead American soldiers confronted the American public for the first time with th…
Despite being targeted by law enforcement across the globe at the start of the 20th century, opium and opium dens were prevalent fixtures in east Asia, the United States, and Europe up until the mid-1950′s. In this photograph, opium smokers in Singapore…
Before World War I Germany was a prosperous country, with a gold-backed currency, expanding industry, and world leadership in optics, chemicals, and machinery. The German Mark, the British shilling, the French franc, and the Italian lira all had about e…
Maoris of 'C' Company, 28th Maori Battalion of the 2nd New Zealand Division perform the 'Haka' (ancestral war dance) for the visit of King George II of Greece, his wife the Queen, his cousin Prince Peter and Major General Freyberg. The location was at an a…
These photographs show SUB 110, a German submarine that was sunk and risen in 1918. We can see the control room in the submarine, including the manhole to the periscope well, hand wheels for pressure gear, valve wheels for flooding and blowing, and air pre…
Vlasik’s off-the-record photos of Stalin caused a sensation in the early 1960s when an enterprising Soviet journalist spirited some out, selling them to newspapers and magazines worldwide. This photo shows how human this “monster” was, like Hitler with his…
When the people of the town of Hastings awoke one morning to see one of the Kaiser’s U-boats on their beach, it caused some shock. Thousands of visitors flocked to see the beached submarine. The Admiralty allowed the town clerk to charge a fee for peopl…
In May 1910, European royalty gathered in London for the funeral of King Edward VII. Among the mourners were nine reigning kings, who were photographed together in what very well may be the only photograph of nine reigning kings ever taken. Of the nine sov…
In the summer of 1944 the Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration, a large-scale, complex offensive against the Nazi invaders in Belarus, Poland and the Baltic republics. This vital Soviet offensive was launched just after Allied troops had landed in …
A picture from an Einsatzgruppen soldier’s personal album, labeled on the back as "Last Jew of Vinnitsa". It shows a member of Einsatzgruppe D just about to shoot a Jewish man kneeling before a filled mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1941. All 28,000…
The "Soviet flag over Reichstag" photograph is full of symbolism and represents a historic moment. Erected in 1894, the Reichstag's architecture was magnificent for its time. The building contributed much to German history and was considered by the Red …
Albert Einstein, whose theories exploded and reshaped our ideas of how the universe works, died on April 18, 1955, of heart failure. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the ev…
Some of the most extraordinary objects ever created by human hands were never meant to be seen by the public. They were built for kings, popes, and aristocrats who wanted their wealth expressed not in square footage or acreage, but in something far more int…
Few episodes in modern history reveal the lengths a regime will go to manufacture consent quite like the personality cult Nicolae Ceaușescu built around himself and, eventually, his wife. During the Cold War, Romania stood apart even within the Eastern Bloc…
The 21st century has arrived, and yet so many of the technologies people take for granted today look remarkably similar to visions that were sketched out on paper decades ago. That is not a coincidence. The years between 1958 and 1963 represent what man…
Walking into a portrait studio back in the 1960s was an occasion in its own right. Families prepared the way they would for church or a formal dinner, treating the sitting as a milestone worth honoring. Appointments were made in advance, outfits chosen with…
Hollywood has always been a place of illusion — carefully constructed personas, fabricated romances, and studio-engineered narratives designed to keep audiences captivated and ticket sales climbing. But behind the velvet ropes and the camera flashbulbs, cou…
The summer of 1967 marked a pivotal moment in American cultural history when San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district became the epicenter of a transformative social movement. Nearly 100,000 young people—hippies, beatniks, and counterculture pioneers—descend…