The Kennedy name is often associated with political power, charm, and tragedy. But hidden within the family’s storied past is one of its most haunting chapters—the life of Rosemary Kennedy. Photographs of her from before and after a devastating medical procedure reveal a woman whose future was stolen at just 23 years old, when her father arranged a lobotomy that left her incapacitated for the rest of her life....

General Motors Technical Center in Warren Michigan. Before the advent of AutoCAD and other drafting software, engineering drawings were made on sheets of large paper using drawing boards. Many types of equipment were required to complete a given drawing, such as drawing board, different grade pencils, erasers T-squares, set square, etc. The major disadvantage of a paper-based design was that you could not change the drawing after it was committed to paper....

The saloons of the Wild West evoke images of gunfights, heavy drinking, and dangerous outlaws. These remarkable photographs provide tangible evidence that the Old West watering holes truly lived up to their notorious historical reputation. Captured in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these images from states like Montana to Texas offer a glimpse into life inside these iconic establishments. Saloons, a hallmark of the Wild West, were typically among the first buildings to appear in frontier towns....

Private Heath Matthews (aged 20) of ‘C’ Company, 1st Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, awaits medical aid after a night patrol near Hill 166. Note the three No. 36 M Mk. I hand grenades on his belt and the late model US M1 carbine with bayonet lug. Private Heath Matthews’ face is covered in blood as he awaits medical attention for his superficial lacerations. The blood, combined with the weary and astonished expression on the young soldier’s face, effectively portrays the terror of war....

Mikol Furneaux waves two copies of Windows 95 at a midnight launch at a store in Sydney, Australia. On Aug. 24, 1995, Microsoft—at that time a tech company with around $6 billion in sales and 17,800 employees—introduced their newest operating system, a product the New York Times at that time called “the splashiest, most frenzied, most expensive introduction of a computer product in the industry’s history.” Windows 95 had a few notable add-ons, not least being the now-famous Start menu, a feature so significant that the company dedicated its launch ad to it....

The battles on the Eastern Front constituted the largest military confrontation in history. They were characterized by unprecedented ferocity, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, and massacres. The Eastern Front, as the site of nearly all extermination camps, death marches, ghettos, and the majority of pogroms, was central to the Holocaust. Over the course of four years, more than 400 Red Army and German divisions clashed in a series of operations along a front that extended more than 1,000 miles....

The Challenger launches, moments before its destruction. Jan. 28, 1986. (Image: AP) January 28, 1986, was an exceptionally cold day in Florida, where freezing weather is rare. The beaches near the Kennedy Space Center were crowded with people who had come to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger, which had been postponed on several preceding days to great disappointment. A crew of seven was assigned to the spaceship....

Pennsylvania’s rich coal mining history dates back centuries to the late 1700s and boomed between 1870 and 1930. The pictures collected in this article were taken by John Collier, an Office of War Information photographer, and capture the gritty life of miners working in Montour No. 4 Mine of the Pittsburgh Coal Company. Collier documented the underground life of the miners, laying tracks and deploying the machinery, drilling, blasting with dynamite while being careful from possible collapses....

Serra Pelada was a large gold mine in Brazil. Soon word leaked out and by the end of the week, a gold rush had started. During the early 1980s, tens of thousands of prospectors flocked to the Serra Pelada site, which at its peak was said to be not only the largest open-air gold mine in the world but also the most violent. At first, the only way to get to the remote site was by plane or foot....

“Prepare to meet your God”. During the bombing campaign, 23 bomb disposal specialists lost their life trying to disable improvised bomb devices. A British Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technical Officer approaches a suspect device at the junction of Manor Street and Oldpark Road in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Manor Street marked the line between protestant and catholic neighborhoods. The quotation on the sign on the building to the left is from the Old Testament (Amos 4:12) and it reads: “ Prepare to meet your God “....

I Want You for U.S. Army, 1917, James Montgomery Flagg. The United States entered World War I in 1917 as an associated power on the allied side of Britain and France. By the time that World War I came around, the United States was a leader in the recently discovered art of movie making and the new profession of commercial advertising. Such newly discovered technologies played an instrumental role in the shaping of the American mind and the altering of public opinion into a pro-war position....

Passing round the product at an outdoor Tupperware. Hosts had a strict dress code – skirts and stockings were mandatory. 1955. When an amateur inventor and designer named Earl Silas Tupper first invented Tupperware around 1942 (from a refined version of polyethylene that he referred to as “Poly-T: Material of the Future), he envisaged the total “Tupperization” of the American home. Throughout the Depression Tupper had persevered in his endeavor to become a commercial inventor and transform his economically precarious life from rags to riches....

French forces use flamethrowers against enemy positions. 1916. The first flamethrower, in the modern sense, is usually credited to Richard Fiedler. He submitted evaluation models of his Flammenwerfer to the German Army in 1901. The most significant model submitted was a portable device, consisting of a vertical single cylinder 4 feet (1.2 m) long, horizontally divided in two, with pressurized gas in the lower section and flammable oil in the upper section....

Theodore Roosevelt simply wrote an “X” above one striking sentence: “The light has gone out of my life”, 1884. On February 14, 1884, Theodore Roosevelt received a terrible news, his wife and mother died within hours of one another in Roosevelt’s house in New York City. His mother, age 50, succumbed to typhus, and his wife Alice died at the age of 22 giving birth to her namesake. The following diary entries lovingly describe his courtship, wedding, happiness in marriage, and his grief over the death of his wife Alice....

Three girls skate home from school, past blocks of houses destroyed by Allied air raids, Essen, Germany, February 14, 1949. Three German girls skate home from school past blocks of houses destroyed by Allied air raids in Essen, Germany, Feb. 14, 1949. These kids can’t remember a time when their city didn’t look like that, because they weren’t old enough or even born when the city was still standing. For them, life had always been like that....

A photo of soldiers from the Eight-Nation Alliance, Beijing, 1900. This photograph shows soldiers of the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900, left-to-right: Britain, United States, Australia, British India, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Japan. This was a British propaganda photo where the British requested the heights in order to reflect racial/ethnic supremacy. The British requested an American slightly shorter than the Brit they were sending. However, the Americans sent someone taller than the Brit....

Taco Bell, the Mexican-inspired fast-food chain, has established a reputation for serving affordable and delicious tacos, burritos, and more for over half a century. Taco Bell’s original menu, with its first franchisee, Kermit Becky, 1962. It t offered just five menu items. The vintage menus date back to the 1960s, revealing a limited selection of tacos, burritos, and tostadas that were considerably more straightforward than the vast selection available today....

Coke comes to France. In 1950, Coca-Cola decided to start a big marketing campaign targeting the drink to the people of France. The LIFE magazine photographer Mark Kauffman was there to photograph the genuine reactions of French people trying the drink for the first time. Under the slogan “Drink Fresh,” vans toured the streets, and salesmen distributed samples to adults and children, in what Coke now calls “La révolution du froid” (The cold revolution)....

These photos taken by photographer Gordon Parks capture the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan and document the path of a fresh catch from the boats of New England fishermen to the vendors’ stands. The fish market was originally a wing of the Fulton Market, established in 1822 to sell a variety of foodstuffs and produce. In November 2005, the Fish Market relocated to a new facility in Hunts Point in the Bronx, from its historic location near the Brooklyn Bridge along the East River waterfront at and above Fulton Street in the Financial District, Lower Manhattan....

A Soviet partisan, 1944. This Soviet partisan is remarkably well equipped for the average partisan, he’s armed to the teeth: a PPSH-41 submachine gun, 1 RGD-33 grenade, 1 RPG-40 anti-tank grenade, 3 F1 grenades, a German Stielhandgranate 24, a belt of 7.62 ammunition, and 2 M1895 Nagant pistols. The Nagant pistols were intended (and typically) issued to officers. They also were used by a wide variety of soldiers, partisans, and civilians....