19 Rare Historical Photos and the Real Stories Behind Them

Old photographs pull us into moments we could never have seen for ourselves: a samurai's sword at his side, a city sky scratched with the trails of fighter planes, a future president of a tech giant posing with long-haired colleagues. This collection gathers nineteen of those images, from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the 1990s.

Lists of “rare historical photos” circulate endlessly online, and their captions are often wrong: dates are off by decades, places are mixed up, and staged pictures are passed off as candid ones. So for each photo below we have written what is actually known about it, corrected the captions where the record says otherwise, and flagged the details that cannot be confirmed. Some pictures here show war and its aftermath, including the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and the capture of an American pilot in Vietnam. They are included because they are part of the historical record.

The photos are grouped by period, so you can read the collection as a short walk through about 150 years of history.

The nineteenth century: boxers, samurai and giant trees

A boxing match staged for a crowd of sailors

The viral caption dates this to 1897, which cannot be confirmed. The setting looks like the deck of a ship, with men in sailors' uniforms packing the stairs and rigging to watch two fighters in a roped-off space. Organised bouts were a popular entertainment aboard navy ships around the turn of the twentieth century, and the gloved, rule-based boxing seen here had largely replaced bare-knuckle fighting by then.

Samurai in a photographer's studio

Captioned as “around 1850”, this portrait is almost certainly later. Photography was barely present in Japan before the late 1850s, and most surviving studio portraits of samurai date from the 1860s, when foreign photographers such as Felice Beato worked in Yokohama. The men wear the paired swords that marked samurai status, a privilege that disappeared after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended the old social order.

Loggers among California's coast redwoods

These two pictures show lumber crews dwarfed by coast redwoods, the tallest trees on Earth, in northern California, probably in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Felling one tree could take a crew days of work with axes and long two-person saws, often standing on boards wedged into the trunk. Most of the original old-growth redwood forest was cut in this era, which is why the surviving groves are now protected in state and national parks.

1912 to the 1930s: ships, statues and a lost species

Titanic leaving port in April 1912

RMS Titanic sailed from Southampton on 10 April 1912 on its maiden voyage to New York. Four days later it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank early on 15 April, with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. One caution for collectors: some photos labelled as Titanic actually show its nearly identical sister ship, Olympic, so check a picture's archive record before relying on it.

Christ the Redeemer under construction

The statue on Corcovado mountain above Rio de Janeiro was built between 1922 and 1931. Engineer Heitor da Silva Costa led the project with French engineer Albert Caquot, sculptor Paul Landowski created the design, and Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida shaped the face. The figure is 30 metres tall, made of reinforced concrete covered in soapstone, and was inaugurated on 12 October 1931.

Walt Disney outside an early studio

This picture shows Walt Disney with colleagues outside an early Disney studio building in Los Angeles in the 1920s, not the opening of the famous later studio. Walt and his brother Roy started the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in 1923, a small operation that would grow into one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. The modest storefront is a good reminder of how small the business was at the start.

The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, in 1933

In 1933 naturalist David Fleay filmed the thylacine kept at Hobart Zoo in Tasmania, and stills from that footage, like this one with its jaws open wide, are among the best-known images of the species. Contrary to the caption, it was not the very last record: further footage was shot in 1935. The last known thylacine died at the zoo on 7 September 1936, and the name “Benjamin” often given to it is a later invention.

The Second World War

Contrails over London, 1940

During the Battle of Britain, fought in the skies over southern England from July to October 1940, dogfights between the RAF and the Luftwaffe left tangled vapour trails like these above the city. The German bombing campaign known as the Blitz began in September 1940. The exact source of this dramatic version with Big Ben in the frame is unclear, and it may be a composite.

A reindeer and bombers in the Soviet Arctic, 1941

This striking image is usually credited to Soviet war photographer Yevgeny Khaldei, who covered the war from the Murmansk front in the far north to Berlin. Khaldei is known to have staged or manipulated some of his photographs, including the famous flag-raising over the Reichstag in 1945, so this perfectly composed scene may have been retouched. It still captures how the war reached even the remote north.

Night raid on Moscow, 1941

The Luftwaffe began bombing Moscow in July 1941, a month after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In this long exposure, tracer and anti-aircraft fire streak across the sky above the Kremlin's towers. Images of these raids by foreign photographers who were in Moscow at the time were published in Western magazines and helped show readers abroad the scale of the war in the east.

A camp prisoner holding a guard at gunpoint

The picture shows a man in striped camp clothing aiming a rifle at a man in a German uniform, and it is usually captioned as a Jewish prisoner turning the tables on a Nazi guard. Its photographer, place and date are not documented, and it may have been staged after liberation in 1945. Liberated prisoners did confront their former guards in several camps in the final weeks of the war, which is why such images resonate.

The mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, 9 August 1945

The United States dropped the plutonium bomb known as Fat Man on Nagasaki at 11:02 local time on 9 August 1945, three days after Hiroshima. An estimated 60,000 to 80,000 people had died in the city by the end of that year. The viral caption says this photo was taken twenty minutes after the explosion; the timing is plausible but its photographer is not given in the copies that circulate online.

Inside Hitler's bunker after the war

The Führerbunker lay under the garden of the old Reich Chancellery in Berlin; Hitler took his own life there on 30 April 1945. The first post-war photographs of its wrecked interior were taken in July 1945, among them pictures by Life photographer William Vandivert. Soviet and later East German authorities demolished most of the complex, and the site is now an unremarkable car park with an information board installed in 2006.

After the war: space, civil rights and Vietnam

The first photograph of Earth from space, 1946

On 24 October 1946, a camera carried on a captured German V-2 rocket launched from White Sands, New Mexico, took grainy black-and-white frames from roughly 100 kilometres up. They were the first photos to show Earth from the edge of space, and the curve of the planet is just visible. The film survived the crash because it was held in a steel case.

Martin Luther King Jr. removes a burned cross

King pulls a charred cross from the lawn of his family's home while his young son watches. The picture is generally dated to 1960, the year King moved to Atlanta. Burning crosses on the lawns of Black families and civil rights leaders was a common tactic of intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan, and King's calm response made this an enduring image of the movement.

John McCain pulled from Truc Bach Lake, Hanoi, 1967

On 26 October 1967, US Navy pilot John McCain was shot down over Hanoi on his 23rd bombing mission and nearly drowned after landing in Truc Bach Lake with both arms and a leg broken. Vietnamese civilians and soldiers pulled him ashore. He spent about five and a half years as a prisoner, much of it at Hoa Lo Prison, the “Hanoi Hilton”, and was released on 14 March 1973, later serving as a US senator for Arizona.

Before they were famous

Osama bin Laden as a teenager

This holiday photograph is said to show members of the bin Laden family in Falun, Sweden, in 1971, with Osama, born in 1957, second from the right. His father, a wealthy Saudi construction magnate, had dozens of children. Osama later founded al-Qaeda, which carried out the 11 September 2001 attacks; he was killed by US forces in Pakistan in 2011.

The Microsoft team in Albuquerque, 1978

Bill Gates (front left) and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 4 April 1975. In December 1978, eleven of the company's thirteen employees posed for this staff photo, shortly before the company moved to Bellevue, Washington, on 1 January 1979. The picture became famous decades later as a symbol of how small the giants of the computer age once were.

Google's early team in Palo Alto

Google was incorporated on 4 September 1998 in a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In March 1999 the company moved to an office at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, and this group shot, with the early exclamation-mark logo above the door, comes from that period. So it is not quite the very beginning, but it shows the firm while it was still a small startup.

How to read a list of rare historical photos

Going through these pictures one by one shows how much a caption can mislead. A samurai portrait gains a decade or two, an early storefront becomes a grand opening, and a film still turns into the “last photo” of a species. A few habits help you avoid passing on errors:

• Look for the archive. A credible photo usually has a home in a museum, library or news agency collection with a date and photographer.
• Be wary of perfect timing. Dramatic wartime images were sometimes staged or retouched, then and now.
• Check the dates against what was possible. Photography technology, uniforms and buildings often reveal when a picture could have been taken.
• Read the human story. Behind every frame, whether a prisoner, a pilot or a lumberjack, is a real person whose experience deserves accuracy.

Sources: Wikipedia: John McCain; Wikipedia: Thylacine; Wikipedia: Yevgeny Khaldei; Wikipedia: History of Microsoft; Wikipedia: History of Google; Wikipedia: Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Wikipedia: Führerbunker; Wikipedia: First images of Earth from space; Wikipedia: Christ the Redeemer; Wikipedia: Felice Beato. Photo collection originally shared by The Unknown But Not Hidden via Truth Seeker Daily; individual photographers are named above where known.

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