100 Unforgettable Moments of History’s Most Powerful Photos
Armed members of ‘The Star’ News escort newspapers into Witwatersrand, defying embargoes and threats during the Rand Revolt. (March 1922).
An Imperial Japanese narrow-gauge railroad locomotive at the Orote Peninsula airfield, Guam, two months after the island was declared secure, October 5th, 1944.
South African police protect South African-Indians from a mob during the Durban Race Riots of January 1949, a period of violence against the Indian community.
In 1970, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed students at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine.
Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nicholai Bulganin visit Calcutta during their 1955 tour of India.
‘Germany’s Last Hope’: German child soldiers from the Volkssturm and Hitler Youth captured during the Battle of Berlin, May 1945.
Agronomy researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspect soybean plants outside a Korean farmer’s home, 1929.
Robert Nixon, 18, prepares to reenact a murder for police. His case’s racist media coverage, exemplified by the Chicago Tribune likening him to an ape, inspired Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son,’ 1938.
East Berlin in the 1980s, showcasing distinctive communist-era urban architecture and design.
William Trethewey and other sculptors working on a clay model for a statue at the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition, circa late 1930s.
F6F Hellcat pilots of VF-16 celebrate a decisive victory, shooting down 17 out of 20 Japanese planes targeting Tarawa, November 1943.
Moroccan police commissioner Mustapha Tabet hangs his head at trial, accused of kidnapping, assault, and rape of at least 518 women and girls in the country’s worst police corruption scandal, 1993.
President Abraham Lincoln confers with a general near the Antietam battlefield on October 4th, 1862, with captured rebel flags visible.
Iraqi Vice-President Saddam Hussein with his brutal security director Nadhim Kzar in the early 1970s. Kzar was executed in 1973 after a failed coup.
Army attorney Joseph Welch famously confronts Senator Joe McCarthy at the ‘Red Scare’ Hearings: ‘At long last, have you no sense of decency, sir?’ Washington D.C., June 1954.
A rare photograph capturing the last known Tasmanian tiger, a long-extinct species, taken in 1933.
The original McDonald’s restaurant, featuring an autograph by Richard McDonald, late 1940s.
A Soviet soldier pauses next to a fallen German soldier after the brutal Battle of Berlin, May 1945.
The commander of an M48 Patton tank surveying the battlefield during the Vietnam War, 1967.
Old West lawman and journalist Bat Masterson (standing) with silent film actor William S. Hart in Masterson’s office at the New York Morning Telegraph, 1921.
Adolf Hitler is served a non-alcoholic dessert at Finnish commander-in-chief Gustaf Mannerheim’s 75th birthday lunch in Imatra, Finland, June 4, 1942.
An eerie scene from an abandoned village in Bosnia, 1997.
Jews and Muslims in Ottoman Jerusalem, circa 1900.
U.S. soldiers pose with the victims of the Bud Dajo massacre on Jolo Island, Philippines, March 7, 1906.
An autochrome photograph capturing Greek soldiers in their uniforms, May 24, 1913.
Double exposure publicity for an 1887 stage production of “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” starring Richard Mansfield, whose convincing performance led some to suspect him of being Jack the Ripper.
A Pepsi Cola bottling plant in Novorossiysk, Soviet Union. Photo by Burt Glinn, 1974.
Chief of Staff Saad Al-Shazly with his daughter Shahdan, Egypt’s first female paratrooper, May 1971.
An Ouled Naïl Woman in traditional jewelry and dress in Algeria, 1910s.
The awe-inspiring, unbroken seal of Pharaoh Tutankhamen’s Tomb, discovered in 1922.
A German anti-tank gun crew in action on the Eastern Front, 1942.
Colonel Desgrées du Loû waves the flag, leading an assault during the 2nd Battle of Champagne, 1915.
Marshals Zhukov, Eisenhower, and Stalin at the Red Square parade in Moscow, 1945.
Poles expelled from Rudki (now Ukraine) in a cattle car en route to Recovered Territories, May 1946. Over a million Poles were expelled from territories annexed by the USSR after WWII. Photo by John Vachon.
A Soviet Red Army machine gunner on duty in Siberia, 1936.
Captured Soviet soldiers begging for food in a German POW camp, 1941.
Resistance fighters in the mountains of Georgia (South Caucasus) during the August Uprising of 1924, a revolt against Soviet occupation.
Nurses attentive to a lecture at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, Scotland, 1957.
Italian migrant workers arrive in Germany for agricultural jobs, 1938.
A 22-year-old Xi Jinping (center) with local peasants while serving as party secretary of Liangjiahe, 1975. Banished during the Cultural Revolution, he spent seven years in the countryside.
Soviet leaders carrying the urn of Russian writer Maxim Gorky during his funeral in Moscow, June 1936.
Socialist Shakes: The ‘Milk Bar Bennewitz’ in Jonsdorf, Saxony, GDR, 1965.
The burnt remains of the Apollo 1 capsule interior after the tragic launchpad fire killed three U.S. astronauts, Cape Kennedy, January 1967.
Doctor Marcel Pétiot (right) on trial for the serial murders of 27 people, with suitcases of his victims’ belongings, Paris, France, March/April 1946.
A Soviet junior political officer (Politruk) urges troops forward against German positions, July 12, 1942.
A South Vietnamese woman mourns over the remains of her husband, found in a mass grave of Tet Offensive victims, April 1969. Photo by Larry Barrows.
Fries and firearms: ‘Dirty Jack’s Wild West Theater Chuckwagon Restaurant’ in Jackson, WY, 1978.
Soviet aviators of the all-female 46th Guards Night Bomber Regiment, known as the ‘Night Witches,’ 1943.
The Italian battleship Roma during fitting out in Trieste, 1942.
The bustling Home Decor department at a Woolworth’s store in 1964.
Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street) in the immediate aftermath of the Easter Rising, 1916.
Jakobus Onnen, identified as the murderer of the ‘last Jew in Vinnitsa,’ a crime captured in a notorious photo. Onnen, a Nazi fanatic, circa late 1930s.
Canadian soldiers playing hockey on a rink they built in Korea, 1952.
A bustling street scene in Manhattan, New York City, 1908.
A Soviet state-sponsored interfaith conference on world peace near Moscow, with 27 religious organizations attending, May 1952.
Air travel behind the Iron Curtain: Airport terminal, Schoenefeld, East Berlin, GDR, 1960s.
‘The First Day of War’: Soviet civilians in Moscow listen to the radio announcement of the German invasion, June 22, 1941.
Berlin city officials rename a street dedicated to Nobel Peace Prize winner Gustav Stresemann under Nazi orders, 1935. The name was restored after WWII.
Monica Mening Macias Bindan, daughter of Equatorial Guinean dictator Francisco Macias Nguema, living in North Korea in the 1980s as Kim Il Sung’s adopted daughter after her father’s overthrow.
An 1865 portrait of Brigham Young, 2nd President of the Church of Latter-day Saints, founder of Salt Lake City, and first Governor of Utah. Young had 57 children with 56 wives.
The historic opening of the first McDonald’s in Moscow, circa 1990.
The Greenbrier Ghost, Zona Heaster Shue & her husband Edward Stribbling Trout Shue’s wedding picture, West Virginia, 1896.
Malcolm X with Prince Faisal, the future King of Saudi Arabia, in Makkah, 1964.
Czech civilians volunteer to donate blood at a Red Cross office in Prague during the Sudetenland Crisis, September 1938.
October 4th, 1945: European colonists celebrate the French 5th Colonial Infantry Regiment’s arrival in Saigon, reestablishing control over Vietnam after WWII.
East German border guards gaze into West Berlin on November 11, 1989, two days after the Berlin Wall officially fell, ending 28 years of separation.
A jailhouse photo of D.B. Napier, 1934. Arrested for murder, he confessed to an earlier lynching, making national headlines after being saved from a mob himself.
A MAOC captain poses with two militiawomen in Valencia, Spain, 1936. These anti-fascist militias were created by the PCE during the Second Republic, early Spanish Civil War.
An Indian policeman walking on a road in Tianjin, China, 1898.
Liverpool Street Station, as captured by Charles W. Prickett, 1932.
Japanese and German children sing songs during a Hitler Youth trip to Japan, 1938.
Iraqi Vice President Saddam Hussein meeting with local tribesmen in the early 1970s.
A boy walks near a heat power station in Bytom, Poland, circa 1960. Photo by Zofia Rydet.
The Montgomery Wall in Micanopy, FL – the grand entrance to Dr. Lucius Montgomery’s 1850s antebellum plantation home.
A 1900s picture of young George S. Patton III with his father, George S. Patton II, District Attorney for Los Angeles County and first mayor of San Marino, California.
Jane Goodall with infant chimpanzee Flint in Tanzania, 1964.
Palestinian refugees navigating displacement in 1948.
U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey and wife Muriel at the inauguration of Liberian President William Tubman in Monrovia, 1968, with Thurgood Marshall visible behind them.
Armed German separatists establish the Rhenish Republic during the French-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr region, 1923.
U.S. President Harry Truman speaks with General Douglas MacArthur in 1950, seven months before firing him over disagreements regarding the Korean War.
Boston Corbett, the self-castrated hat maker who killed Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Photographed by Mathew Brady, circa 1880.
A powerful 1908 portrait of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.
An Austro-Hungarian general, possibly Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, sleeping in a horse-drawn carriage, 1917.
Pan-Slavic celebrations in Czechoslovakia after WWII, with attendees from Bulgaria, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, 1945.
A 1940 prison photo of Cleo Wright. Two years later, he was lynched by a white mob in Missouri, the first lynching after the U.S. entered WWII.
A poignant scene: a Soviet teenager cleans the boots of a wounded German soldier at a train station, 1943.
Revolution on Granite: A peaceful student protest campaign against the communist regime in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, October 2-17, 1990.
African-American activist & NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois meets with Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong, 1959.
German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop congratulates Yugoslav Prime Minister Dragiša Cvetković for joining the Axis alliance, March 1941. Two days later, Cvetković’s government was overthrown, leading to an Axis invasion.
Survivors of an antisemitic pogrom in Khodorkiv during the Russian Civil War, 1919. Over 100,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed in the conflict.
A conscript of the Karelia Brigade poses for the camera, 1976.
The iconic Oval Office during the Kennedy administration, 1960s.
An upside T-55AM main battle tank with its turret buried, belonging to the Georgian Armed Forces during the War in Abkhazia and Georgian Civil War, circa August 1992 - September 1993.
U.S. Navy corpsman Vernon Wilke with a mortally wounded Marine near Khe Sanh, April 1967.
B-17 waist gunners capture a rare ‘selfie’ moment during WWII, 1944.
U.S. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt meets with Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and his wife Bienvenida, 1934.
A worker with a cutting torch on a Gato Class Submarine at Electric Boat Company, Groton, Connecticut. This original, uncolorized photo was taken for Life Magazine in October 1943.
Various speakers at Hyde Park, London, 1961.
Eighteen-year-old Lowell Lee Andrews (center) stands as police search the Kansas River for parts of the guns he used to kill his family, 1958. Despite being described as the ‘nicest boy in Wolcott,’ Andrews was a Kansas University sophomore accused of murder.
