Few places from late-20th-century American leisure culture inspire the same mix of nostalgia and disbelief as Action Park. For anyone who lived within reach of northern New Jersey, the name alone still brings back a rush of adrenaline, a hint of dread, and memories that feel too wild to be real. The park’s mythology grew from experiences that blended genuine excitement with chaos, creating an environment that shaped an entire generation’s stories—and their scars....

Famine stricken people during the famine of 1876-78 in Bangalore. The Great Famine of 1876–78, also known as the Madras famine of 1877, covered a major part of south India and took an estimated 5.5 million lives. The famine ultimately covered an area of 670,000 square kilometers (257,000 sq mi) and caused distress to a population totaling 59 million. In part, the Great Famine may have been caused by an intense drought resulting in crop failure in the Deccan Plateau....

A smiling prisoner of war returning home to Vienna passes a woman holding a photograph up in a mixture of hope and despair. These iconic photographs were taken in 1947 at Vienna’s Southern Railway Station, where photographer Ernst Haas witnessed the moving scenes of the return of the first 600 Austrian war prisoners from Eastern Europe. Haas’s images show the anticipation and grief of people searching for their lost relatives among the survivors....

That is a look of determination. It says a lot about his love. This photo is taken during the Bangladesh Liberation War. The atrocities of this war are little known to the Western. It lasted over a duration of nine months and witnessed large-scale atrocities. Also during the time cholera was rampant. This war resulted in Bangladesh becoming an independent state from West Pakistan, now just Pakistan. Looking at the photo someone can see love right there....

Unable to breathe, patients entered iron lungs, which made use of negative pressure ventilation to compress and depress the chest, simulating respiration. In the early 20th century, polio was one of the most feared diseases in industrialized countries, paralyzing hundreds of thousands of children every year. A highly infectious disease, polio attacks the nervous system and can lead to paralysis, disability, and even death. The symptoms – pain and weakness, fatigue, and muscle loss – can strike any time from 15 to 50 years after the initial disease....

By definition, a midget submarine is less than 150 tons, has a crew of no more than eight, has no onboard living accommodation, and operates in conjunction with a mother ship to provide the living accommodations and other support. The Japanese Navy built at least 800 midgets in 7 classes, but only a fraction had any noticeable impact on the war. Their intended purpose initially was to be deployed in front of enemy fleets, but their actual use would be in harbor attacks and coastal defense....

Gundrun with her father, Heinrich Himmler, 1938. Heinrich Himmler adored his daughter and had her regularly flown to his offices in Berlin from Munich where she lived with her mother. When she was at home he telephoned her most days and wrote to her every week. He continued to call her by her childhood nickname “Püppi” throughout his life. She accompanied her father on some official duties. In 1941 he took her with him when he visited Dachau Concentration Camp....

Weidmann is placed in the guillotine seconds before the blade falls. In the early morning of 17 June 1939, Eugène Weidmann became the last person to be publicly executed by guillotine. He had been convicted of multiple kidnappings and murders, including that of a young American socialite. Beginning with the botched kidnapping of an American tourist, the inspiring dancer Jean de Koven, Eugène Weidmann murdered two women and four men in the Paris area in 1937....

France had asked Russia for help on the Western Front, and Russia responded by sending nearly 45,000 soldiers. The Russian Expeditionary Force was a World War I military force sent to France by the Russian Empire. In 1915 the French requested that Russian troops be sent to fight alongside their own army on the Western Front. Initially, they asked for 300,000 men, an absurdly high figure, probably based on their assumptions about Russia’s “unlimited” reserves....

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system. Training for an engineering career, he attended the Technical University at Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague. At Graz he first saw the Gramme dynamo, which operated as a generator and, when reversed, became an electric motor, and he conceived a way to use alternating current to advantage....

Sagrada Família in 1897. Antonio Gaudí started work designing a building in 1883 he originally termed the “church of the poor”. After disagreements between the founding association and the original architect, Gaudí was assigned to lead the project in 1884, and thus produced an entirely new design. Already a famous architect for his unique designs in Barcelona, Gaudí had in mind something spectacular, which he would eventually achieve. In his later years, he abandoned all secular work and devoted his life to the basilica called La Sagrada Família, or the “Holy Family”....

Fire Escape Collapse, also known as Fire on Marlborough Street, is a black-and-white photograph by Stanley Forman which received the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1976. A nineteen-year-old and her two-year-old niece and goddaughter are hurled off a collapsing fire escape during an apartment fire on Marlborough Street. The two waited with firefighter Robert O’Neil for a rescue ladder to reach them. As the firefighter climbed onto the rescue ladder, the fire escape collapsed under their feet and they fell to the ground five floors below....

This extraordinary accident occurred on October 22, 1895 at Montparnasse, then known as Gare de l’Ouest . The drive of the express train from Granville to Paris, hoping to make up time for its 131 passengers, increased the train’s speed and the air brake failed. Smashing through the track buffers, the express careered across the station concourse, broke through the station wall, and crashed to the street below, where it remained for four days drawing crowds of curious onlookers....

The restoration done in the 1950s was only minimal as the building could not be used as the seat of government for West Germany (the Reichstag was just at the Berlin Wall and West German politicians didn’t want to have their seat of government in a tiny exclave in the East). The Reichstag had not been in use since when it burned in February 1933 and its interior resembled a rubble heap more than a government building....

An 1875 image of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the creator of the Statue of Liberty, posing with a visitor while the statue was under construction inside a Paris studio. The Statue of Liberty, officially Liberty Enlightening the World , designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and Gustave Eiffel, was a gift to the United States from the people of France in 1886. With a tablet inscribed with the date of America’s independence, a broken chain beside one foot symbolizing the abolition of slavery, and a guiding light held up for the world to see, the structure is loaded with symbolism....

Annie Edson Taylor poses with her cat and the barrel in which she rode over the falls. 1901. It is said that Niagara Falls has a mystic allure that gives some people the uncontrollable urge to jump in and blend into the swirling waters. Officials say that they recover an average of 20 people per year who chose Niagara Falls as the place to end their lives. But there are those who choose to go over Niagara Falls in the name of adventure, not suicide....

Strongman Eugen Sandow, considered the father of modern bodybuilding. 1900. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, strongmen more often exhibited their incredible power as circus performers and entertainers than as competitive athletes. Originating in Europe and spreading to the United States, physical culturists included strongmen and women who routinely competed against one another for prestige and popularity. Later on, part of this culture branched out into bodybuilding ....

Grenadier Burg of the 24th Regiment of the Guard of 1815. These remarkable photographs provide probably the only surviving images of veterans of the Grande Armée and the Guard actually wearing their original uniforms and insignia, although some of the uniforms have obviously been recut by tailors of the 1850s. All the men — at this time in their 70s and 80s — are wearing the Saint Helena medals, issued in August 1857 to all veterans of the wars of the Revolution and the Empire....

In the world of glamor and allure, where beauty reigns supreme, one name shines brightly: June Wilkinson. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Wilkinson captivated audiences with her exquisite looks and undeniable charm. She emerged as one of the era’s most-photographed women, earning the title of “the most photographed nude in America.” Born on March 27, 1940, in the picturesque town of Eastbourne, England, Wilkinson’s path to stardom began at an early age....

Children in the village of Supai, Arizona in the Grand Canyon. In 1972, the United States federal government, which was looking to document living conditions among Native American communities, employed the services of photographer Terry Eiler to visit the south-west of the country and give an outsider view into the lives of some of the most disadvantaged of Americans Eiler’s pictures show a world that was becoming modernized and similar to mainstream America but at the same time, was still clinging tenaciously to their traditions, forged over millennia....