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Ovation for Hitler in the Kroll Opera House after announcing the successful Anschluss, March 1938. The Anschluss (German for “union”) was the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in March 1938. One of the Nazi’s ideologies was to re-unite all Germans either born or living outside of the Reich in order to create an “all-German Reich”. From the early beginning of his leadership in the Nazi Party, Hitler had publicly stated in his 1924 autobiography (Mein Kampf) that he would create a union between his birth country and Germany, by any means possible....

Austrian-Hungarian soldier, 1918 It looks like a thousand-yard stare, it’s like there’s nothing there. The rank insignia indicates that he is an Austrian-Hungarian soldier, not German, he’s a Lance corporal. In case you’re wondering, those lugs on the side of his Stahlhelm helmet were combination air vents and mounting lugs for an extra armor plate for nervous soldiers. Few soldiers used these Stirnpanzer plates and lugs were deleted from later helmets....

What you are seeing laid out on the table is the monthly food ration per Polish citizen in the early to mid-1980s. This seemingly modest assortment of goods, meticulously allocated through a complex system of distribution, belies the profound challenges that defined life in communist Poland during that era. Each item, from the staple grains to the precious drops of cooking oil, carries within it the weight of an economic system strained to its limits and a society that defied adversity with unwavering determination....

Nestled in northeastern France, Alsace is a region steeped in a rich and complex history, often serving as a cultural crossroads between France and Germany. This unique position is reflected in its hearty cuisine, charming villages, and distinctive traditions. One such tradition is the Schlupfkapp, a flamboyant headdress that was once a hallmark of Alsatian women’s attire. Literally translating to “slip cap” in German, the Schlupfkapp is anything but subtle – a giant bow that captured both fashion and social identity in the region....

These photos were taken by legendary LIFE photographer Ralph Crane in 1961 and document the audition for a black cat role. Following a newspaper casting call, 152 black cats are waiting for the audition for a low-budget horror movie adaptation of ‘Tales of Terror’ by Edgar Allan Poe. Those with white noses or paws wereimmediately disqualified. “Tales of Terror,” an adaptation of three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, starred Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone, and was directed Roger Corman....

This photograph shows a sailor removing the manacle from a newly freed slave. The picture is part of a small collection donated by Samuel Chidwick to the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth. His father Able Seaman Joseph Chidwick, born in 1881, was serving aboard HMS Sphinx. The Africans featured in the photos escaped in a canoe from a slave-trading village on the coast on hearing that the Royal Navy ship was in the area....

The bookmobile was a traveling library often used to provide books to villages and city suburbs that had no library buildings. It went from a simple horse-drawn cart in the 19th century to large customized vehicles that became part of American culture and reached its height of popularity in the mid-twentieth century. One of the earliest mobile libraries in the United States was a mule-drawn wagon carrying wooden boxes of books....

There are very rare occasions when people can see a new volcano emerging from virtually nowhere. Considered by some as one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World, Parícutin volcano is undoubtedly one of the wonderful geomorphological landscapes of the Globe. Parícutin volcano was born on a Mexican cornfield owned by Dionisio Pulido, a farmer who saw vapor emanating from a hollow and shortly afterwards, witnessed the beginning of a unique event of a volcano being created....

The original Moulin Rouge the year before it burned down, Paris, France, 1914. On 6 October 1889, the Moulin Rouge ( English: The Red Mill ) opened in the Jardin de Paris, at the foot of the Montmartre hill. Its creator Spaniard Joseph Oller and his manager Charles Zidler were formidable businessmen who understood the public’s tastes. The aim was to allow the very rich to come and slum it in a fashionable district, Montmartre....

“The Soiling of Old Glory” was taken on April 5, 1976, during the Boston busing desegregation protests. Stanley Forman was early for his shift at the Herald American on April 5th, 1976 and he decided to head out to an anti-busing demonstration at Boston City Hall that another journalist was already covering. It was already two years into a desegregated school-busing in Massachusetts, a scheme that forcibly bused students to schools often far from their homes in an effort to diversify schools, but the protests in favor of the old system were still raging....

Until the beginning of the 20th century, stilts were actually used to make people’s lives easier and shepherds depended on them to follow their flocks with a bird’s eye view. 1936. The once-impoverished region of Landes in southwestern France consisted of very flat and marshy terrain and barely even had any roads to speak of, which made moving around somewhat problematic. To navigate the soft and unsteady heathlands, shepherds developed a unique adaptation — they traveled on stilts....

The old “Telefontornet” telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, with approximately 5,500 telephone lines c. 1890. In the late 19th century, the miracle device called the telephone had been invented but the simple concept of undergrounding telephone cables had eluded engineers. Due to technical limitations of the earliest phone lines, every telephone required its own physical line strung between a house or business to a phone exchange where the call was manually connected by a live operator....

Will West and William West mugshots. On May 1, 1903, an African-American man named Will West entered the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth. Like any other new prisoner, West was subjected to the standard admission procedure: prison clerks took photographs, a physical description, and eleven anthropometric measurements. Using West’s measurements and description, identification clerks matched him to the record of William West, who had a previous conviction for murder. Not surprisingly, in the clerks’ view, West denied that he was this man....

Tuesday Weld is an American actress, who often portrayed impulsive and reckless women acting out sexually. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for Play It as It Lays (1972) , an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) , an Emmy Award for The Winter of Our Discontent (1983) , and a BAFTA for Once Upon a Time in America (1984) . Since the late 1980s her acting appearances have been infrequent....

Winter War, Finland, 1940. The Soviets had to bring troops from far away to the Finnish front. Some of the soldiers were from the south and hadn’t ever experienced winter conditions like this before, combine that with Finnish patrols destroying the support lines and the hardest winter in a lifetime. The lack of food and supplies was huge, they did lack winter warfare training and gear. The saddest thing about this is that just by covering that fox hole with some branches and putting snow on top the temperature in the foxhole would have risen to about -3 Celsius....

Step into a time machine through a series of vivid Kodachrome photographs that offer an enthralling glimpse into the bygone streets of Manhattan during the early 1940s. These colorful snapshots serve as portals to a city pulsating with life, painting a captivating picture of a metropolis on the cusp of change. A bustling Fifth Avenue teems with stylish pedestrians, donning the fashions of yesteryears. Vintage automobiles navigate the streets, their polished surfaces reflecting the vibrant signs and architecture that defined the cityscape....

Acrobats balance on top of the Empire State Building, 1934 The fearless ‘Three Jacksons,’ acrobats, Jarley Smith, Jewell Waddek, and Jimmy Kerrigan perform a balancing act on a ledge on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building in Manhattan on August 21, 1934. The act took place 1,050 feet (320m) above the pavement with no safety net. Balancing on the edge (the ‘Three Jacksons’ recalled as being “about the width of a newspaper”), the group used no harnesses and relied purely on their pinpoint accuracy....

While the First World War witnessed the development of modern, technological warfare, it also made unprecedented demands on what we might see as archaic methods of campaigning. Despite the tanks, planes, and machine guns, fighting still depended on the physical and emotional suffering and sacrifice of men, who also had to contend with mud, sand, water, disease, and often brutal weather. Moreover, like fighting men since time immemorial, the armies of the Allies and the Central Powers depended on the efforts and skills of animals for transport, logistics, communications, and, at times, solace....

Sunbathers and swimmers on the beach while a blimp with the word Flamingo on the side glides above. For e brief time, early in the twentieth century, Coney Island was the most dazzling spectacle in the world — a wonderland of light, imagination, and ingenuity that seemed to herald an emerging nation’s promise at the dawn of the century that it would come to dominate. Coney Island’s three great amusement parks — Steeplechase, Luna Park, and Dreamland — took guests not on rides but on journeys: under the sea and around the world, to the past, to the future, to the outer space, to inner space....

The Jewish Danielsson, whose mother survived Auschwitz, struck the skinhead during a march in the Swedish town of Växjö, 1985. The photograph titled A Woman Hitting a Neo-Nazi with Her Handbag, captured by Hans Runesson on April 13, 1985, in Växjö, Sweden, has become an iconic image. It portrays a 38-year-old woman striking a Nazi skinhead with her handbag during a demonstration organized by supporters of the Nordic Reich Party....