If you think you know your history, get ready to be amazed. Keeping you old big books aside, what’s better than looking at your history through photographs.
A picture is worth a thousand words, it’s true because putting a strong moment into words is very hard, especially when those moments come about after looking other people in times of complete loss and despair.
The rare photos below show a different angle of historical events, and you probably wouldn’t find them in any school textbook.
1. Testing a bulletproof vest, 1923
2. Samuel Reshevsky, age 8, defeating several chess masters at once in France, 1920
3. The 2800-year-old kiss
4. A V-1 flying bomb “buzzbomb” plunging toward central London, 1945
5. The molten radioactive core after the Chernobyl accident. Known as the “Elephant’s foot”
6. A picture of 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters taken by serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades shortly before he murdered her
7. Gadget, the first atomic bomb
8. The last picture that was taken of the Titanic before it sank
9. General George S. Patton’s dog on the day of Patton’s death on December 21st, 1945
10. The control room of the UB-110 German submarine, 1918
11. 1963 – JFK’s funeral in the Capitol Building.
12. Young Winston Churchill, 1895
13. Gas masks for babies tested at an English hospital, 1940
14. A politician in the Philippines Reynaldo Dagsa photographs his own assassination
15. Laughing at Auschwitz – SS auxiliaries poses at a resort for Auschwitz personnel, 1942
16. The last Jew in Vinnitsa, 1941
17. 1989 – East German soldier passing a flower through the Berlin Wall before it was torn down.
18. USAAF B-25 sinks Japanese destroyer Amatsukaze off the coast of Xiamen, China, 6 April 1945
19. 1912 – The first World Series Game in New York.
20. Illegal picture inside the Supreme Court. A man faked a broken arm and hid a camera in his cast
21. Execution of a German Communist in Munich, 1919
22. Einstein’s desk photographed a day after his death
23. Nazis singing to encourage a boycott of the allegedly Jewish-founded Woolworths, 1933
24. The first photograph upon discovery of Machu Picchu, 1912
25. Annual midnight swearing-in of Nazi SS troops, Feldherrnhalle, Munich, 1938
26. The underwater detonation of 15 kilotons nuclear weapon
27. U-118, a World War One submarine washed ashore on the beach at Hastings, Sussex, England
28. Using banknotes as wallpaper during Hyperinflation, Germany 1923
29. An illegal picture atop the Giza pyramids in Egypt
30. The Cologne cathedral stands tall amidst the ruins of the city after allied bombings, 1944
31. Turkish official teasing starved Armenian children by showing bread during the Armenian Genocide, 1915
32. Henry Ford receiving the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Nazi officials, 1938
33. Two German soldiers and their mule wearing gas masks in WWI, 1916
34. Using a traditional Japanese blade, 17-year-old Otoya Yamaguchi assassinates socialist politician Inejiro Asanuma in Tokyo, Japan
35. Archduke Franz Ferdinand with his wife on the day they were assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, 28 June 1914
36. Germans testing a Messerschmitt Bf 109 E3, 1940
