Nearly 200 Rare Historical Photos and the Stories Behind Them

These are nearly 200 photographs that show history from unusual angles: the Beatles walking the "wrong" way over the Abbey Road crossing, the Eiffel Tower half built, a Cessna parked beside Red Square, Einstein's desk on the day he died and Neil Armstrong's picture of Buzz Aldrin inside the lunar module. Some are world famous; many are outtakes, snapshots and archive prints that rarely appear in textbooks.

A collection like this spreads quickly online, and so do its mistakes. While putting the stories together we checked each caption against reliable records, and several popular claims turned out to be wrong. Pope Pius XI never met Hitler, the "Tank Man" did not verifiably survive, the famous Moon bootprint belongs to Aldrin rather than Armstrong, and the gunman in the "Last Jew in Vinnitsa" photograph was identified in 2025 as having fired in Berdychiv. Where a picture's origin is uncertain, we say so.

The photographs are grouped by theme rather than date, so you can read one section at a time. Each picture has a short note on who and what it shows, when it was taken and why it matters. The portrait at the top, of the wrestler Maurice Tillet with the model Dorian Leigh, is explained at the end of the final gallery.

Ancient tombs, empires and the turn of the twentieth century

The oldest scenes in the collection reach from Tutankhamun's sealed shrine to the last years of the samurai, the American West and the first Olympic marathon. Many come from glass-plate negatives, which is why they are so sharp.

The sealed shrine inside Tutankhamun's tomb

When Howard Carter's team opened the burial chamber of Tutankhamun in 1923, they found four gilded shrines nested around the stone sarcophagus. The doors of the second shrine were still tied with cord and pressed with a clay seal of the royal necropolis, untouched for more than 3,200 years. Expedition photographer Harry Burton recorded it before the cord was cut.

Howard Carter and Tutankhamun's coffin

Howard Carter and an Egyptian colleague work on the innermost coffin of Tutankhamun, made of solid gold, in 1925. The king's body lay inside three nested coffins within a quartzite sarcophagus. Egyptian workers did much of the excavation, though they are rarely named in popular accounts of the find.

Samurai in a studio portrait

This studio portrait comes from the last decades in which samurai existed as a class. Japan opened its ports to Western trade in the 1850s, and foreign and Japanese photographers began making portraits like this in Yokohama and Nagasaki in the 1860s. The Meiji government abolished samurai privileges in the 1870s, including the right to carry swords in public.

A studio portrait from Meiji Japan

An elaborately dressed sitter poses in a photographer's studio in Japan around 1860-1880. Early Japanese studios often posed people in traditional armour and robes, partly for foreign buyers. Hand-tinted prints like this were popular souvenirs.

Three archers, Japan, 1870s

Three archers draw the tall Japanese bow, the yumi, which is over two metres long and held below the centre. The skill, known today as kyudo, was part of samurai training. After the samurai class was abolished, archery survived as a martial art and discipline.

George Armstrong Custer in camp

Custer graduated last in his West Point class of 1861 but rose fast, becoming one of the Union's youngest generals at 23. Civil War photographers often posed officers outside their tents like this; the colour here was added later. Custer was killed at the Little Bighorn in June 1876 along with every man in the five companies under his direct command.

The only quagga photographed alive

The quagga, now treated as a southern form of the plains zebra, had bold stripes only on the front of its body. This mare lived at London Zoo in Regent's Park and was photographed there between 1863 and 1870; no other living quagga is known to have been photographed. The last of its kind died at Artis zoo in Amsterdam on 12 August 1883, and a South African project has since bred plains zebras for quagga-like markings.

The Kremlin in 1852

British photographer Roger Fenton made some of the earliest photographs of Moscow and the Kremlin in 1852. Three years later he became famous for his Crimean War pictures. This sepia view shows the Kremlin's towers and churches beyond the rooftops.

A lookout above the railroad in Nevada

A lone figure looks down over a river canyon and a newly built rail line, in a view from the late 1860s when the Central Pacific Railroad was pushing east across Nevada. The first transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, on 10 May 1869. Its construction opened the West to settlers and brought upheaval and land loss to the Native nations along the route.

Machu Picchu as Hiram Bingham's team found it

Yale lecturer Hiram Bingham reached Machu Picchu in July 1911, guided by local farmer Melchor Arteaga, and found families already farming its terraces. He returned in 1912 with an expedition that cleared the overgrowth, and photographs like this, published by National Geographic in 1913, made the 15th-century Inca site famous. "Discovery" therefore means discovery by the outside world.

Princeton students after a snowball fight

Two bruised Princeton students pose after the traditional freshman-versus-sophomore snowball fight in 1893. Clashes between year groups, known as "rushes", were a rough rite of passage at many American colleges of the time. The swollen faces show these were not gentle games.

The Montparnasse derailment, 1895

On 22 October 1895 an express from Granville came into Paris's Gare Montparnasse too fast, overran the buffers, crossed the concourse and smashed through the front wall, leaving the locomotive nose-down in the street. Remarkably, only one person died, a woman on the street below. The scene became one of the most reproduced railway photographs ever taken.

Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab

Mark Twain holds a glowing lamp lit by high-frequency currents in Nikola Tesla's New York laboratory in 1894; Tesla can be seen faintly in the background. The two were friends, and the image appeared in Century Magazine in 1895. It was described at the time as one of the first photographs taken by phosphorescent light.

Spyros Louis, the first Olympic marathon winner

Spyros Louis, a 23-year-old water carrier from Marousi, won the marathon at the first modern Olympic Games in Athens on 10 April 1896, in 2 hours 58 minutes 50 seconds. Crown Prince Constantine and Prince George ran beside him on the last lap. Asked what gift he wanted, Louis reportedly chose a cart and donkey for his water business, and he carried the Greek flag at the 1936 Games.

Auguste and Louis Lumière

The Lumière brothers held the first public, paid screening of projected films at the Grand Café in Paris on 28 December 1895, using their Cinématographe. Calling them the first filmmakers ever overstates it: Louis Le Prince filmed short scenes in Leeds in 1888, and Edison's company was already making films for peep-show machines. The Lumières' gift was making cinema a shared public experience.

Tsar Nicholas II at play, 1899

Russia's last emperor strikes a playful pose in a private snapshot. The Romanovs were keen amateur photographers and left thousands of informal pictures of family life. After the 1917 revolution the family was imprisoned, and in July 1918 they were shot by Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg.

The Eiffel Tower going up, 1888

Gustave Eiffel's company started the foundations in January 1887, and by the summer of 1888 the iron lattice had climbed past the first platform. The tower opened for the 1889 World's Fair, held for the centenary of the French Revolution. At about 300 metres it stayed the tallest structure on Earth until the Chrysler Building rose in New York in 1930, and it was originally meant to come down after twenty years.

Building the Statue of Liberty in Paris

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi's statue was made in Paris around an iron framework engineered by Gustave Eiffel. This workshop scene shows sections of the copper skin and plaster models being shaped. The statue was shipped to New York in 350 pieces and dedicated on 28 October 1886.

Steamboats on the Mississippi, 1907

Stern-wheel and side-wheel steamboats line up along a Mississippi River landing around 1907. Railways were steadily taking their trade, but river boats still moved cotton, freight and passengers. The image comes from the Detroit Publishing Company archive, later popularised by the photo site Shorpy.

Union Station, Washington, D.C.

Union Station, designed by Daniel Burnham in grand Beaux-Arts style, opened in 1907 and was among the largest railway stations in the world. This view of the main hall shows rows of wooden benches under the coffered vaulted ceiling. It was restored in the 1980s and is still a busy rail hub.

Times Square at night, 1911

Longacre Square was renamed Times Square in 1904, after The New York Times moved into its new tower there. By 1911 electric advertising signs were already turning the crossroads into a night-time attraction. The paper's New Year's Eve celebrations began there in 1904, and the ball drop followed in 1907.

A Titanic passenger ticket

What is often called Titanic's "boarding pass" is a White Star Line passenger contract ticket, which served as both ticket and travel agreement. Titanic left Southampton on its maiden voyage on 10 April 1912. Genuine originals are very rare and fetch high prices at auction, so many of the images circulating online are reproductions.

One of the last photos of Titanic

Titanic called at Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland on 11 April 1912, and pictures taken as it steamed away are among the last ever made of the ship. Four days later it struck an iceberg and sank in the early hours of 15 April, with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. The disaster led to the first International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea in 1914.

Propellers and a man for scale

Photos of a giant propeller with a man beside it, labelled "Titanic in dry dock", very often show Titanic's near-identical older sister, Olympic, in Belfast's Thompson Graving Dock in 1911. The two ships are hard to tell apart in such close-ups. Either way, the human figure shows the vast scale of the White Star liners.

Folsom Street after the 1906 earthquake

The San Francisco earthquake struck at 5:12 a.m. on 18 April 1906, with an estimated magnitude of 7.9. Shaking and three days of fire destroyed much of the city, and around 3,000 people died. Cracked streets like this one marked areas of soft, filled ground where the shaking was worst.

Building the Manhattan Bridge, 1908

The Manhattan Bridge, linking Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn across the East River, opened on 31 December 1909. In this 1908 view workers stand on the temporary catwalks used to spin the main cables. Its engineer, Leon Moisseiff, pioneered new methods for calculating how suspension bridges flex.

The Tunguska blast zone

On 30 June 1908 a huge explosion flattened around 2,000 square kilometres of Siberian forest near the Tunguska River. No one photographed it at the time; pictures like this come from Leonid Kulik's expeditions from 1927. Scientists think a meteoroid or comet fragment burst in the air several kilometres up, which is why no impact crater was found.

Lumberjacks and a redwood giant

Loggers pose with a felled tree in California's coast redwood forests in the early 1900s. Coast redwoods are the tallest trees on Earth, some exceeding 110 metres, and individual trees can live for about 2,000 years. Felling one by hand could take a crew several days with axes and long crosscut saws.

The scale of old-growth logging

Cuts like this removed most of the original coast redwood forest; conservation groups estimate that around 95 percent of the old growth was logged after the 1850s. Save the Redwoods League, founded in 1918, began buying groves to protect them, and many survivors now stand in state and national parks. The stump in the foreground gives a sense of how big these trees were.

Building the modern world: cities, business and technology

Construction sites, shopfronts and office portraits show how quickly the twentieth century was assembled, from Brasília and Mount Rushmore to the first fast-food counters and the Windows 95 launch.

"La Marquise", a steam car from 1884

Built in 1884 by De Dion, Bouton et Trépardoux, this steam-powered car with back-to-back seats is widely regarded as the oldest automobile that still runs. In 1887 it was the only entrant in a run from Paris to Versailles organised by a cycling newspaper, sometimes called the first motor race. It sold at auction in 2011 for about 4.6 million dollars.

The "Vagabonds" camping trip

Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and tyre maker Harvey Firestone took well-publicised summer camping trips together from 1915 into the 1920s, at first with naturalist John Burroughs; the press called them the Vagabonds. President Warren G. Harding joined them in Maryland in July 1921. The camps came with cooks, drivers and a convoy of supply vehicles, so the roughing-it was mostly for the cameras.

An early McDonald's stand

Brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald reopened their San Bernardino, California drive-in in December 1948 with a short menu and an assembly-line kitchen they called the "Speedee Service System". Burgers cost 15 cents, the price shown on this sign. Milkshake-machine salesman Ray Kroc became their franchise agent in 1954 and bought the brothers out in 1961.

Walton's 5-10 in Bentonville

The sign reads "Walton's 5-10", Sam Walton's variety store on the town square in Bentonville, Arkansas, which he opened in 1950. The first store actually called Wal-Mart, "Wal-Mart Discount City", opened separately in nearby Rogers in 1962. The Bentonville building now houses the Walmart Museum.

The first Ronald McDonald

Before he became the weatherman on NBC's Today show, Willard Scott played Ronald McDonald in local television advertising in Washington, D.C. in 1963. His costume used a paper cup for a nose and a food tray as a hat. McDonald's later redesigned the character for national campaigns.

Microsoft's team in 1978

On 7 December 1978, eleven Microsoft employees posed for a portrait in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the company began. Bill Gates sits bottom left and co-founder Paul Allen bottom right. A few weeks later the company moved to the Seattle area, and the photo became famous for the question of who would have invested.

Google's early staff

Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google in September 1998 and worked at first from a rented garage in Menlo Park, California. By 1999 the company had moved to offices in Palo Alto and then Mountain View, and its staff still fitted into one group photo. The playful exclamation mark in the logo was dropped soon after.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates

The two founders were rivals, partners and occasional courtroom opponents: Microsoft wrote early software for the Macintosh, and Apple later sued over the look of Windows. In 1991, when Jobs was running NeXT, the pair sat together for a joint magazine interview. In 1997 Microsoft invested 150 million dollars in a struggling Apple, a deal Jobs announced on stage.

ENIAC, the giant electronic calculator

ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly for the US Army and unveiled in February 1946. It is fairly described as the first general-purpose, programmable electronic computer, but it was not the first computer of any kind: Britain's Colossus and the Atanasoff-Berry machine came earlier with narrower abilities. ENIAC used about 17,500 vacuum tubes, weighed around 27 tonnes and could manage some 5,000 additions per second. Its first programmers were six women, among them Jean Jennings Bartik and Kay McNulty.

The Windows 95 launch

Microsoft released Windows 95 on 24 August 1995 with a huge marketing push, including the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" in its adverts, and shoppers queued at midnight to buy it. It introduced the Start button and taskbar that still shape Windows today. Within days it had sold millions of copies.

Porsche 911 production line

Porsche 911 bodies move along the line at the company's Zuffenhausen plant in Stuttgart around 1970. The 911 was unveiled in 1963 and went on sale the following year. Much of the work was still done by hand, and the model remains in production today.

A Dodge dealership at night, 1948

A brightly lit car showroom in New York City selling Dodge and Plymouth models in 1948. After wartime production stopped civilian car making, American buyers faced long waiting lists. Dealerships like this one became modernist showcases with big glass fronts.

An old "twin tyre" advertisement

This print advert promoted a tyre with its tread split in two by a central channel, claiming better grip on wet roads and quoting a racing driver's endorsement. Tyre makers have tried many ideas to clear water from under the tread. The basic principle survives in the deep grooves of modern rain tyres.

How the Coca-Cola bottle changed

Coca-Cola was first sold in Atlanta in 1886, and early bottlers used plain straight-sided bottles. In 1915 the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana, designed the curved contour bottle so it could be recognised by touch or even when broken. The shape later became a registered trademark in its own right.

A cigarette machine with a light, 1931

A woman tries a coin-operated machine in England in 1931 that was advertised as dispensing a cigarette already lit, for a penny. Novelty vending machines were a craze between the wars. Today smoking is recognised as one of the leading preventable causes of death worldwide.

Barrels of seized alcohol

A pyramid of barrels waits to be burned during American Prohibition. The 18th Amendment banned the making and sale of alcohol from January 1920 until its repeal in December 1933. Officials staged public destruction of seized liquor for the press, though bootlegging thrived anyway.

A lawn mower in the fuel queue, 1973

In October 1973 Arab members of OPEC imposed an oil embargo on the United States and other countries over their support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Oil prices roughly quadrupled, and American drivers faced long queues and rationing at the pumps. This man waited in line with his lawn mower.

A picnic on an empty motorway, 1973

During the 1973 oil crisis several European countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium and West Germany, banned private driving on certain Sundays. People took to the empty motorways on foot, bicycles and roller skates, and some spread out picnics on the asphalt. The car-free Sundays lasted a few weeks.

Inside a Hoover Dam penstock

Hoover Dam's penstocks, the steel pipes carrying water from the intake towers to the turbines, were up to 30 feet (9 m) across. They were so large that a steel fabrication plant was built near the site to make them. The dam was completed in 1936 and still supplies power and water across the Southwest.

Carving Mount Rushmore

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum and about 400 workers carved the four presidential faces in South Dakota's Black Hills between 1927 and 1941, using dynamite and then drills and hammers. Borglum died in March 1941 and his son Lincoln finished the work. The mountain lies on land sacred to the Lakota, taken in breach of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.

Christ the Redeemer under construction

Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer was built between 1922 and 1931 on top of Corcovado mountain. Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa designed it, French sculptor Paul Landowski made the head and hands, and the reinforced concrete figure was clad in soapstone tiles. It stands about 30 metres tall, not counting its base.

Building the Palace of Culture and Science

The Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw was built from 1952 to 1955 as a "gift" from the Soviet Union, designed by Lev Rudnev in the Stalinist style. At about 237 metres including its spire, it was Poland's tallest building until 2022. Many Varsovians still see it as a symbol of Soviet control.

Brasília rising from the plateau

Brazil moved its capital from coastal Rio de Janeiro to a new city built almost from scratch on the central highlands. Lúcio Costa drew the airplane-shaped master plan and Oscar Niemeyer designed its landmark buildings; President Juscelino Kubitschek opened the city on 21 April 1960. The identical blocks in this aerial view are the first of its residential "superquadras". UNESCO listed Brasília as a World Heritage Site in 1987.

The Hindenburg over Manhattan

The German airship Hindenburg, 245 metres long, made its first season of transatlantic flights in 1936, often passing over Manhattan on the way to Lakehurst, New Jersey. On 6 May 1937 it caught fire while landing there, and 36 people died. The disaster ended the era of passenger airships.

Tower Bridge in the fog, 1928

London's Tower Bridge, opened in 1894, rises out of a thick autumn fog in 1928. Coal smoke made the city's fogs notorious, and the Great Smog of December 1952 killed thousands. That disaster led to the Clean Air Act of 1956.

Central Park, 1933

The skyline of hotels and apartment towers along Fifth Avenue and Central Park South is reflected in the Pond at the park's south-east corner. During the Depression, a shanty town of homeless families stood elsewhere in the park. The view still looks similar today.

Times Square in the rain, 1943

In 1943 wartime rules dimmed the bright lights of New York at night, because the city's glow could silhouette ships for German submarines offshore. By day the square was a crossroads for servicemen on leave. The reflections on the wet street give this colour picture its unusual mood.

Times Square, 1972

By 1972 Times Square glowed with giant adverts like this one for Kent cigarettes, but the area was also known for crime and decay. A major cleanup and redevelopment came in the 1990s. Cigarette billboards disappeared from the square after a 1998 legal settlement with US states.

New York City from the air, 1951

This aerial view, looking north up Manhattan on 16 December 1951, was made by Fairchild Aerial Surveys. The Empire State Building and the grid of streets are easy to pick out. The new United Nations headquarters had just opened on the East Side.

Light beams in Grand Central Terminal

Sunlight pours through the tall windows of Grand Central Terminal's main concourse in the 1930s, in a celebrated view by photographer Hal Morey. Dust and smoke in the air made the beams visible. Later, taller buildings nearby blocked much of the direct light.

A drive-in screening in Utah

Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) plays to rows of cars at a Utah drive-in in 1958. Drive-in theatres peaked in the United States in the late 1950s, with around 4,000 screens. Television, rising land values and daylight saving time all helped shrink their numbers later.

Lunch break at Disneyland

Costumed characters line up for food in the employee cafeteria at Disneyland, which opened in Anaheim, California, in July 1955. Performers took their breaks out of guests' sight so the illusion inside the park held. Seeing Snow White beside a knight over trays of lunch is the kind of backstage moment the public rarely saw.

Two world wars

The largest group covers 1914 to 1945. Some images were taken by soldiers, others by state propaganda units, so we note where a picture was made to send a message as well as to record one.

Franz Ferdinand and Sophie in Sarajevo

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie arrive in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Hours later Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist, shot them both after their car took a wrong turn. Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia set off a chain of alliances that led to the First World War.

Russian motorcycle machine guns, WWI

Soldiers of the 39th Tomsk Infantry Regiment pose with motorcycles fitted with machine guns during the First World War. Motorcycle machine-gun units were an early experiment in fast, mobile firepower. Russia bought many of its motorcycles and sidecars from abroad.

The Red Baron and his dog

Manfred von Richthofen, the German fighter ace credited with 80 victories in the First World War, kept a Great Dane called Moritz that travelled with his squadron. Richthofen was shot down and killed near Amiens on 21 April 1918, most likely by ground fire from Australian troops. He was 25.

U-118 ashore at Hastings

The German submarine U-118, a minelayer handed to the Allies after the First World War, was being towed to France for scrapping in April 1919 when its tow line broke in a storm. It drifted onto the beach at Hastings, East Sussex, right in front of the town. Thousands of people came to look at it.

The stranded U-boat from above

For a few weeks the wreck became one of the south coast's odder tourist attractions, drawing crowds down to the shingle. The submarine was broken up where it lay later in 1919. This view shows how close it came to the seafront hotels.

A pyramid of German helmets in New York

Captured German helmets were stacked into pyramids along Park Avenue for the Victory Loan campaign in the spring of 1919, part of a display called the "Victory Way". The aim was to sell war bonds to pay for the war. The trophies came from the battlefields of the Western Front.

A school photo from Leonding

This class picture from the primary school in Leonding, near Linz in Austria, around 1899, shows Adolf Hitler at about ten, in the middle of the top row. It is included as a historical document. His father, a customs official, had retired to the village.

Hitler on a sledge

An informal picture of Hitler sitting on a sledge in the snow. His personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, produced thousands of such homely images to present the dictator as a simple man. They are useful now mainly as evidence of how carefully his public image was built.

Mussolini's face on the Palazzo Braschi

In 1934 the Fascist party headquarters in Rome's Palazzo Braschi was covered with a giant image of Benito Mussolini and rows of the word "SI" (yes) for a single-list plebiscite vote. The display shows how dictatorship staged consent. Mussolini was overthrown in 1943 and killed by partisans in April 1945.

A papal nuncio, not the Pope, meets Hitler

This photograph is often labelled as Pope Pius XI meeting Hitler, but no such meeting ever happened. Images like it show the papal nuncio in Berlin, Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, greeting Hitler at diplomatic receptions in the 1930s. Pius XI condemned Nazi ideology in his 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge.

Joseph Goebbels' wedding, 1931

Joseph Goebbels, later Hitler's propaganda minister, married Magda Quandt on 19 December 1931 at an estate in Mecklenburg, with Hitler as a witness. The raised arms in the frame show how the Nazi movement was already turning private events into displays. In May 1945, in the Berlin bunker, the couple poisoned their six children and then killed themselves.

Ferdinand Porsche shows Hitler the "people's car"

Ferdinand Porsche shows Hitler a model of the car later known as the Volkswagen Beetle. The picture is often dated 1935, but the best-known presentations took place around the 1938 founding of the factory. Civilian production barely began before the war, the plant turned to military vehicles using forced labour, and the Beetle only became a mass-market car after 1945.

A Christmas banquet for Nazi officers

This colour photograph shows long tables of uniformed men at a Christmas dinner, usually captioned as a 1941 party for Hitler's officers or cadets. The exact unit and venue are not recorded in the caption. The regime's photographers produced many images of comfort and order like this even as the war in the East turned against Germany.

An air-raid tunnel in Chongqing

Chongqing (then spelled Chungking) became China's wartime capital after Japan took Nanjing. From 1938 to 1943 Japanese aircraft bombed it repeatedly, and residents crowded into tunnels dug into the city's hills. In June 1941 a stampede and suffocation in one tunnel killed many hundreds of people.

Hitler in Paris, June 1940

On 23 June 1940, the day after France signed the armistice, Hitler made a brief early-morning tour of Paris with architect Albert Speer and sculptor Arno Breker. It lasted about three hours and was his only visit. The picture in front of the Eiffel Tower became a staple of Nazi propaganda.

New York reads the war news, May 1940

On 18 May 1940 a man on a New York street corner stands near a newspaper stand as headlines report the German army 75 miles from Paris. Germany had attacked France and the Low Countries on 10 May, and Paris fell on 14 June. The United States stayed neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

St Paul's Cathedral survives the Blitz

Daily Mail photographer Herbert Mason took this picture from a rooftop on the night of 29 December 1940, during one of the heaviest raids on London. Fire-watchers saved the cathedral while the streets around it burned. The image became a symbol of British endurance.

Nearco's private bomb shelter

Nearco, an Italian-bred racehorse unbeaten in 14 races, was bought by English bookmaker Martin Benson in 1938 and stood at stud at Beech House, Newmarket. During the war he had his own shelter in case of air raids. He became one of the most influential sires of the century; Northern Dancer was his grandson.

Luftwaffe pilots in the desert, 1942

Pilots play cards in the shade next to a Messerschmitt Bf 109 during the North African campaign in 1942. Sand, heat and glare were hard on men and engines alike. The desert war ended with the Axis surrender in Tunisia in May 1943.

A haircut between missions

An RAF pilot keeps reading while a comrade cuts his hair beside a Spitfire. Fighter pilots on readiness could spend hours waiting by their aircraft, ready to take off within minutes, so everyday chores happened right on the airfield. Colour photographs from the Second World War like this one were relatively rare.

SAS patrol in North Africa, 1943

The Special Air Service was founded in 1941 by David Stirling to raid Axis airfields far behind the lines in North Africa. Jeeps armed with twin machine guns, like these, let small teams cross hundreds of miles of desert and strike at night. The unit destroyed hundreds of enemy aircraft on the ground during the desert campaign.

Soldiers with a kitten, 1943

German soldiers pause to play with a kitten in 1943. Many such scenes were taken by the army's propaganda companies to show the troops as ordinary and kind. They are best read as images the regime wanted the public to see.

German soldiers with a French prisoner, 1940

German soldiers pose with a captured French soldier during the 1940 campaign. About 1.8 million French troops became prisoners after France's defeat, and many spent nearly five years in German camps. Soldiers' private photos like this are now studied by historians for what they reveal about attitudes in the ranks.

A German soldier and children in Bulgaria

A German soldier sits on his motorcycle surrounded by local boys in Bulgaria in 1941, the year the country joined the Axis and let German troops cross on their way to invade Greece and Yugoslavia. Scenes like this were often photographed to suggest friendly occupation. Bulgaria changed sides in September 1944.

A soldier and his pet kangaroo, 1942

An American serviceman feeds a young kangaroo at an Allied base in 1942. Tens of thousands of US troops arrived in Australia that year as Japan advanced across the Pacific. Local animals became unofficial mascots at many bases.

Islanders admire a Corsair, 1943

Local people gather around an F4U Corsair at a Pacific island airstrip in 1943. The Corsair was flown by the US Navy and Marine Corps, not the Army Air Forces as some captions say. Bases across the Pacific brought sudden, deep change to island communities.

A Corsair crash on a carrier deck

Carrier landings depended on a tailhook catching one of the arresting wires across the deck. When the hook missed or the gear failed, a fighter could end up nosed over or tipped like this one. The F4U Corsair's long nose made deck landings tricky, which is partly why the US Navy first gave it to land-based Marine squadrons before clearing it for carrier use in 1944.

Kingcobras over Niagara Falls

Two Bell P-63 Kingcobras with Soviet red stars fly over Niagara Falls, near the Bell factory in Niagara Falls, New York. Most of the roughly 2,400 P-63s sent under Lend-Lease were ferried to the Soviet Union through Alaska and Siberia. They served mainly late in the war, including against Japan in August 1945, rather than over Western Europe.

Elisabeth "Lilo" Gloeden on trial

Elisabeth Charlotte Gloeden stands before the Nazi People's Court in 1944. She, her husband and her mother had hidden General Fritz Lindemann, who was wanted for his part in the 20 July plot against Hitler; she was not one of the plotters herself. All three were executed in November 1944 for sheltering him.

Hitler's trousers after the July plot

On 20 July 1944 Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg left a briefcase bomb in a conference hut at the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia. Hitler survived with minor injuries, and his shredded trousers were photographed as evidence. Stauffenberg was shot that night, and many others involved were later executed.

The "Schwerer Gustav" railway gun

Built by Krupp, this 80 cm railway gun weighed around 1,350 tonnes and fired shells of up to about seven tonnes. It saw combat only once, at the siege of Sevastopol in 1942, and needed weeks of preparation and well over a thousand personnel. It remains the largest-calibre rifled gun ever used in battle; here Nazi leaders inspect it.

A King Tiger in Budapest, 1944

The German Tiger II weighed close to 70 tonnes, with frontal armour up to 180 mm thick, and fewer than 500 were built. This one was photographed in Budapest in October 1944, when Germany seized control of the Hungarian government to stop it leaving the war. Heavy and powerful, the tank was also mechanically unreliable and thirsty for scarce fuel.

Sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a history student from Kyiv, joined the Red Army in 1941 and was credited with 309 kills, often called the highest total of any female sniper. Some historians question how such tallies were counted. In 1942 she toured the United States and became a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt.

"The Last Jew in Vinnitsa"

This photo of a German gunman about to shoot a Jewish man kneeling at the edge of a mass grave became one of the most recognised images of the Holocaust. In 2025 historian Jürgen Matthäus, formerly of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, identified the gunman as Jakobus Onnen and the place as Berdychiv, Ukraine, probably on 28 July 1941, rather than Vinnytsia. Einsatzgruppen units and their helpers murdered tens of thousands of Jews in the region that year.

The Enola Gay

This B-29 Superfortress, flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets and named after his mother, dropped the uranium bomb "Little Boy" on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. It was the first use of a nuclear weapon in war; three days later another B-29, Bockscar, bombed Nagasaki. Estimates suggest around 140,000 people in Hiroshima had died by the end of 1945. The restored aircraft is displayed at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.

Hiroshima before and after

These aerial views compare Hiroshima before and after the atomic bomb of 6 August 1945. Around 70 percent of the city's buildings were destroyed or badly damaged, leaving the river channels as the main landmarks. Survivors, called hibakusha, have campaigned against nuclear weapons for decades.

Firebombs falling on Kobe, 1945

US B-29 bombers struck the port city of Kobe with incendiary raids in March and June 1945, burning large parts of the city and killing thousands. Japan's mostly wooden housing made such raids devastating. The anime Grave of the Fireflies is set during these Kobe raids.

MacArthur signs the Japanese surrender

On 2 September 1945, on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, General Douglas MacArthur signed the Instrument of Surrender as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Japan's foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and army chief General Yoshijirō Umezu had signed first. The ceremony formally ended the Second World War.

Inside the Führerbunker, 1945

The Führerbunker lay under the garden of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Hitler spent his final weeks there and killed himself on 30 April 1945; Soviet troops reached the site on 2 May, and Allied soldiers and reporters photographed the wrecked rooms that summer. What remained was largely demolished in the late 1980s, and the spot is now an unremarkable car park with an information board.

A show on a tank near Berlin

Soviet soldiers crowd around a tank on the outskirts of Berlin in 1945 as one of them performs acrobatics on top. Concert brigades and improvised shows were a way to lift spirits between battles. The Battle of Berlin lasted from 16 April to 2 May 1945 and was one of the bloodiest of the war.

The Soviet flag over the Reichstag

Yevgeny Khaldei took this picture on 2 May 1945, restaging a flag-raising on the Reichstag after the building fell. The soldier holding the flag is usually identified as Aleksei Kovalyov, with Abdulkhakim Ismailov steadying him; Rakhimzhan Koshkarbayev and Grigory Bulatov are credited with raising an earlier flag on 30 April. Khaldei later retouched the photo, including removing a second wristwatch that hinted at looting.

Soviet soldiers with "Hitler's globe"

Red Army soldiers inspect a large globe found in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in 1945. These "Columbus globes" were made by a Berlin firm for top government offices, and several survive. Charlie Chaplin had already mocked Hitler's ambitions with a giant globe in The Great Dictator (1940).

A new street sign in Berlin, 1945

An American soldier swaps a street sign named for Hitler for one honouring President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died on 12 April 1945. Occupation authorities renamed streets across Germany to remove Nazi names. Many towns had dedicated a main street to Hitler after 1933.

Manet's "In the Conservatory" in a salt mine

In April 1945 soldiers of the US Third Army found a vast hoard in the Kaiseroda mine at Merkers, Thuringia: Germany's gold reserves, banknotes, Nazi loot and artworks evacuated from Berlin's museums. Manet's 1879 painting In the Conservatory belonged to Berlin's Nationalgalerie, so it was museum property moved for safekeeping rather than stolen art. It hangs again in Berlin today.

Patton's dog Willie

Willie, a bull terrier, was General George S. Patton's constant companion from 1944. Patton died in a military hospital in Heidelberg on 21 December 1945, twelve days after a car crash, and this picture shows Willie lying beside his master's belongings. The dog was later sent home to Patton's family in the United States.

V-J Day in Times Square

Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed a sailor kissing a woman in white in Times Square on 14 August 1945, as news of Japan's surrender spread. Many people later claimed to be the pair; the most widely accepted identification is George Mendonsa and Greta Zimmer Friedman, a dental assistant rather than a nurse. Friedman later said the kiss was not her choice, which has changed how many people see the picture.

Flight, rockets and the race to the Moon

Barely 66 years separate the Wright Flyer's 12-second hop from Buzz Aldrin's bootprint. These pictures follow that leap through stunts, prototypes and spacecraft.

The Wright brothers' first flight

On 17 December 1903 at Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright flew the Wright Flyer for 12 seconds and about 120 feet while Wilbur ran alongside. John T. Daniels of the nearby lifesaving station squeezed the shutter on the brothers' camera. The longest of their four flights that day lasted 59 seconds.

A biplane through the Arc de Triomphe, 1919

Airmen had been told to march on foot in the Paris victory parade of 14 July 1919, and many were furious. On 7 August pilot Charles Godefroy answered by flying a small Nieuport biplane straight through the arch, an opening less than 15 metres wide, while newsreel cameras rolled. The stunt has never been officially repeated.

Howard Hughes in the "Spruce Goose"

Howard Hughes sits at the controls of the H-4 Hercules, a wartime flying boat nicknamed the Spruce Goose although it was built mostly of birch. It flew only once: on 2 November 1947 Hughes lifted it about 70 feet over Long Beach Harbor for roughly a mile. Its 320-foot wingspan was not exceeded until the Stratolaunch carrier aircraft flew in 2019.

The Boeing 707 prototype that did a barrel roll

In August 1955 Boeing test pilot Alvin "Tex" Johnston rolled the 367-80 "Dash 80", prototype of the 707 jetliner, over Lake Washington in front of crowds at Seattle's Seafair races. Asked by company president Bill Allen what he thought he was doing, Johnston is often quoted as replying that he was selling airplanes. The Dash 80 is now preserved by the Smithsonian.

B-36 bombers wrecked by a tornado

On 1 September 1952 a tornado tore through Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas, damaging most of the B-36 Peacemaker bombers parked there. The B-36 had a wingspan of 230 feet (70 m), six piston engines and, on later versions, four jets as well. Repairs took months and briefly left a serious gap in US bomber strength.

A pilot lying face down

In the late 1940s researchers tested beds that let pilots fly lying on their stomachs, because a prone body can tolerate stronger g-forces before blacking out. A modified Gloster Meteor flew prone-pilot trials in the 1950s. Poor visibility and neck strain meant the idea never entered service.

The Horten Ho 229 flying wing

The Ho 229 was the first pure flying-wing aircraft powered by jet engines. Its jet prototype first flew in early 1945 and crashed after only a few flights, and the war ended before production. Because so few flights took place, many "in flight" pictures of it are retouched or show models; the only surviving airframe is held by the Smithsonian.

The Grumman X-29

Two X-29 research jets were built for DARPA, NASA and the US Air Force; the first flew in December 1984. Their forward-swept wings made them so unstable that flight computers corrected them up to 40 times a second. The programme fed lessons into later computer-controlled aircraft.

The Blue Angels over Niagara Falls

The US Navy's Blue Angels fly Grumman F11F Tigers in close formation over Niagara Falls in the late 1950s. The team was not new: it was founded in 1946 and first flew Hellcats and Bearcats, switching to the Tiger in 1957. Their shows remain a major draw at air displays across the United States.

Missile Row at Cape Canaveral

Around 1960 a string of launch complexes, nicknamed Missile Row, lined the coast at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The site was chosen because rockets could fly out over the Atlantic, away from towns. Early missiles and the Mercury and Gemini crewed flights all left from pads like these.

John F. Kennedy at Cape Canaveral

President Kennedy toured NASA and Air Force facilities at Cape Canaveral in September 1962, on the same trip in which he gave his "we choose to go to the Moon" speech at Rice University. Here he sits in on a briefing about the launch programme. After his assassination in November 1963 the cape was renamed Cape Kennedy; the old name returned in 1973.

The first photograph from space, 1946

On 24 October 1946 a team at White Sands, New Mexico, launched a captured German V-2 rocket with a 35 mm movie camera in its nose. The rocket reached about 65 miles (105 km), and the film, sealed in a steel case, survived the fall back to the desert. These grainy black-and-white frames were the first pictures of Earth taken from space.

Apollo 1 crew in water training

Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee practise getting out of a capsule in a pool in 1966. On 27 January 1967, during a launch-pad test, a fire in the pure-oxygen cabin killed all three. NASA redesigned the hatch and cabin materials before crewed Apollo flights resumed in 1968.

Buzz Aldrin inside the lunar module

Neil Armstrong took this picture of Buzz Aldrin inside the lunar module Eagle on 20 July 1969, soon after their moonwalk. The two spent about 21 hours on the surface. Most Apollo 11 surface photos show Aldrin, because Armstrong carried the camera for most of the walk.

A bootprint on the Moon

Buzz Aldrin photographed his own bootprint on 20 July 1969 as part of a study of lunar soil; it is not Neil Armstrong's first step, as often claimed. With no wind or water, prints like this can last for a very long time, though tiny meteorite impacts slowly wear the surface. Apollo 11 left about 100 such tracks around Tranquility Base.

Apollo 16 astronauts in training

John Young and Charles Duke, commander and lunar module pilot of Apollo 16, practise carrying equipment in desert terrain chosen to resemble the Moon. Geology field training taught crews how to choose and describe rocks. In April 1972 they spent about three days in the Descartes Highlands and brought back around 95 kg of samples.

A family photo left on the Moon

Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke left a print of himself, his wife Dotty and their two sons on the lunar surface in April 1972, sealed in plastic. The back carried a short signed note from the family to whoever might find it. Duke photographed it before leaving; decades of harsh sunlight have almost certainly bleached it blank.

Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space

On 12 April 1961 Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made a single orbit of Earth in Vostok 1, a flight of 108 minutes. He became a worldwide celebrity overnight. Gagarin died in a training jet crash in 1968, aged 34.

A Cessna beside Red Square

On 28 May 1987 Mathias Rust, an 18-year-old West German amateur pilot, flew a rented Cessna 172 from Helsinki to Moscow and landed on a bridge next to Red Square, then taxied up near St Basil's Cathedral. Soviet air defences tracked the plane but never got permission to shoot. Mikhail Gorbachev used the embarrassment to remove Defence Minister Sergei Sokolov and other commanders. Rust was sentenced to four years in a labour camp and released after about 14 months.

A damaged Su-25, 2008

During the five-day war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008, Georgian air defences hit several Russian aircraft. The Su-25 ground-attack jet was designed with armour and spare systems so it could survive heavy damage and get home. This one appears to have returned with its engine area badly torn.

Cold War, civil rights and conflict

From Havana to Saigon and from Montgomery to Beijing, the second half of the century was shaped by revolutions, protest movements and wars fought in the shadow of the superpowers. Several of these images are hard to look at, and they are meant to be.

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro

Ernesto "Che" Guevara, an Argentine doctor, met Fidel Castro in Mexico in 1955 and became one of the commanders of the guerrilla war that brought down Fulgencio Batista on 1 January 1959. He then ran Cuba's national bank and its industry ministry before leaving to fight insurgencies in the Congo and Bolivia. Castro led Cuba until 2008 and died in 2016.

The body of Che Guevara

Che Guevara was captured by the Bolivian army and executed at La Higuera on 9 October 1967. The next day his body was shown to the press in a laundry in Vallegrande, where photographer Freddy Alborta took this picture. His remains were found in 1997 and reburied in Santa Clara, Cuba.

Segregated drinking fountains

Fountains labelled "White" and "Colored" were a routine sight under the Jim Crow laws of the American South. One of the best-known pictures of them was taken by photographer Elliott Erwitt in North Carolina in 1950. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public accommodations.

The "Klansman in surgery" picture

This image of Black medical staff treating a man in Ku Klux Klan robes circulates as a historical photo. The fact-checking site Snopes found it is not a genuine news photograph; it appears to have been scanned from a printed source, and it is not a still from the TV drama ER. Its message is powerful, but it should be shared as an illustration, not as a record of a real event.

Ruby Bridges goes to school

On 14 November 1960 six-year-old Ruby Bridges, escorted by US marshals, became the first Black child to attend William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Three other girls integrated a different school in the city that same day. Norman Rockwell later painted the scene as The Problem We All Live With.

Freedom Rider Jim Zwerg

Jim Zwerg, a white student from Wisconsin studying at Fisk University in Nashville, joined the Freedom Rides to challenge segregation on interstate buses. On 20 May 1961 a mob attacked the riders at the Greyhound station in Montgomery, Alabama, and Zwerg was badly beaten; reports say he waited a long time for an ambulance. From his hospital bed he told reporters the rides would go on.

Martin Luther King Jr. removes a burned cross

In 1960, at his home in Atlanta, King pulls up a cross that had been burned on his lawn as his young son watches. Cross-burning was a Ku Klux Klan tactic meant to terrify. King's family was targeted repeatedly; their house in Montgomery had been bombed in 1956.

Martin Luther King Jr. playing pool

In 1966 King moved into a flat in Chicago's North Lawndale neighbourhood to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement against housing discrimination. This shot shows him lining up a shot at a pool table in the city. The campaign met violent resistance in white neighbourhoods and helped lay groundwork for the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

The Berlin Wall goes up, 1961

East Germany sealed the border through Berlin overnight on 13 August 1961, first with barbed wire and then with concrete blocks and walls. The barrier split families and neighbourhoods for 28 years. At least 140 people were killed at the wall.

Crowds at the Berlin Wall, 1989

After East Germany suddenly opened its border crossings on the night of 9 November 1989, crowds gathered and people began hacking pieces off the wall. Official demolition followed in 1990. Germany was reunified on 3 October 1990.

Chipping at the Berlin Wall

A man swings at the painted western side of the wall in late 1989 as others watch. "Wall peckers" broke off pieces as souvenirs in the weeks after the border opened. The East German side, by contrast, had no graffiti, because it lay inside the guarded death strip.

Nixon and the chopsticks

Richard Nixon's week-long visit to China in February 1972 was the first by a serving US president and opened relations with the People's Republic after two decades of hostility. State banquets in Beijing tested his chopstick skills in front of the world's press. Full diplomatic relations followed in 1979.

President Bush hears the news on 9/11

On the morning of 11 September 2001 George W. Bush was listening to second-graders read at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. His chief of staff, Andrew Card, bent down to whisper that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center and that the country was under attack. Bush stayed in the classroom for several more minutes before leaving to address the nation.

Grounded jets in Halifax, 9/11

When US airspace closed on 11 September 2001, Canada's Operation Yellow Ribbon took in more than 200 diverted flights. Halifax Stanfield International Airport in Nova Scotia received about 40 airliners, lined up here on taxiways. Thousands of stranded passengers were fed and housed by local people for several days.

USS Nautilus off Manhattan

USS Nautilus, commissioned in 1954, was the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. Its reactor let it stay underwater far longer than diesel boats, and in August 1958 it became the first vessel to cross the North Pole submerged. Here it cruises past the Lower Manhattan skyline.

A napalm strike seen from the cockpit

An American airman looks back at a napalm strike in the early 1960s, when US aircrews flew alongside the South Vietnamese air force. Napalm, a jellied petrol mixture that sticks and burns, was used widely in Vietnam. It became a symbol of the war's toll on civilians.

A recon platoon leaves a Huey

Members of a reconnaissance platoon jump from a UH-1 "Huey" helicopter during Operation Oregon near Duc Pho in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam, in 1967. The Huey became the signature aircraft of the Vietnam War, carrying troops, supplies and the wounded. Thousands were lost during the conflict.

A border inspection, 1969

A US Customs officer covers a car suspected of carrying marijuana near the Mexican border in 1969. That September the Nixon administration launched Operation Intercept, inspecting almost every vehicle crossing for about three weeks. The traffic chaos it caused led to its quick end.

Kim Phúc running from napalm, 1972

On 8 June 1972, after a South Vietnamese napalm strike near Trảng Bàng, nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc ran down the road with severe burns, alongside her brother and other children. The photo, long credited to AP's Nick Ut, won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. In 2025 World Press Photo suspended the credit after a documentary named another photographer, while AP and Ut stand by the attribution. Kim Phúc survived, settled in Canada and works for child victims of war.

"Saigon Execution", 1968

On 1 February 1968, during the Tet Offensive, Eddie Adams photographed South Vietnam's police chief, General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, shooting the captured Viet Cong fighter Nguyễn Văn Lém. The image won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize and shaped opinion against the war. Adams later said he regretted the damage it did to Loan, who moved to the United States and ran a restaurant in Virginia.

The self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức

On 11 June 1963 the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself to death at a Saigon intersection in protest against President Ngô Đình Diệm's treatment of Buddhists. AP's Malcolm Browne photographed it; the picture won World Press Photo of the Year for 1963, and Browne shared the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting with David Halberstam for their Vietnam coverage. His heart reportedly did not burn when the body was re-cremated and is kept as a relic.

Another angle on "Tank Man"

Associated Press photographer Terril Jones took this street-level picture in Beijing on 5 June 1989 and only realised years later that it showed the famous standoff; it was first published in 2009. The lone man stands near the top left as a column of tanks approaches along Chang'an Avenue. His identity and fate are still unknown.

"Tank Man", Beijing, 1989

On 5 June 1989, the morning after troops cleared Tiananmen Square, an unknown man stood in front of a column of tanks on Chang'an Avenue. Several photographers captured him from hotel balconies. Despite claims that he survived, nobody has established who he was or what happened to him; the crackdown killed hundreds and possibly thousands.

An elderly Armenian woman with a rifle

This photograph, usually captioned as a 106-year-old Armenian woman guarding her home in 1990, dates from the violence around Nagorno-Karabakh as the Soviet Union came apart. Her age comes from the caption and is hard to confirm. If it is right, she was born in the 1880s and lived through the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923.

Stalin, off the record

Joseph Stalin laughs in a picture taken by his chief bodyguard, Nikolai Vlasik, a keen amateur photographer. Vlasik's informal shots were very different from the stiff official portraits, and some reached the Western press in the 1960s. Vlasik himself was arrested in 1952 and sent into exile.

Young Joseph Stalin

Ioseb Jughashvili, the future Stalin, was born in Gori, Georgia, in 1878 and trained for the priesthood at a seminary in Tbilisi before turning to revolutionary politics. Pictures from his early years, including police mugshots, show a very different face from the official portraits. He ruled the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953.

Salvador Allende on the day of the coup

On 11 September 1973, as the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet unfolded, President Salvador Allende appeared outside La Moneda palace in Santiago with armed aides. It is among the last photographs of him alive. Allende died inside the palace that day; a 2011 forensic inquiry confirmed suicide.

The attempt on John Paul II's life

On 13 May 1981 Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Ağca shot Pope John Paul II as he rode through St Peter's Square; the circle marks the attacker. The Pope survived after emergency surgery. In 1983 he visited Ağca in prison and forgave him.

The Manson "Family"

Members of Charles Manson's commune smile for the camera, a picture that looks harmless until you know the story. In August 1969 followers acting on Manson's orders murdered seven people in Los Angeles, including actress Sharon Tate, who was heavily pregnant. Manson died in prison in 2017.

Pablo Escobar at the White House

Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar poses with his son Juan Pablo outside the White House fence in the early 1980s, in a photo his son later published. At the time Escobar was building a public profile at home and was elected an alternate member of Colombia's congress in 1982. He was killed by Colombian police in Medellín in December 1993.

The bin Laden family in Sweden

Members of the wealthy Saudi bin Laden family pose in Falun, Sweden, around 1970-71, in a picture later widely published. Osama bin Laden, then a young teenager, is often identified as one of the boys, though the identification has been debated. The family's construction business made it one of the richest in Saudi Arabia.

A Soviet cruiser aground in Norway

The decommissioned cruiser Murmansk was being towed to India for scrap in December 1994 when it broke free in a storm and ran aground near the Norwegian fishing village of Sørvær. It sat rusting there for more than 15 years. Norway finally removed the wreck in a large salvage project completed around 2012.

Queen Elizabeth II at the shooting range

Queen Elizabeth II tries a rifle mounted on a stand during a 1993 visit in Surrey, where the national shooting centre at Bisley is based. The monarch was head of the armed forces and regularly visited regiments and ranges. She had trained as a mechanic and driver in the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1945.

Scientists, stars and famous faces off duty

The lightest part of the collection catches well-known people in unguarded moments: physicists on holiday, musicians before they were famous and actors between takes.

Einstein's school-leaving certificate

Albert Einstein finished secondary school at the cantonal school in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1896, at 17. The Swiss scale ran from 1 to 6, with 6 as the top mark, and he earned top grades in algebra, geometry and history; his weakest subject was French. The document is a useful answer to the old story that Einstein failed mathematics, which he never did.

Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein

Bohr and Einstein were photographed together by their friend, physicist Paul Ehrenfest, in Leiden in the mid-1920s. For decades they argued in a friendly way about quantum mechanics, most famously at the Solvay Conferences of 1927 and 1930. Einstein's quip that God does not play dice, and Bohr's replies, became part of physics folklore.

Einstein with fellow scientists

Albert Einstein, centre of a row of researchers, during one of his many working visits in the 1920s and 1930s. He travelled widely to lecture and attend conferences, including winters at Caltech in California from 1931 to 1933. Group photos like this record the international network that shaped modern physics.

Albert Einstein in Palm Springs

Einstein relaxes in the desert sun near Palm Springs, California, during his winter stays in the early 1930s. He loved sailing and simple holidays. In 1933, with the Nazis in power, he settled permanently in the United States.

Cord Meyer Jr. visits Einstein

Cord Meyer Jr., a wounded Marine veteran and president of United World Federalists, visits Einstein at his home in Princeton around 1948 to talk about world government and the Soviet Union. Einstein believed only a world authority could prevent nuclear war. Meyer later joined the CIA and became a senior officer there.

Einstein's office on the day he died

Einstein's desk at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton was photographed by Ralph Morse for LIFE on 18 April 1955, the day of his death. The blackboard still shows equations from his long search for a unified field theory. Einstein had worked at the institute since 1933.

Stephen Hawking's wedding

Stephen Hawking married Jane Wilde in Cambridge in July 1965, two years after he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given about two years to live. He went on to transform the study of black holes and cosmology. He died in March 2018 at 76.

Charlie Chaplin meets Mahatma Gandhi

Chaplin met Gandhi on 22 September 1931 in Canning Town, east London, while Gandhi was in Britain for the Round Table Conference on India's future. They talked about machines and modern life, and Chaplin later said the conversation influenced Modern Times (1936). Crowds filled the street outside.

Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses

Photographer Eve Arnold took this picture of Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce's Ulysses in a playground on Long Island in 1955. Arnold later said Monroe kept a copy and read it in parts, aloud, because she liked the sound of it. Monroe owned a large personal library.

Winston Churchill in a bathing suit

Winston Churchill, in a one-piece bathing costume, walks out of the sea on a beach holiday. Away from politics he loved swimming, painting and even bricklaying. Pictures like this are a reminder of the private man behind the wartime leader.

The Beatles on the Abbey Road crossing

On 8 August 1969 photographer Iain Macmillan stood on a stepladder in the middle of Abbey Road in St John's Wood, London, while a policeman held up traffic for about ten minutes. He took six frames as John, Ringo, Paul and George walked back and forth over the zebra crossing. This is one of the outtakes, with the band heading the other way from the famous album cover. The crossing itself was given protected listed status in 2010.

Teenage Lennon, McCartney and Harrison

In 1957 Lennon's group was still called the Quarrymen. Paul McCartney met John at a church fête in Woolton on 6 July 1957 and soon joined; George Harrison followed in early 1958. Lennon was born in 1940, McCartney in 1942 and Harrison in 1943, so they were all teenagers in pictures like this.

The early Beatles

The Beatles grew out of the Quarrymen in Liverpool and sharpened their act in Hamburg clubs between 1960 and 1962. Ringo Starr joined in August 1962, shortly before their first single, "Love Me Do". Pictures from these years show matching jackets and a band still finding its sound.

John Lennon at Abbey Road Studios

John Lennon stands with his guitar in Studio Two at EMI's Abbey Road studios in London around 1963, the year the Beatles recorded their first two albums there. EMI renamed the studios after the band's 1969 album Abbey Road. The building is now a protected landmark.

The Beatles meet Cassius Clay

On 18 February 1964, during their first American visit, the Beatles were taken to the 5th Street Gym in Miami Beach to meet the 22-year-old boxer then known as Cassius Clay. Photographer Harry Benson posed the group as if knocked down by one punch. A week later Clay beat Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title and soon announced his new name, Muhammad Ali.

The night the Beatles met Elvis

The Beatles met Elvis Presley at his house in Bel Air on 27 August 1965. Accounts agree that photographers and recordings were not allowed inside, so no confirmed images of the meeting exist. This dark picture is said to show the arrival, but the claim cannot be verified.

A close-up from the same picture

The enlargement is said to show John Lennon leaving Elvis's house, but the figures are too blurry to identify with confidence. The meeting itself lasted several hours and included an informal jam session. Treat this pair of images as a curiosity rather than proof.

John Lennon signs for Mark Chapman

On the afternoon of 8 December 1980, outside the Dakota building in New York, John Lennon signed a copy of Double Fantasy for Mark David Chapman, captured by amateur photographer Paul Goresh. That night Chapman shot Lennon dead outside the same building. Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life and remains in prison.

Private Presley

Elvis Presley was drafted in March 1958, at the height of his fame, and served with the 3rd Armored Division in West Germany until 1960. He turned down an easier posting as an entertainer and served as an ordinary soldier, leaving as a sergeant. In Germany he met Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he married in 1967.

Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison

Johnny Cash played two shows for inmates at Folsom State Prison in California on 13 January 1968. The live album At Folsom Prison, released that May, revived his career and helped make prison reform a theme in his work. Cash himself never served a prison sentence, despite the outlaw image.

Bob Marley playing football backstage

Marley loved football and played wherever he could, including backstage and on tour. Despite a popular caption, the man beside him is not Jimi Hendrix but another musician from Marley's circle. A toe injury from a 1977 match turned out to be a melanoma, the cancer that killed him in 1981 at the age of 36.

Behind the scenes on the Millennium Falcon

A crew member works on the cockpit set of Han Solo's ship during the making of the original Star Wars films. The Falcon was a mix of large partial sets, separate cockpit and interior sets on studio stages, and detailed models for the flying shots. Photos like this show how much of the "used future" look was built by hand.

Lunchtime on the Star Wars set

Crew and an R2-D2 unit pause in the Tunisian desert, where the Tatooine scenes for Star Wars were filmed in 1976. The shoot was plagued by sandstorms, rain and remote-controlled droids that kept failing. The film became one of the biggest box-office hits in history the following year.

Steven Spielberg with a scale model

Steven Spielberg leans over a miniature set during the making of Raiders of the Lost Ark, filmed in 1980 and released in 1981. Models and miniatures were essential for big action scenes before computer effects. The film began the Indiana Jones series.

On the set of Conan the Barbarian

Danish actor and bodybuilder Sven-Ole Thorsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger take a break on the set of Conan the Barbarian, filmed in Spain and released in 1982. Thorsen played one of the villain's henchmen and became a regular face in Schwarzenegger's films. The role turned Schwarzenegger from a bodybuilding champion into a film star.

Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes a US citizen

Born in Austria in 1947, Schwarzenegger became a United States citizen on 16 September 1983 and celebrated with the flag, as seen here. He had arrived in 1968 as a bodybuilder with limited English. He later served as governor of California from 2003 to 2011.

Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham in Arkansas

In 1975 Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham were both teaching at the University of Arkansas law school in Fayetteville, where they married that October. This relaxed snapshot from the same period shows them outdoors with a ball. He was elected governor of Arkansas three years later.

The Clintons in the early 1970s

Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham met at Yale Law School in 1971. This photo from that period shows them as young students. They married in 1975, and Bill became the 42nd US president in 1993.

John F. Kennedy and Caroline

President Kennedy shares a children's tea party with his daughter Caroline. The Kennedys gave photographers unusual access to family life in the White House, which shaped the public image of the presidency. Caroline Kennedy later served as US ambassador to Japan and to Australia.

Babe Ruth meets President Harding

Babe Ruth shakes hands with President Warren G. Harding at Yankee Stadium in April 1923, the month the ballpark opened. Ruth hit the stadium's first home run on opening day. He retired with 714 career home runs, a record that stood until Hank Aaron passed it in 1974.

Madonna, Sting and Tupac

A candid snapshot shows Madonna, Sting and rapper Tupac Shakur at the same table, apparently in the mid-1990s, when Madonna and Tupac were briefly linked. The occasion itself is not well documented, which is common for party photos that later go viral. Tupac was shot in Las Vegas in September 1996 and died aged 25.

Kurt Cobain with a slice of pizza

Nirvana's singer pulls a face behind a pizza in a playful moment. The band's 1991 album Nevermind brought grunge into the mainstream. Cobain died in Seattle in April 1994, aged 27.

Eminem in an ALF T-shirt

A teenage Marshall Mathers, later Eminem, wears a T-shirt of ALF, the furry alien from the NBC sitcom that ran from 1986 to 1990. He grew up mostly in Detroit. His major-label debut, The Slim Shady LP, came out in 1999.

Tom Hardy and his son

This one is not historic at all: actor Tom Hardy holds his young son, dressed as Batman, around 2012, the year Hardy played the villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. It earned its place in the original collection simply for its charm.

Walt and Roy Disney with their families

Walt Disney and his older brother Roy founded their cartoon studio in Los Angeles in October 1923. Here the brothers stand with their wives, Lillian and Edna, and their mother, Flora, outside the studio. Roy ran the finances while Walt drove the creative side, a partnership that lasted until Walt's death in 1966.

Measuring a bathing suit, 1922

With the Washington Monument behind him, a park police officer named Bill Norton measures the gap between a bathing suit and a swimmer's knee on a Washington beach in 1922. Local rules said suits could be no more than six inches above the knee. Women were sometimes fined or arrested for breaking such codes.

Louis Armstrong plays for his wife at Giza

Louis Armstrong plays trumpet to his wife Lucille in front of the Sphinx in 1961, during one of the US State Department's jazz tours. These "jazz ambassador" trips sent American musicians around the world during the Cold War. The picture shows the warmth that made Armstrong one of the best-loved entertainers of his time.

Maurice Tillet and Dorian Leigh

Irving Penn photographed model Dorian Leigh with wrestler Maurice Tillet in the 1940s. Tillet, born in the Urals to French parents, had acromegaly, a hormone condition that enlarged his features, and became a wrestling star as "the French Angel". People often say he inspired Shrek, but the character comes from William Steig's 1990 picture book and DreamWorks has never confirmed the link.

How to read viral history photos

Old photographs feel like proof, but a caption is only as good as the person who wrote it. Several pictures here were mislabelled for years: an ocean liner's sister ship stood in for Titanic, a papal diplomat became the Pope, and a staged illustration passed as a hospital snapshot. A few simple habits help.

• Look for the photographer and the archive. Images held by museums, news agencies or national libraries usually come with dates and names you can check.
• Check the details against the date. Uniforms, cars, aircraft markings and shop signs often reveal when a caption has the wrong year or place.
• Ask who made the picture and why. Wartime images from propaganda units, or official portraits of dictators, were designed to persuade.
• Be wary of perfect stories. Claims that a man "survived", that a nurse slapped a sailor or that a photo is "the only one ever taken" are often added later.
• Search the image itself. A reverse image search often leads to fact-checks or to the archive that holds the original.

Seen this way, a gallery of old photographs becomes more than nostalgia. It is a chance to practise the same careful looking that historians use, and to remember the people in each frame as real individuals with lives before and after the shutter clicked.

Sources: Original compilation by Memolition and Imgur; Smithsonian Magazine on the Berdychiv photograph; Smithsonian Magazine on the first photo from space; Snopes on the Klan surgery image; AP report on the "Napalm Girl" attribution; Olympics.com on Spyridon Louis.

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