On April 19, 1939, the BBC broadcast bandsman James Tappern playing one silver and one bronze trumpet discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. It was the first time the trumpets were played in roughly 3,000 years.
The instruments had been buried with Tutankhamun around the 14th century BC and were among the remarkable objects discovered by Howard Carter’s team. More than three millennia later, millions of BBC listeners were able to hear approximations of the sounds produced by the ancient Egyptian trumpets. The broadcast took place only months before the outbreak of World War II.
Self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States, Joshua Norton, riding a bike in 1869 San Francisco
Joshua Abraham Norton was a San Francisco businessman who lost his fortune and, in 1859, famously declared himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States.” Rather than dismissing him entirely, San Franciscans embraced the eccentric figure. Restaurants reportedly fed him for free, businesses accepted currency bearing his name, and thousands of people attended his funeral when he died in 1880.
Victim of a war crime — Flight Officer Charles Appleby was murdered by his Japanese captors in Fukuoka, Japan after the surrender of Japan was announced on August 15, 1945. He was 21 years old.
Appleby was a 21-year-old USAAF flight officer serving with the 28th Bombardment Squadron when his B-29 was hit by anti-aircraft fire during a bombing mission over Omuta, Japan, on July 27, 1945. He survived the destruction of the aircraft, bailed out and was captured along with several other crewmen.
On August 15, just hours after Japanese officers heard Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast announcing Japan’s surrender, Appleby and fourteen other American prisoners were reportedly taken from captivity, handcuffed and blindfolded, and transported to a field near Aburayama outside Fukuoka. There, the fifteen men were executed by their captors. Appleby’s remains were never recovered; he is memorialized among the missing at the Honolulu Memorial in Hawaii.
Anti-integration mob shakes and screams at an African American family passing by in their car, Clinton, Tennessee, 1956
The violence erupted after twelve Black students integrated Clinton High School in August 1956, making it one of the first state-supported high schools in the South to desegregate. Outside segregationists descended on the town and helped inflame local opposition. Mobs attacked cars carrying Black passengers, and the situation eventually became so dangerous that the Tennessee National Guard was deployed to restore order.
Ryan White and his mother Jeanne talk before nightly prayers, Cicero, Indiana, 1986
White contracted HIV through contaminated blood products used to treat his hemophilia. After his diagnosis became public, he was barred from attending his Indiana middle school amid widespread fear and misinformation about AIDS. His fight to return to school turned him into one of America’s most recognizable AIDS activists and helped change public understanding of how HIV was transmitted.
Detective Frank Serpico testifies before the Knapp Commission about corruption endemic to the NYPD, December 1971. Serpico survived being shot earlier that year after contributing to a New York Times story documenting racketeering schemes within the department.
Serpico had spent years trying to convince his superiors to investigate officers who were accepting bribes and payoffs. His testimony before the Knapp Commission publicly exposed the scale of corruption within the department. His story later became the basis for the 1973 film Serpico, starring Al Pacino.
German generals captured near Stalingrad by a Soviet patrol at the end of January 1943.
The surrender at Stalingrad was one of the great turning points of World War II. After months of brutal urban combat, the Soviet counteroffensive trapped Germany’s Sixth Army and other Axis forces inside the city. Roughly 90,000 exhausted Axis soldiers ultimately went into Soviet captivity, including Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus and numerous German generals.
A Serbian soldier sleeps with his father who came to visit him on the front line near Belgrade, 1914/1915
Serbia endured some of the most devastating losses of any country during World War I. The fighting repeatedly swept across Serbian territory, meaning that for civilians, the front lines were sometimes frighteningly close to home. The identities of the father and son in this photograph are unknown.
An African American student takes classes by television during the ongoing school integration fight in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957
The battle over Little Rock’s Central High School became one of the defining confrontations of the Civil Rights Movement. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus initially used the National Guard to prevent nine Black students from entering the school. President Dwight D. Eisenhower eventually federalized the Guard and sent soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the students’ right to attend.
Warren Nutter, 19, reads a letter from his mother while on death row, 1957. He was the second-youngest man sentenced to death in Iowa. After his death sentence was commuted to life in prison, he served 65 years at the Iowa State Penitentiary, becoming the longest-serving inmate in Iowa history.
Nutter was convicted of murdering an Independence, Iowa, police officer during a robbery in 1956. He came within hours of execution before receiving a stay, and his sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment. He remained incarcerated until his death in 2021 at the age of 84.
A woman plugging in her electric car, 1912.
Electric cars are almost as old as the automobile itself. Around the turn of the 20th century, electric vehicles competed directly with gasoline and steam-powered cars and were especially popular in cities because they were quiet, clean and didn’t require hand-cranking to start. Improvements in gasoline engines and the availability of cheap fuel eventually pushed electric cars out of the mass market for decades.
Torpedo Juice was first mixed in World War II and made from pineapple juice and the 180-proof grain alcohol fuel used in U.S. Navy torpedo motors. The Navy then added poisonous substances to the fuel alcohol to discourage sailors from drinking it. One recipe called for two parts ethyl alcohol and three parts pineapple juice.
Sailors sometimes went to extraordinary lengths to make the denatured alcohol drinkable, including constructing crude stills aboard ship to try to separate the ethanol from additives. The practice could be extremely dangerous: some additives used by the Navy could cause severe illness, blindness or worse. “Torpedo juice” became part of the folklore surrounding life aboard American warships during World War II.
In 1848, Biddy Mason was forced to walk 1,700 miles from Mississippi to Utah, then taken on a second journey to California. After learning slavery was illegal there, she sued her enslaver, won her freedom in court, and bought land that ultimately made her one of the wealthiest Black women in Los Angeles.
After gaining her freedom in 1856, Mason worked as a nurse and midwife and carefully invested her earnings in Los Angeles real estate. As the young city expanded, those investments became increasingly valuable. She also became a prominent philanthropist and helped establish the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles.
Alessandro Moreschi was the last famous castrato, one of the final survivors of a centuries-old tradition in which boys were castrated before puberty to preserve their high singing voices. He is the only castrato known to have made solo recordings.
Moreschi sang in the Sistine Chapel Choir and was recorded in Rome in 1902 and 1904, just as the centuries-old castrato tradition was disappearing. The primitive recordings are imperfect, but they provide the only surviving opportunity to hear the solo voice of an actual castrato rather than a modern countertenor attempting to reproduce the sound.
John Brown photographed around 1847, twelve years before his raid on Harpers Ferry.
Brown was a militant abolitionist who came to believe that slavery would never be destroyed peacefully. In October 1859, he and a small band of followers seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in hopes of sparking a widespread uprising against slavery. The raid failed, and Brown was captured, tried for treason against Virginia and hanged on December 2, 1859.
Pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart was born July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas.
Earhart became one of the most famous pilots in the world after becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932. Five years later, while attempting to become the first woman to fly around the world, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared somewhere over the central Pacific. Neither Earhart nor her aircraft has ever been conclusively found.
In December 1891, eager to find an indoor activity to keep his students active during the winter months, Massachusetts physical education instructor James Naismith tacked two peach baskets on either end of a gymnasium and wrote thirteen rules for a new game, aptly called “basket ball.”
The first game was played at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, using a soccer ball and two peach baskets. Unlike modern basketball, the bottom of each basket was initially intact, meaning someone had to retrieve the ball after every successful shot. Naismith’s original thirteen rules were published in January 1892.
Lyndon Johnson signs into law the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Signed on July 2, 1964, the law prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin and strengthened the federal government’s ability to enforce school desegregation. Martin Luther King Jr. stood among the civil rights leaders watching as Johnson signed the historic legislation at the White House.
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