Rare historical photos are fascinating because they show the past doing things we never learned about in school: a 1932 motorcycle that was a single giant wheel, women painting fake stockings on their legs during a wartime nylon shortage, a Spitfire carrying beer kegs to troops in Normandy, and one shipyard worker keeping his arms folded while a crowd around him gives the Nazi salute. This collection brings together 24 such images from the 1860s to the 1980s.
Popular captions for viral history photos are often wrong, so for each picture we explain who and what is shown, when and where it was taken, and why it matters. Several original captions needed correcting: one date was off by about nine years, one flood scene was placed in the wrong town, and one border scene is usually described backwards. The photo above, for example, shows infants strapped into cardboard boxes on an airliner during Operation Babylift, the 1975 evacuation of children from South Vietnam, which we return to below. The images are grouped by era and theme, and the closing section offers a simple checklist for testing any "rare historical photo" you see online before you share it.
Curiosities from the Victorian age to the 1920s
A crinoline under construction, around 1860
A young woman sits in the middle of an enormous cage of hoops while other women in wide skirts look on. Crinolines, frames of steel or whalebone hoops worn under skirts, were the height of fashion in the 1850s and 1860s. The number on the print and the posed group suggest this is one of the comic stereoscopic photographs that were popular at the time, made to poke fun at the fashion rather than record a real dress shop.
via imgur | reddit /u/ DaHitcha
Listening for aircraft in the First World War
Two uniformed soldiers on a wooden balcony wear helmets fitted with pairs of large horns, a wearable acoustic locator. Before radar, armies tried to hear approaching aircraft and estimate their direction by amplifying sound and comparing what reached each ear. The devices were soon replaced by larger mounted horns and, from the late 1930s, by radar.
via imgur / SirBrunno
Crossing a flood on chairs, 1924
Well-dressed men step from chair to chair along a flooded path to keep their feet dry. The photographer Henri Manuel took the picture in 1924, and the source page places it at the racecourse of Maisons-Laffitte, west of Paris, rather than in the city itself. A row of hired chairs made an improvised walkway for racegoers.
via Facie Populi / Henri Manuel
The real Christopher Robin and his bear
Christopher Robin Milne, son of the author A. A. Milne, holds his teddy bear in a portrait from the late 1920s. The bear and his other toys inspired the Winnie-the-Pooh books, first published in 1926. The original stuffed animals, including Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga and Tigger, are now kept at the New York Public Library.
via Twitter / @History_Pics
Wooden bathing suits, 1929
Four smiling women pose on a beach in swimsuits made of thin, curved strips of spruce. The suits were a publicity idea from the lumber industry around Hoquiam and Grays Harbor in Washington State in the late 1920s, linked to a local "Wood Week". The wood was supposed to help weak swimmers float, but the main purpose was clearly to get attention for local timber.
via Vintag
The 1930s: contests, inventions and city crowds
The Miss Lovely Eyes contest, 1930
Contestants in a "Miss Lovely Eyes" pageant in Florida wear identical masks with only their eyes showing, so judges could score their eyes alone. Novelty beauty contests were a popular publicity stunt in the period. Today the masks make the picture look more like a horror film than a pageant.
via FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Judging ankles, around 1930
A policeman in a British-style helmet inspects a row of women's ankles and feet showing beneath a screen. Contests judging a single feature, such as ankles or knees, were part of fairground and seaside entertainment between the wars. The screen kept the contest anonymous and, in the spirit of the time, respectable.
via imgur | reddit /u/ sacredserenity
The Dynasphere, 1932
The British engineer John Archibald Purves built the Dynasphere, a monowheel in which the driver sits inside a single huge lattice wheel. He demonstrated it on the beach at Weston-super-Mare in the early 1930s, and reports said it could reach about 25 to 30 miles per hour. Steering and braking were difficult, and the driver could spin inside the wheel, so the design never caught on.
via BBC / Getty Images
Women boxing on a rooftop, 1930s
On a flat city rooftop, two young women spar in boxing gloves while friends in swimsuits relax on blankets around them. Rooftops were popular spaces for exercise and sunbathing in crowded American cities. Women's boxing existed mainly as exhibition and fitness at the time; it became an Olympic sport only in 2012.
via reddit /u/ chl59
A sea of hats in New York
Looking straight down on a crowded New York street, the photo shows hundreds of hats and almost no faces. It is Margaret Bourke-White's "Hats in the Garment District", usually dated to around 1930 rather than the 1939 in the viral caption. Hats were a standard part of men's dress until the 1950s and 1960s, when they faded from everyday use.
via Artsy / Margaret Bourke-White
Alfred Hitchcock serves tea to a lion
The film director Alfred Hitchcock stands at a set table holding a teapot while a lion sits on a chair opposite him. It is a staged publicity photograph, typical of Hitchcock's love of macabre jokes. The lion is often said to be one of MGM's mascot lions, but the date and occasion of the picture are not well documented.
via Twitter / @HistoricalPics
War, resistance and the Cold War
The man who would not salute, 1936
At the Blohm+Voss shipyard in Hamburg in June 1936, a crowd raises their arms in the Nazi salute at the launch of a navy training ship, but one man stands with his arms crossed. He is most often identified as August Landmesser, a worker who had been barred from marrying his Jewish partner, Irma Eckler; another family has identified him as Gustav Wegert. Either way, the picture has become a symbol of individual conscience.
Painted-on stockings, 1942
One woman draws a seam line up the back of another's leg with an eyebrow pencil. When the United States entered the Second World War, nylon was diverted to parachutes and other military uses, and stockings became scarce. Leg makeup and painted seams let women keep up appearances without the real thing.
Beer by Spitfire, 1944
A Spitfire flies over the English countryside with two beer kegs, circled in red, slung under its wings where bombs or fuel tanks would normally go. After the D-Day landings in June 1944, pilots improvised ways to bring beer from English breweries to troops in Normandy, sometimes in modified drop tanks and sometimes in kegs like these. The practice was unofficial and was eventually stopped.
Saint-Lô in ruins, 1944
Two boys sit in a shattered tree and watch American vehicles drive through the ruins of Saint-Lô in Normandy. The town was liberated in July 1944, weeks after D-Day, but heavy bombing and fighting had destroyed most of it. The Irish writer Samuel Beckett, who worked at a Red Cross hospital there after the war, later called it "the capital of the ruins".
via The Atlantic / AP
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara go fishing, 1960
Fidel Castro sits in the foreground of a fishing boat while Che Guevara relaxes in a fighting chair with a rod, a year after their revolution took power in Cuba. Castro was a keen fisherman, and in 1960 he famously took part in Ernest Hemingway's billfish tournament. Relaxed shots like this were part of the revolutionaries' public image.
via Kizaz
Prague, August 1968
A soldier chases a young man across a wide Prague street lined with military trucks. Magnum photographer Ian Berry captured scenes like this when Warsaw Pact troops, led by the Soviet Union, invaded Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968. The invasion did not happen during the Prague Spring so much as end it, crushing the reforms of Alexander Dubček.
via Magnum Photos / Ian Berry
Operation Babylift, April 1975
Babies lie in cardboard boxes strapped two to a row across airliner seats. President Gerald Ford authorised Operation Babylift on 3 April 1975, as North Vietnamese forces closed in on Saigon, and flights carried thousands of children to the United States and other countries for adoption. The first flight, a US Air Force cargo plane, crashed shortly after take-off on 4 April, killing many of those aboard. Not every child was an orphan, and some families later tried to recover children they had placed in care.
via imgur | reddit /u/ kirbyfood
Postwar flight, art and film
George Aird ejects from a Lightning, 1962
A tractor driver mows grass while, high behind him, an English Electric Lightning F1 points straight down and its pilot shoots clear on his ejection seat. De Havilland test pilot George Aird was flying near Hatfield airfield in September 1962 when a fire weakened the tailplane controls and the jet pitched up out of control at about 100 feet. Local photographer Jim Meads caught the moment. Aird landed in a greenhouse, broke both legs, and was flying again within six months.
via Fear Of Landing
A "portable living room", 1967
A man stands in a studio with a large white helmet covering his whole head, a pipe-like extension sticking out at the sides. This is the Austrian architect and artist Walter Pichler's "TV Helmet (Portable Living Room)" from 1967, an art piece imagining a person sealed inside a private screen. It looks surprisingly like a forerunner of today's virtual reality headsets.
via Arts Electronic
Salvador Dalí walks his anteater, 1969
Salvador Dalí, with his famous upturned moustache and a cane, leads a giant anteater on a lead out of a Paris Métro entrance as passers-by stare. The Spanish surrealist loved public spectacle and often appeared with exotic animals. Pictures like this were part of how he turned himself into a living work of art.
via imgur | reddit /u/ Tsukamori
Spielberg and the miniatures of Raiders of the Lost Ark
Wearing a Raiders cap, Steven Spielberg lies across a tabletop model of a desert dig site filled with tiny figures, checking camera angles with a small viewfinder. Before computer effects, films used detailed miniatures for wide shots that would be too costly to build full size. Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first Indiana Jones film, was released in 1981.
via Publimetro
Pictures that are easy to misread
A tug of war at the US–Mexico border
Beneath a sign marking Mexico on one side and the USA on the other, a uniformed officer pulls a man by the arms toward the US side while men on the Mexican side hold his legs. The viral caption described him as a fugitive being stopped from escaping into Mexico, but the scene is more often linked to early 1954, when a dispute over the bracero farm-worker programme led US officials to let Mexican workers cross while Mexican authorities tried to hold them back. The image is also colourised, and its exact date and place are not confirmed in the original post.
via imgur | reddit /u/ jaycrew
A Black police officer protecting a Klansman
A Black police officer in a riot helmet stands guard with a baton in front of a man in a Ku Klux Klan hood, apparently shielding him from a crowd. The photo is widely captioned as Austin, Texas, in 1983, but its date and place have not been confirmed, and similar images have been miscaptioned before. In 2017, a viral photo of officer Darius Nash guarding white supremacists was shared with the wrong date until he explained his job was simply to keep everyone from getting hurt. That is the duty these pictures show: protecting the right to protest even for people who hate you.
via imgur | reddit /u/ eamantite
How to check a "rare historical photo"
Viral history accounts share images quickly and often lose the original caption along the way. Before you share one, try these steps.
- Find the photographer or archive. A reverse image search often leads to Getty Images, Magnum, a museum or a library catalogue, which usually gives the real date and place.
- Look for clues in the picture. Uniforms, signs, cars and even police helmets can show the country and decade, as with the British bobby at the ankle contest.
- Be careful with colour. Many old photos online are colourised, which can make them look more recent and sometimes changes details.
- Question neat stories. A caption that sums up a complicated event in one line, like the border photo, is often missing half the story.
Sources: photo credits as listed under each image; collection first compiled by Diply; Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Operation Babylift; Fear of Landing, the story behind the Lightning ejection photograph; Vintag.es, wooden bathing suits; BuzzFeed News, officer Darius Nash photo; Strange History, on the uncertain origin of the Klan rally photo.
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amazing photographs!
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