15 Rare Historical Photos and the True Stories Behind Them

He stood alone, refusing to join the Nazi salute in 1936.

Old photographs travel the internet with captions that are short, dramatic and often a little wrong. This gallery brings together fifteen widely shared historical pictures, from Einstein's summer holiday in 1939 to a shipyard crowd in Nazi Germany and an ice cave photographed in Antarctica, and gives each one the story it deserves: who took it, what was happening, and what the popular caption gets right or wrong.

Teachers have long used pictures like these to get students talking, and for good reason. A single frame makes a date in a textbook feel real. But a photo is also a puzzle. Who is in it? When exactly was it taken? Has the caption grown in the retelling? Several images below come with corrections: a famous "untouched" tomb had in fact been robbed in antiquity, a boy's new shoes arrived after the war rather than during it, and a woman who ran the Boston Marathon in 1967 was not the first woman to finish the course.

The photos are grouped by theme rather than date. Each caption is a starting point; the sources at the end lead to fuller accounts.

Science and invention

Einstein at Nassau Point, Long Island, New York in the summer of 1939.

Albert Einstein at Nassau Point, Long Island, summer 1939. Einstein spent that summer at a rented cottage on the North Fork of Long Island, a favourite spot for sailing his small boat. It was during this holiday that Leo Szilard and other physicists visited him about the danger of a German atomic bomb, leading to the letter he signed for President Roosevelt in 1939. The letter helped set the Manhattan Project in motion, something Einstein later said he regretted.

Nikola Tesla sitting in his laboratory with his “Magnifying Transmitter.”

Nikola Tesla in his Colorado Springs laboratory, 1899. Tesla built an experimental station in Colorado Springs in 1899 to test a giant coil, his "magnifying transmitter", producing artificial lightning reported at up to 135 feet (41 m) long. A photographer sent by Century Magazine documented the work for a June 1900 article. The famous image of Tesla calmly reading beneath the sparks is generally described as a multiple exposure, since sitting that close to a live discharge would have been deadly.

Courage and conscience

The man who would not salute, Hamburg, 1936. This photo was taken on 13 June 1936 at the Blohm+Voss shipyard during the launch of the navy training ship Horst Wessel. Almost the whole crowd raises an arm; one man near the back keeps his arms folded. In 1991 the family of August Landmesser identified him as the man. Landmesser had been expelled from the Nazi Party for his engagement to a Jewish woman, Irma Eckler, was later imprisoned, and was declared killed in action in 1944. Another family believes the man is Gustav Wegert, a shipyard worker who refused the salute on religious grounds, so the identification is not certain.

A utility worker giving mouth-to-mouth to a co-worker after he contacted a high voltage wire in 1967.

"The Kiss of Life", Jacksonville, Florida, 1967. Photographer Rocco Morabito of the Jacksonville Journal captured lineman J.D. Thompson breathing into the mouth of his co-worker Randall Champion, who had touched a high-voltage line and was hanging unconscious from a pole. Thompson, strapped to the pole himself, revived him there, and Champion survived; he lived until 2002. The picture won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography.

Women were not allowed to run the Boston Marathon in 1967. Kathrine Switzer dodged that rule, and became the first woman to finish despite organizers trying to stop her.

Kathrine Switzer at the Boston Marathon, 1967. Switzer entered as "K.V. Switzer" and wore bib number 261. Partway through the race, co-director Jock Semple tried to pull her number off, and the photos of that scuffle went around the world. She finished in about 4 hours and 20 minutes. She was the first woman to complete the race as a registered entrant, but not the first woman to finish it: Bobbi Gibb ran without a number in 1966, finishing in 3:21:40, and was again the first woman home in 1967. Boston opened an official women's race in 1972.

War and its aftermath

This Austrian boy got a new pair of shoes in World War II.

An Austrian boy hugs his new shoes, 1946. The picture is often captioned as taken during World War II, but it dates from 1946, the year after the war ended. Photographer Gerald Waller took it at an orphanage in Austria when the American Red Cross distributed shoes to the children, and it was published in LIFE magazine. The boy's look of pure joy has made it one of the best-known images of post-war relief.

A random but poignant soldier in Vietnam, 1965.

A young American soldier in Vietnam, 1965. This appears to be the photograph taken by the Associated Press photographer Horst Faas on 18 June 1965, showing a soldier of the 173rd Airborne Brigade at Phuoc Vinh with "War Is Hell" written on his helmet. Faas, who was based in Saigon from 1962 to 1974, won a Pulitzer Prize for his combat photography that same year. The soldier's tired, very young face is what makes the image so lasting.

106-year-old Armenian woman guards her home in 1990.

An elderly Armenian woman with a rifle, 1990. The caption that travels with this picture says she was 106 years old and guarding her home; her age and the photographer's name could not be confirmed. The date places it in the early years of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which turned violent from 1988 onward, with pogroms against Armenians in Azerbaijan, guerrilla fighting and, from 1992, full-scale war. Whatever her exact age, the image shows how war reached every generation of the region's families.

Exploration and discovery

The unbroken seal On Tutankhamen’s Tomb, 1922 (3,245 years untouched).

A seal in the tomb of Tutankhamun, 1920s. Howard Carter's team found the first step of the tomb on 4 November 1922, and Harry Burton photographed the excavation from start to finish. Popular captions say the tomb lay untouched for more than 3,000 years, but that is not quite true: robbers broke in twice within a few years of the burial, and officials repaired and resealed it each time. An intact seal shows that a particular doorway or shrine had not been reopened, not that the whole tomb was pristine.

One of the last photographs of the Titanic, April 1912. Among the best-known final images are those of Father Francis Browne, a young Jesuit who sailed from Southampton on 10 April and left the ship at Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland the next day. His pictures of the decks, the gymnasium, Captain Edward Smith and many passengers are the last known images of several people aboard. The ship struck an iceberg and sank on the night of 14–15 April.

A grotto in an iceberg seen during the British Antarctic Expedition, January 5, 1911.

A grotto in an iceberg, Antarctica, 5 January 1911. Herbert Ponting, the first professional photographer to join an Antarctic expedition, took this picture during Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition. The two figures framed by the ice are geologist Griffith Taylor and physicist Charles Wright. Ponting worked mainly on glass plates and brought back more than 1,700 of them.

Everyday life and changing customs

Sweden switched to driving on the right side of the road in 1967. This was the result on the first morning.

Sweden switches sides, 3 September 1967. On "Dagen H" (H for högertrafik, right-hand traffic), all non-essential traffic stopped at 04:50, every vehicle moved carefully across to the right, and driving resumed at 05:00. Photographs from that morning show traffic and pedestrians adjusting to the new order. Accidents actually fell in the short term because drivers were extra careful, though rates returned to normal within about two years.

Animals used to be involved in medical therapy as early as 1956.

Animals in hospital therapy, 1956. The date in this caption could not be checked, but the idea is older than the 1950s. The York Retreat in England let patients spend time with small animals in the 1790s, Florence Nightingale valued pets for the sick, and Sigmund Freud kept his dog in therapy sessions. Psychologist Boris Levinson made the approach better known in the early 1960s. Modern studies suggest that animal visits can reduce anxiety for some patients, although much of the research is small.

A Catholic woman and her protestant husband laid to rest in Holland, 1888.

The "grave with the hands", Roermond, Netherlands. Jacob van Gorkum, a Protestant colonel, died in 1880 and was buried in the Protestant section of the old cemetery in Roermond. His Catholic wife, Josephina van Aefferden, died in 1888 and, under the rules of the time, could not lie beside him. Their tombs were placed on either side of the dividing wall, and each headstone carries a carved hand that reaches over the top to clasp the other.

Painting the Eiffel Tower, 1932. Workers repaint the iron lattice high above Paris. The tower has been completely repainted at least 19 times since 1889, roughly every seven years, using about 60 tonnes of paint to protect the iron from rust. Its colour has changed over the decades, from reddish brown to today's shaded brown, lightest at the top.

Using historical photos well

These pictures remind us how recent much of this history is. People who saw Sweden switch sides or watched Switzer run are still alive; the children who received shoes in 1946 would be in their eighties now. That closeness is exactly what makes old photos such good teaching tools.

If you share them with students or friends, a few questions make the discussion richer:

Who took it, and why? A news agency photo, a family snapshot and a staged studio image tell different kinds of truth.
Does the date fit? The "wartime" shoes and the "untouched" tomb both fall apart under a quick check.
Is the person really identified? The man in the Hamburg crowd is a good example of an attractive story that is still debated.
What happened next? Champion's long life after the Kiss of Life, or Boston's 1972 rule change, often make the best part of the story.

Checking these details does not take away the wonder. It usually adds to it.

Sources: Wikipedia: August Landmesser, Rocco Morabito, Kathrine Switzer, Dagen H, Horst Faas, Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Tomb of Tutankhamun, Francis Browne, Herbert Ponting, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Animal-assisted therapy, Grave with the Hands and Eiffel Tower; on the 1946 shoes photo, El Popular. Gallery first compiled by Truth Seeker Daily, Bored Panda and Viral Nova.