I love history, so every week I round up the most fascinating photos I can find from across time and space. Below are the best of the best, my favorite and most mind-blowing images from the past 30 days, all in one place. Enjoy!
1.
Did you know Notre Dame Cathedral used to have a parking lot out front? Well, this is what it looked like:
2.
After the sinking of the Titanic, survivors of the disaster became minor celebrities. Here’s a Titanic survivor signing an autograph for a very happy fan:
3.
Here are a bunch of listings for apartments in Manhattan from the 1930s. You can see some for as little as $6 a week:
4.
This is what Sydney Harbour in Australia looked like in 1932:
5.
And this is what Sydney Harbour in Australia looks like today:
6.
The 1912 Olympics, held in Sweden, were the first to allow women to compete in swimming events. Here are some of the British swimmers looking extremely tough:
7.
And this is Greta Johansson, the first woman to ever win an Olympic gold medal in diving at the 1912 games:
8.
This picture, taken in 1925, is the last known photo of a Barbary lion in the wild:
9.
Speaking of extinct animals, this beautiful guy here is a Quagga, a subspecies of zebra that went extinct in the wild in the 1870s due to overhunting.
10.
During World War II, the “Mona Lisa” was packed away and removed from the Louvre to ensure its safety:
11.
The walls of the Louvre were marked with placeholder writing showing where the paintings were supposed to be put back after the war:
12.
This is the Fat Man nuclear bomb being transported by cart before being dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki:
13.
Speaking of nuclear war, here’s a happy family testing out a fallout shelter during the 1960s:
14.
During the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, some places took the extra step of having children learn in outdoor classrooms. Here is one example from the Netherlands:
15.
Speaking of the Netherlands, during the 1970s, in an effort to save gas and oil, the government banned car use on Sundays for three months. Picnics were had:
16.
This picture from 1853 is often cited as the first example of a photobomb. You can see the little rascal in the back left, making mischief all over the photo:
17.
And while we’re at it, this picture is often cited as the first smile ever captured on film. It’s of a boy named Willy in 1853, and he’s, well, smiling:
18.
This is William Hutchings, one of the last surviving American Revolutionary War veterans, at the tender age of 100 in 1864:
19.
In 1953, there was a large-scale newspaper strike in New York City. Consequently, a whole bunch of people had nothing to read on the train. Check out these bored passengers below:
20.
This is an image from the Montparnasse derailment in Paris, France, at the end of the 19th century. The train failed to stop at the station and crashed through the building’s wall, falling into the street:
21.
Sweden’s King Charles XII died during a battle in 1718 after being hit in the head by a cannonball. This was the exact uniform he was wearing the day he died:
22.
Here’s a contemporary painting of Charles XII wearing that exact uniform:
23.
You’re probably familiar with the iconic image of astronaut Bruce McCandless’ untethered spacewalk during the 1980s…
24.
Well, have you ever seen it from this angle? Here’s Bruce from the side, with the vast blue Earth to his left:
25.
This is what the capstone on the top of an ancient Egyptian pyramid looked like:
26.
Of course, that picture doesn’t do the stone justice. This is how big it is compared to a person:
27.
That capstone in particular belonged to the ruined black pyramid of Amenemhat III. Here’s what the pyramid looks like today:
28.
This picture, taken in 1882, shows the Statue of Liberty in the early stages of its construction in France:
29.
And here’s a somewhat frightening, somewhat goofy picture of the Statue of Liberty’s face before it was assembled:
30.
This is American fighter pilot Louis Curdes sitting in his plane, “Bad Angel.” He was one of only three pilots to shoot down a plane from each of the Axis powers, which you can see based on the stickers on his plane:
31.
Speaking of which, here’s a group of women factory workers during World War II assembling the transparent noses of airplanes:
32.
Did you know that Paul McCartney almost spent seven years in a Japanese jail? Here he is being arrested in 1980 upon arriving in Japan for a tour after customs workers found a large amount of cannabis in his bag:
33.
Speaking of the Beatles, here’s an employee at the EMI factory running quality control on new copies of Rubber Soul:
34.
This is the Sedan Crater, an enormous hole over three hundred yards wide and one hundred yards deep, created by a 100-kiloton nuclear test in Nevada during the 1960s:
35.
Here’s a group of tourists gazing over the big, giant, nuclear hole:
36.
This is an electric car from 1919 winding its way through the mountains of Washington State. You can see the camera used to take the picture in the bottom right of the image:
37.
This is Martin Van Buren Bates and his wife Anna Haining Bates, who may have been the tallest couple of all time. He stood 7’9″ and she was even taller, at 7’11”:
38.
This is the death mask of Mary, Queen of Scots taken shortly after her execution by beheading. She was killed after being found to have plotted the death of Queen Elizabeth I:
39.
Here’s a painting of Mary from the time period, for reference:
40.
This is what the March on Washington looked like from several feet behind Abe Lincoln’s head:
41.
This X-ray, taken by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, is the first X-ray ever:
42.
Movie theater etiquette has always been a top priority for Americans. This slide, circa 1912, would be shown before movies to remind filmgoers to maintain some decorum:
43.
This picture shows the French army testing out the relatively new technology of flamethrowers during World War I:
44.
In 1910, Paris flooded so badly that it could have been mistaken for Venice, Italy:
45.
Here’s another picture from the Great Flood depicting a man who I’m sure is wishing he had brought his big ol’ yellow rain boots:
46.
This is Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the age of two, sporting long hair and wearing a dress, which was apparently common for young children at the time:
47.
These people are lining up for what was once the world’s longest bus ride, a route that ran between London, England, and Calcutta, India:
48.
This big ol’ blob is the “Elephant’s Foot” of Chernobyl, created after nuclear fuel mixed with concrete, sand, and other materials. Immediately after the disaster, standing just three feet away from it for two minutes would have been fatal:
49.
Here’s a picture of two men working on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, clearly following all safety protocols and ensuring their survival:
50.
This is Ham, the first chimpanzee in space, enjoying a celebratory apple after successfully making it 160 miles above Earth:
51.
This is Hannah Stilley Gorby, the oldest person to ever have been photographed:
52.
For as long as we’ve had the ability to take photos, people have been editing and retouching them. This picture shows an example of “proto-Photoshop” used in the 1800s to alter an image:
53.
Interracial marriage didn’t become legal in Mississippi until 1970. Here are Roger Mills and his new wife Berta Linson, the first interracial couple married in Mississippi, leaving the courthouse in August 1970:
54.
This truly wild painting shows one of the earliest uses of rockets in battle, when Tipu Sultan’s forces in southern India launched them during the Anglo-Mysore Wars against the British East India Company in the late 1700s:
55.
Here’s what one of those rockets looked like in real life:
56.
On the lighter side of history, here are two kids in Scotland using a system of pulleys and ziplines to cross a river to get to school instead of walking five miles around the river:
57.
This picture, taken in 1898, shows what was once the oldest house in all of Hamburg, Germany, dating back to 1504:
58.
Speaking of which, this is what Germany’s Reichstag building, first built to house Germany’s parliament, looked like in 1945 at the end of World War II:
59.
And here’s what the Reichstag building looked like in 1925, well before World War II:
60.
This is American swimmer Gertrude Ederle, who became the first woman to swim across the English Channel in 1926. She did it in 14.5 hours, beating the men’s record by 2 hours:
61.
Here are some of the family members of the Apollo 11 astronauts, gathered in a living room as they watched their loved ones become the first people to land on the Moon:
62.
Speaking of Apollo 11, here are the astronauts quarantining back on Earth and sharing a brief chat with Richard Nixon:
63.
This is the agreement that allowed the USA to buy the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917. As part of the deal, the USA acknowledged Danish rule over Greenland, declaring, “America will not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland“:
64.
For hundreds of years, Stonehenge was “incomplete.” In the 1950s, work was done at Stonehenge to lift a stone back into place that had fallen in 1797:
65.
And here’s what Stonehenge looks like today, all lined up perfectly:
66.
This, in all its glory, is the 1917 Chapman High School Canning Club standing tall and proud in Kansas:
67.
This is what the Hoover Dam looked like when it was completed, but before the Colorado River was released:
68.
And this is what it looked like at the dam when the river was finally released:
69.
This is what an experimental television set from 1928, made by GE, looked like:
70.
In the mid-80s, the Statue of Liberty was completely covered in scafolding while being renovated:
71.
Here’s a whole bunch of Elvis Presley fans watching the man himself and going absolutely cuckoo bananas over him:
72.
This is the note former president George H.W. Bush left for incoming president Bill Clinton in the White House after Clinton defeated him in the 1992 presidential election:
73.
This is Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls while inside a barrel:
74.
Here’s Annie being retrieved after completing her historic feat, still inside her world-famous barrel:
75.
This is what Broadway in New York City, specifically at 10th Street, looked like in 1911:
76.
And here’s what that same stretch of street looks like today:
77.
And, finally, this is Frederico Caprilli demonstrating his extreme prowess on horseback for some reason:
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