World back then

Last picture of Nikola Tesla, 1943

The “Big Three” – Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill – meet at the Tehran Conference, 1943.

Underwater detonation of 23 kiloton nuclear weapon, 1946.

Crossroads Baker, showing the white surface “crack” under the ships, and the top of the hollow spray column protruding through the hemispherical Wilson cloud. Bikini Island beach in the background.

Young Stalin

Women protesting forced hijab days after the Iranian Revolution, 1979

Women protesting forced hijab days after the Iranian Revolution, 1979

At the time, photographer Golestan recalls, Iranian people were very “politically charged” and believed change could be effected by demonstrating in the streets.

The protest was held on International Women’s Day.

The soldiers fed the polar bears with condensed milk tins. Soviet Union, 1950.

The photo ‘Wait for me, Daddy’ shows Private Jack Bernard, B.C. Regiment saying goodbye to his son Warren Bernard in New Westminster, 1940.

Father and son after the war was over.

Hitler and generals inspecting the largest-caliber rifled weapon ever used in combat, 1941

Heavy gustav blueprint

The Gustav shells were massive, 800 mm caliber.

The Heavy Gustav during its service.

Statue in the center of Stalingrad after Nazi air strikes, 1942
The statue of six children dancing around a crocodile became famous worldwide due to several pictures that a Soviet photographer took after the German army’s devastating bombings.

The Elephants Foot of the Chernobyl disaster. Photo was taken later after the radiation weakened.
Why all the photos from the Chernobyl disaster appear grainy? This isn’t because the photography technology at the time in Soviet Union was behind. Previous photos are of better quality. It is because the radiation affects the film.

Soviet soldiers sexually harass a German woman in Leipzig, Germany, August 1945.

Soviet soldiers openly sexually harass a passing German woman near the West Hall section of the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof central railway terminus. As Allied troops entered and occupied German territory during the later stages of the war, mass rapes took place both in connection with combat operations and during the subsequent occupation.

Most historians agree, although the issue is contentious, that the majority of the sexual assaults on German female civilians were committed in the Soviet occupation zone; estimates of the numbers of German women raped by Soviet soldiers have ranged up to 2 million. In many cases women were the victims of repeated rapes, some as many as 60 to 70 times.

At least 100,000 women are believed to have been raped in Berlin, based on surging abortion rates in the following months and contemporary hospital reports, with an estimated 10,000 women dying in the aftermath. Female deaths in connection with sexual assaults in Germany, overall, are estimated at 240,000. War historians have described it as the “greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history”, and have concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.

Red Army soldiers in a trench as a Soviet T-34 tank passes over them, 1943

Simone Segouin, the 18 year old French Resistance fighter, 1944

Simone Segouin poses with a German MP 40 with which she is most proficient.

President Nixon greets the returning Apollo 11 astronauts, 1969.

Photo taken mere hours after Einstein died, April 28, 1955, Princeton, New Jersey.

British M.P.s walk onto an airship gangplank, in Cardington, England, in the 1920s.

The R-101 moored here was the largest craft in the world (until the Hindenburg) and crashed on her maiden voyage, killing 48 out of 54 on board. The crash effectively ended the nascent British airship program.

The U.S. Navy’s dirigible Los Angeles, upended after a turbulent wind from the Atlantic flipped the 700-foot airship on its nose at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1926. The ship slowly righted itself and there were no serious injuries to the crew of 25.

Lucky British soldier shows off his damaged helmet, 1917

Michael Collins, the astronaut who took this photo, is the only human, alive or dead that isn't in the frame of this picture, 1969

First Miss Soviet Union beauty pageant, 1988

Seems like Lenin doesn’t approve.

Dr. Leonid Rogozov operating himself to remove his appendix in Antarctica, 1961

Leonid Rogozov was a Soviet general practitioner who took part in the sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition in 1960–1961. He was the only doctor stationed at the Novolazarevskaya Station and, while there, developed appendicitis, which meant he had to perform an appendectomy on himself, a famous case of self-surgery.

Leonid Rogozov a few years after his return to Russia.

Japanese troops using prisoners of war for target practice, 1942

The Japanese treatment of prisoners of war in World War II was barbaric. The men shown in the above picture are part of the Sikh Regiment of the British Indian Army. All of them are sitting in the traditional cross-legged prayer position. They’re probably reciting their final prayers as this picture was being taken. It’s very morbid if you think about it. The vast majority of Indian soldiers captured when Singapore fell belonged to Sikh community. These photographs were found among Japanese records when British troops retook Singapore.

Georges Blind, a member of the French resistance, smiling at a German firing squad, October 1944.

This was a mock execution attempting to get the resistance fighter, Georges Blind, to talk. It didn’t work. Georges did not divulge any information. It’s interesting how they’ve placed him at the corner of the building rather than against the stereotypical flat wall. It must make ricochet injuries to the firing squad members much less likely. Of course this was a mock execution, but most likely they used the same site for real executions. Georges Blind was eventually forwarded to a concentration camp, where he was selected for termination on arrival, dying some time in late November 1944.

Atomic Annie firing the first atomic artillery shell, 1953

Its yield was estimated at 15 kilotons, around the same level as Little Boy.

View of the Atomic Annie from the front prime mover.

German submarine U-118 washed ashore on the beach at Hastings, 1919

The rising mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, a few minutes after the nuclear bomb was detonated, August 9, 1945. Picture taken from Koyagi-jima, 5 miles from the center of Nagasaki.

Fidel Castro lighting a cigar and wearing two Rolex watches during a meeting with Khrushchev, Kremlin, 1963

Facing the Death - Poles shot by Germans in Bydgoszcz, 9 September 1939.
A range of emotions displayed by these men. Anguish, defiance, stoicism, acceptance and fear, the third one from the left is even smiling. This execution happened during the Bloody Sunday in Bydgoszcz, Poland, 1939.

David Rothman was in his work clothes and Albert Einstein was dressed for the beach when they posed on this rock at Horseshoe Cove in Nassau Point in the summer of 1939.

Elephant-mounted machine-gun, 1914

Australian soldiers after their release from Japanese captivity in Singapore, 1945

Picture taken in 1962 at the Faculty of Medicine in Kabul of two Afghan medicine students listening to their professor (at right) as they examine a plaster cast showing a part of a human body.

A shopfront display of fruits and nuts in Kabul, in November of 1961.

This photo shows the now-destroyed Kabul-Herat highway, that linked the Afghan capital to the Iranian border city of Mashad. Built in the early second half of the 20th century, the highway has been virtually destroyed through decades of warfare.

Architecture in Kabul, Afghanistan, seen on May 28, 1968.

Children in a Kabul street, November, 1961.

Aleksandra Samusenko was the only female tank officer in the 1st Guards Tank Army, 1943

An American soldier wears a hand lettered "War Is Hell" slogan on his helmet, Vietnam, 1965

A German woman facing public humiliation because of a romantic affair with a Polish man, 1942

A Chernobyl liquidator pushes a baby in a carriage who was found during the cleanup of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, 1986

775 confirmed kills in one picture, 1945

Because of chronic problems in finding the manpower to fulfill military and industrial tasks, the Soviet government recruited some 7.75 million women, of whom 800,000 served in the military. Sniping was a precision role, which many women soldiers performed with expertise. It is estimated that in 1943 there were more than 2,000 female snipers in the Soviet armed forces. Female snipers have been credited with more than 12,000 confirmed kills.

The snipers in the picture:

First row – Guard Staff Sergeant, VN Stepanova: 20 kills, Guard Sgt JP Belousova: 80 kills, Guard Sgt AE Vinogradova: 83 kills.
Second row – Guard Lieutenant EK Zhibovskaya: 24 kills, Guard Sgt KF Marinkin: 79 kills, Guard Sgt OS Marenkina: 70 kills.
Third row – Guard Lieutenant NP Belobrova: 70 kills, Lieutenant N. Lobkovsky: 89 kills, Guard Lieutenant VI Artamonova: 89 kills, Guard Staff Sergeant MG Zubchenko: 83 kills.
Forth row – Guard Sergeant, NP Obukhova: 64 kills, Guard Sergeant, AR Belyakova 24 kills.

Total number of confirmed kills: 775. Photo taken in Germany, May 4, 1945.

A hired reader reads to cigar makers hard at work in Cuban cigar factory, ca. 1900-1910.

The practice of reading aloud while others listen intently as they engage in manual labor has a long and distinguished tradition through out the Caribbean in the practice of cigar manufacture. Because the job of rolling cigar after cigar could become monotonous, the workers wanted something to occupy and stimulate the mind. Thus arose the tradition of lectors, who sat perched on an elevated platform in the cigar factory, reading to the workers. It started in Cuba and was brought to the United States more particularly to Key West in 1865 when thousands of Cuban cigar workers emigrated to Florida to escape Spanish oppression.

A girl who grew up in a concentration camp draws a picture of home while living in a residence for disturbed children, 1948

A German World War II prisoner is released by the Soviet Union and reunited with his 12-year-old daughter, who has not seen him since infancy.

A picture of a crowd in New York and there is not one unhatted head, 1930

A lady with two slaves, in Bahia, Brazil, 1860.

These two men are manumitted slaves. Manumission is the act of a slave owner freeing his or her slaves. They borrowed the clothes and the hats just for the picture. It’s a posed photograph and a statement about being manumitted rather than a picture of a woman posing with her slaves. To answer the question of why they are dressed up but shoeless – it’s part of the old custom of using shoes to denote class, position, or wealth. It was highly traditional that slaves be barefooted. Some countries went so far as to mandate that slaves always be without shoes.

A Japanese boy standing at attention after having brought his dead younger brother to a cremation pyre, 1945

Joe O’Donnell, the man who took this photo at Nagasaki, was sent by the U.S. military to document the damage inflicted on the Japanese homeland caused by air raids of fire bombs and atomic bombs. Over the next seven months starting September 1945, he traveled across Western Japan chronicling the devastation, revealing the plight of the bomb victims including the dead, the wounded, the homeless and orphaned. Images of the human suffering was etched both on his negatives and his heart.

In the photo, the boy stands erect, having done his duty by bringing his dead brother to a cremation ground. Standing at attention was an obvious military influence. Looking at the boy who carries his younger sibling on his back, keeps a stiff upper lip, tries so hard to be brave is heart-breaking. He has epitomized the spirit of a defeated nation.

A police officer issuing a woman a ticket for wearing a bikini on an Italian beach, 1957

The priest and the dying soldier, 1962

The uprising against the Venezuelan government of Rómulo Betancourt was quickly crushed but not before Hector Rondon was able to capture these iconic photos.

The photo was taken on June 4 (1962) by Hector Rondón Lovera, photographer of Caracas, for the Venezuelan newspaper “La Republica”. It won the World Press Photo of the Year and the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Photography. The original title of work is “Aid From The Padre”.

Despite the danger surrounding him, Luis Padilla walked around giving last rites to dying soldiers.

Actress Marlene Dietrich kisses a soldier returning home from war, 1945

Albert Einstein sticks out his tongue when asked by photographers to smile on the occasion of his 72nd birthday on March 14, 1951.

Albert Einstein’s matriculation certificate, 1896

A U.S soldier offers his hand to a woman leaving a cave where she had hidden with her child during the battle between Japanese and American forces. Saipan, 1944