John F. Kennedy consults with his brother Robert Kennedy during campaigning. 1960
Marilyn Monroe during her early career, 1947
A stewardess checks her reflection in a mirror against a grooming checklist covering hat, makeup, hair length, and blouse cleanliness, USA, 1950s
Former US President Theodore Roosevelt with magician Harry Houdini and other associates aboard the S.S. Imperator, 1914. On the voyage Houdini performed a “psychic” trick on Roosevelt that left him so baffled that Houdini later explained it to him personally.
Benito Mussolini in an open top car with his pet lion cub “Ras” after he became dictator of Italy. (1924)
A patrol of the 4th Armored Division passes a cathedral in the midst of heavy damage in Coutances, France. 28 July, 1944.
Paratroopers of the 503rd Regimental Combat Team waited aboard an aircraft en route to Corregidor, February 17, 1945.
15 year-old math prodigy, Ted Kaczynski (bottom right), with fellow National Merit Scholarship recipients in 1958. Kaczynski would be accepted at Harvard to study mathematics the same year. Two decades later, he would carry out his first bombing.
U.S. soldiers playing Xbox in Saddam Hussein’s former palace, in Baghdad – amidst the aftermath of the U.S.-led coalition invasion of Iraq, c. 2003.
Mykola Bokan and his family pose for a watery meal marking “300 days” without bread, Ukraine 1933.
In 1933, Soviet Ukraine was in the grip of one of the worst famines in modern history, known as the Holodomor. The famine occurred during Joseph Stalin’s campaign of forced collectivization, in which private farms were absorbed into state-controlled collective farms and impossible grain quotas were imposed on Ukrainian villages. Even as millions faced starvation, Soviet authorities confiscated grain, livestock, seed, and other food supplies, leaving families with virtually nothing to eat. Villages that failed to meet production quotas were often blacklisted, preventing residents from obtaining food or leaving to search for it elsewhere. Historians estimate that millions of Ukrainians died between 1932 and 1933, though the exact number remains debated.
For ordinary people, daily life became a desperate struggle for survival. Families exhausted every possible food source, consuming weeds, tree bark, roots, and thin soups made from whatever could be gathered. Malnutrition left countless people too weak to work or even walk, while disease spread rapidly among starving communities. Children were especially vulnerable, and entire villages were devastated by hunger. Today, many countries and scholars recognize the Holodomor as a man-made famine, and more than two dozen governments have formally recognized it as a genocide, while others describe it as a crime against humanity or a catastrophic state-induced famine.
Remember that photo of the construction workers having lunch on the unfinished Empire State Building? Well here’s the photographer Charles Ebbets taking that photo. 9/20/1932
Cetshwayo, King of the Zulu who defeated the British at the Battle of Isandlwana, 1878
A crowd of about 4000 Nazi sympathizers, some with their children, protest outside Landsberg Prison, demanding amnesty for the hundreds of Nazi war criminals being held there. When Jewish people counter-protested, the crowd chanted Nazi-era slogans and attacked them, West Germany, 1951
Russian President Vladimir Putin hands flowers to Alina Kabaeva in 2001. She is rumored to be his longtime mistress and the mother of several of his children.
Dr. Erich Salomon faked a broken arm so he could hide a camera in his cast to photograph the US Supreme Court – 1932
An anti-communist revolutionary holds a Molotov cocktail behind his back during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution
San Francisco’s iconic Cliff House, shortly before it was destroyed by fire in 1907
Two autistic kids tied to the radiator of an asylum. 1982. Deir el Qamar, Lebanon
Anne Frank’s father, Otto, revisits the attic entrance where he and his family hid for two years before their betrayal. Amsterdam. 1960.
Reporters who Exposed the Watergate Scandal watch President Nixon resign, 1974
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