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The French President Marshal Petain meets Adolf Hitler at Montoire in front of Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt with Foreign Minister Ribbentrop at the side. Few men over the last century can have experienced such a change of fortune as Philippe Pétain. During the First World War, Pétain was hailed as the ‘Saviour of Verdun’, helping the French keep the Germans at bay during the 1916 Battle of Verdun. In May 1917 he was made commander-in-chief of French forces....

Mississippi’s Tatum Salt Dome in rural Lamar County near Hattiesburg was the site of two nuclear test explosions in the mid-1960s. The Salmon test on Oct. 22, 1964 and the Sterling test on Dec. 3, 1966, were conducted to help determine whether and how nuclear test yields could be disguised through “decoupling” and how well such blasts could be detected. After nine years of negotiations, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) in 1963, which prohibited “any nuclear weapon test explosion, or any other nuclear explosion” “in the atmosphere; beyond its limits, including outer space; or under water, including waters or high seas”....

Covering 1,216 acres, in Flushing Meadows, New York, the 1939 New York World’s Fair, like the legendary Phoenix rising from the ashes, was erected on what was an ash-dump. The theme, “Building the World of Tomorrow” echoed in virtually every corner of the Fair. This World’s Fair was a look to the future and was planned to be “everyman’s fair” where everyone would be able to see what could be attained for himself and his community....

Humanity has always tried to predict what the future would look like and this vintage photo collection shows predictions that were either a hit or a miss. While some people actually managed to predict it rather accurately, many of them look pretty hilarious from today’s perspective. The term “retrofuturism” was first coined in a 1960s book titled Retro-Futurism by T.R. Hinchliffe. In its more popular form, futurism (sometimes referred to as futurology) is “an early optimism that focused on the past and was rooted in the nineteenth century, an early-twentieth-century ‘golden age’ that continued long into the 1960s’ Space Age”....

Wadlow with his mother and brother. 1935. Robert Wadlow, the tallest man in the world, was born in Alton, Illinois, on February 22, 1918, to Harold Franklin and Addie May Wadlow, and was the oldest of five children. Nobody could’ve anticipated that the seemingly normal baby boy will grow up to be the world’s tallest man, often nicknamed Alton Giant or the Giant of Illinois . When Robert turned one, he was already 3 ft 5 in (1....

Simo Häyhä, also known as “The White Death” posing with his winter camouflage, 1940. Simo Häyhä, also known as “The White Death,” was a Finnish sniper who is credited with killing 505 enemy troops within 100 days during the Winter War against the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1940. Simo Häyhä’s involvement in the Winter War was very extraordinary. With his Mosin-Nagant M91 rifle, he would dress in white winter camouflage, and carry with him only a day’s worth of supplies and ammunition....

In 1945, Todd Webb was discharged from the U.S. Navy following World War II, and landed in New York. With a keen fascination for the bustling humanity of Manhattan, he took his large-format camera out to the streets, capturing its people and places in all weather and seasons. Buildings, signage, vehicles, the passing throngs, isolated figures, curious eccentrics, odd corners, windows, doorways, alleyways, squares, avenues, storefronts, uptown, and downtown, from the Brooklyn Bridge to Harlem, his pictures document a rich portrait of the everyday life and architecture of New York....

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel famously declared and predicted: “The war will be won or lost on the beaches. We’ll have only one chance to stop the enemy and that’s while he’s in the water… struggling to get ashore… everything we have must be on the coast… the first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive… for the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day”....

The skinhead subculture was born in England in the late 1960s as an offshoot of the mod culture. Skinheads were distinct from other British subcultures due to their uniform of boots, jeans, braces (suspenders), and the trademark shaved head. Their style was an exaggerated version of the traditional unskilled laborer. One of the first scholars to research skinheads, sociologist Mike Brake, classified skinheads as a “traditional working-class delinquent subculture” and documented five traits that defined first-generation British skinheads: toughness and violence; football (soccer), ethnocentrism, Puritan work ethic; and a cynical worldview....

After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese quickly gained control over a huge area of the Pacific, from the Philippines to Burma to the Aleutians to the Solomons. While the Japanese enjoyed the advantage of interior lines of communication, they had somewhat overextended themselves. Once the Allies became strong enough to threaten their perimeter from several directions, the advantage would be lost, since Japan did not have and could not produce enough planes and ships to defend in force at all points....

Aid from the Padre, 1962. Navy chaplain Luis Padilla gives last rites to a soldier wounded by sniper fire during a revolt in Venezuela. Braving the streets amid sniper fire, to offer last rites to the dying, the priest encountered a wounded soldier, who pulled himself up by clinging to the priest’s cassock, as bullets chewed up the concrete around them. The photographer Hector Rondón Lovera, who had to lie flat to avoid getting shot, later said that he was unsure how he managed to take this picture: “I found myself in solid lead for forty-five minutes … I was flattened against the wall while bullets were flying when the priest appeared....

The largest wooden airplane ever constructed and flown only one time, the H-4 Hercules (nicknamed Spruce Goose) represents one of humanity’s greatest attempts to conquer the skies. It was born out of a need to move troops and material across the Atlantic Ocean, wherein in 1942, German submarines were sinking hundreds of Allied ships. Henry Kaiser, the steel magnate, and shipbuilder conceived the idea of a massive flying transport and turned to Howard Hughes to design and build it....

The American presidency has put 45 men in power who have been described as everything from noble to despicable. They are known for the wars they fought, the legislation they signed into law, and the scandals they brought to the Oval Office. These interesting photos show US presidents looking cool and doing “non-presidential” things. President Theodore Roosevelt hunts for bear in Colorado. 1905. There have been 46 presidencies (including the current one, Joe Biden, whose term began in 2021), and 45 different individuals have served as president....

Victorian Slums Revealed: Haunting Photos of Everyday Life in Victorian England In the late 19th century, England was known for its wealth, but not everyone shared in its prosperity. Even though it was one of the richest countries, many neighborhoods, especially in London, were very poor. Around 35 percent of Londoners lived in poverty by the end of the 1800s. When Henry Mayhew, a social reformer, visited the slums of Victorian London, he was shocked....

In the 1920s, a Coca-Cola bottler declared, “Coca-Cola was as instrumental in building up the soft drink industry as Henry Ford was in building up the automotive industry.” Originally marketed as a temperance drink and intended as a patent medicine, it was invented in the late 19th century by John Stith Pemberton in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1888, Pemberton sold Coca-Cola’s ownership rights to Asa Griggs Candler, a businessman, whose marketing tactics led Coca-Cola to its dominance of the global soft-drink market throughout the 20th and 21st century....

These vintage photographs of Snow King chairlifts taken between the 1950s and 1970s show people riding in a very unsafe way without deploying any safety bars or other protections. While these chairlifts were actually dangerous, there’s also a forced perspective component that makes the lift look much higher than it actually was. Snow King Mountain winter resort is located in Downtown Jackson, Wyoming and the original 1936 ski hill was on the southeast edge of the city....

The man of the late 19th century, no matter his social status, was sure to don a perfectly stylish and manicured mustache as a part of any proper gentlemen’s attire. During the Crimean War in the 1850s was when men started to really show off a variety of different facial hair styles. Beards had been banned in the British Army until this time, however, the freezing temperatures and harsh winters meant that it was impossible to keep clean-shaven....

Long before today’s video calls became part of daily life, videophones were the stuff of science fiction, futuristic devices imagined in movies, magazines, and the minds of tech visionaries. The ability to see and speak with someone in real time across vast distances once felt like a fantasy. But behind the everyday ease of modern video chat lies a fascinating, often frustrating history of failed experiments, bold innovations, and relentless ambition....

A NASA study from 1995 shows just how different drugs affect the spiders’ ability to make webs. A NASA tech briefing “Using Spider-Web Patterns To Determine Toxicity” was published in April 1995. The work was done by researchers at Marshall Space Flight Center to see how various substances — including caffeine — affect spider web patterns. According to the briefing, the purpose of the study was to examine how toxic a chemical is by exposing spiders to it and comparing how their webs differed from that of a normal spider web....

The 1970 Lancia Stratos Zero is just a cool car; it’s a crazy dream come true, showing off what cars could be if designers threw the rulebook out the window. Crafted by the genius brain of Marcello Gandini and his team at Bertone, the Stratos Zero isn’t your average ride. Imagine a car so low, it’s almost kissing the ground, and with a wild wedge shape that’s more at home in a sci-fi movie than on the road....