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Alois Hitler Jr. and Irishwoman Bridget Dowling met in Dublin in 1909 and they married in London’s Marylebone district in 1910 and relocated back to Liverpool. Alois Hitler left his wife and son in England and moved back to Germany where he started a new family. According to Lyon Air Museum, Willy reconnected with his father when he was 18; he traveled to Germany where his dear old “dad took him to a Nazi rally where he saw his uncle Adolf....

The son of a carpenter on a collective farm, Gagarin graduated as a molder from a trade school near Moscow in 1951. He continued his studies at the industrial college at Saratov and concurrently took a course in flying. On completing this course, he entered the Soviet Air Force cadet school at Orenburg, from which he graduated in 1957. Gagarin was stationed at the Luostari Air Base, near the Norwegian border, before his selection for the Soviet space programme with five other cosmonauts....

Fueled by the vibrant pop music scene, men’s hairstyles in the 1980s exploded in volume and variety. Gone were the tame cuts of previous decades. The 1980s embraced a rock-and-roll spirit, with styles ranging from the edgy punk rock to the luxurious, flowing mane. From the classic bob and the flattop fade to the ever-present curl and the iconic fringe, here are some of the coolest men’s hairstyles that defined the 1980s....

From frogs stabbing each other, and insects dancing in the moonlight, to Krampus (a half-goat, half-daemon) entertaining the ladies, this photo collection shows creepy Victorian Christmas cards. As you can see, the cards were not only overwhelmingly secular, but some were grimly non-festive. During that time, Christmas was hardly celebrated, at least, not in a way we would recognize today. Many businesses didn’t consider it to be a holiday. Gift-giving had traditionally been a New Year activity but moved as Christmas became more important to the Victorians....

Since taking power in January 1959, Castro had infuriated the American government with his policies of nationalizing U.S. companies and investments in Cuba. Some American officials, such as Vice President Richard Nixon, believed that Castro was leaning perilously toward communism. (Castro did not publicly proclaim his adherence to communism until late-1961, when he declared that he was a “Marxist-Leninist”.) The media loved Castro, almost following him around like he was a rock star....

Soldiers suffered from frostbite and exposure, causing them to lose fingers. The muddy walls of trenches became hard as bricks, and any food and water became almost impossible to eat. The standard cold-weather protection issued to soldiers was the so-called trench coat. Constructed from wool serge, they were a considerable weight, even when dry. Difficult to wear with equipment, and prone to fouling with mud and water – creating an even weightier piece of clothing – they were bulky and long....

What they found amidst the lush jungles were more than just plants and animals; they stumbled upon ancient ruins, hidden beneath the dense foliage. These discoveries opened a window into the rich histories of the peoples who once thrived in these lands. Back in the 19th century, whispers began to circulate about the existence of ancient cities lying hidden within the jungles of Mesoamerica and South America. Long before Europe even knew the New World existed, the Maya had already built spectacular cities in these regions....

However, have you ever wondered what KFC looked like in its early days? What were the prices like? How was the food advertised? In this article, we take a trip down memory lane and showcase vintage photos of KFC’s menus and early advertisements that will make you feel nostalgic. These vintage pictures not only depict the evolution of the brand, but also highlight how much things have changed since the early days of KFC....

On January 19, 1981, The Los Angeles Times photographer Boris Yaro heard reports of a suicidal jumper on the radio. His editor wasn’t interested, but Yaro drove over to Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile regardless, where he found a young black man in flared jeans and a hoodie, perched on an office-building fire escape nine floors above. “Joe,” as he was named in reports, had been up there for hours. According to a police spokesman, “he seemed to think he was in Vietnam — with the Viet Cong coming at him....

On the day the photograph was taken, about 40,000 civilians lost their lives to Nazi airstrikes, according to official statistics. The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the bloodiest battles in history, with combined military and civilian casualties of nearly 2 million. The Evzerikhin’s most famous image is a grim scene of a fountain at the center of Stalingrad. The subject of this classic image of children dancing the khorovod, a circle dance common in Russia, once might have projected innocence and normal life in the center of Stalingrad....

Luxury items such as rocking horses, dollhouses, and Noah’s Arks were exclusive to the wealthy, while elaborately dressed dolls were so expensive and delicate that children were often forbidden to play with them. With the average wage in 1900 being just £1 per week (equivalent to approximately £74.39 today – $98), many toys were simply out of reach for most families. A well-crafted dollhouse could cost £1. 12s. 6d (about $160 today), making it a rare possession for ordinary working-class households....

According to the Penn Museum: Around 800 BCE, the settlement of Hasanlu in northwestern Iran was destroyed by an as yet unknown invading force. Inhabitants were slain and left where they fell, and much of the site was burned in a conflagration. The skeletons of the “lovers” were found together in a mudbrick and plaster bin during excavations in 1973. They perished during the destruction of the site; both have some evidence of trauma from around the time of their death, but no definitively fatal wounds (many injuries such as those to soft tissue could leave the skeleton unmarked)....

The presentation of the prize places Utzon in the pantheon of the greatest contemporary architects but marks a career that failed to reach its full potential following the traumas of building the Opera House. Since it opened in 173 the Opera House has repaid its A$100 million cost many times over as a tourist attraction and as a cultural center. As a brand it is priceless. The story of its construction is one of triumph and tragedy....

A crowd of police and press with live television cameras rolling gathered to witness his departure. As Oswald came into the room, Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd and fatally wounded him with a single shot from a concealed .38 revolver. Note that Jack Ruby is using his middle finger to pull the trigger on the revolver. It suggests that this was not Ruby’s first rodeo so to speak. Using the middle finger to pull the trigger of a snub nose revolver was a gunslinger type of method....

The GDR desperately wanted to halt this so-called ‘brain-drain’, so in August 1961 the East German communists were given the go-ahead by Moscow to close the border and build a physical barrier. The Berlin Wall turned the usual function of walls – to keep people out – on its head; this wall was solely to keep its citizens in. The Berlin Wall was not one wall, but two. Measuring 155 kilometres (96 miles) long and four metres (13 feet) tall, these walls were separated by a heavily guarded, mined corridor of land known as the ‘death strip’....

Medical sciences in the early parts of the 20th century were far advanced from the medieval days of leeches, but still, most of the treatments and medical devices were misguided and often even barbaric by our modern standards. Seeming to mean well, bizarre contraptions were built, claiming to aid the ailing patients. A little pseudoscience and quackery were also thrown in the mix. Over years, scientists and doctors experimented with some really strange-looking devices, which had questionable effects on the patients, sometimes simply being a placebo....

He was the NKVD major in charge of executing the Polish officers from the Ostashkov camp, and he believed in personally doing the killing that his superiors had ordered him to supervise. Born in 1885, he was known as the NKVD’s chief executioner, having been hand-picked for this position by Joseph Stalin himself. Blokhin personally killed tens of thousands of men and women during Stalin’s Great Purges of the 1930s, so it was only natural that the NKVD would turn to him when it came time to dispatch the officers held in the Soviet prison camps....

According to the Buchenwald Camp museum site: “Zdének Syrovátka, a Czech political inmate, identifies a member of the SS from Wansleben, a Buchenwald subcamp. Photo by Harold M. Roberts, U.S. Signal Corps, 14 April 1945” There’s something really fascinating about this picture. We can only see so much of the prisoner’s expression here, but that finger means so much. Days, maybe even hours earlier, that prisoner might have been afraid to cross paths with or even make eye contact with this man....

The monument was erected on the edge of Városliget, the city park of Budapest. The large monument stood 25 meters tall in total. The bronze statue stood eight meters high on a four meters high limestone base on top of a tribune eighteen meters wide. Stalin was portrayed as a speaker, standing tall and rigid with his right hand at his chest. The sides of the tribune were decorated with relief sculptures depicting the Hungarian people welcoming their leader....

The event, where this famous photo was taken, was part of what was known as “Die Heimkehr der Zehntausend” (The Return of the 10,000), as they were the last German prisoners of war to be released by the Soviet Union since the end of World War II. On a visit to Moscow in the fall of 1955, Konrad Adenauer secured the release of the last approximately 10,000 German POWs from Soviet prisons....