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They were too big to hold and the recoil so large that they were mounted directly on the punts (a small skiff boat) used for hunting, hence their name. “Used for duck hunting” isn’t the right expression for aiming this piece of artillery in the general direction of a flock of ducks, firing, and spending the rest of the day picking up the carcasses. In the early 1800s, the mass hunting of waterfowl to supply commercial markets with meat became a widely accepted practice....

The famous artist posed up showing his surreal personality and didn’t miss this opportunity to shock his audience. Hewitt ended up titling the photoshoot simply as “One day with Salvador Dalí”. In 1930, a few months after his father threw him out of the house, unable to stand his strange personality, Salvador Dalí purchased a former fisherman’s shack. The property was paid with some of the 20,000 francs that the Viscount of Noailles had given him as an advance for a painting that would later become The Old Age of William Tell....

Two members of the platoon found an open balcony that commanded on an unobstructed view of the bridge, set up their gun. For a while, one soldier fired the gun while the other fed it. Then one soldier went inside and the other manned the smoking gun alone. While absorbed in reloading it, a German sniper’s bullet from the street pierced his forehead. He crumpled to the floor, dead. War photographer Robert Capa climbed through a balcony window into the flat to photograph the dead man, who lay in the open door, a looted Luftwaffe sheepskin helmet on his head....

Some of the stranger treatments of old-time medicine would turn out to be useful; while cautery—heating an iron stick on hot coals and then pressing it onto a person’s body—didn’t end up curing broken hearts when the rod was pressed against the patient’s chest, the practice was a forerunner to electric surgical instruments. And while doctors were misguided in prescribing the poison arsenic to treat syphilis and skin conditions, a form of the chemical has been used to treat acute promyelocytic leukemia....

Dazzle camouflage (also known as Razzle Dazzle or Dazzle painting) was a military camouflage paint scheme used on ships, extensively during World War I and to a lesser extent in World War II. The idea is credited to the British artist Norman Wilkinson who came with this idea in 1917, a time when German U-Boat attacks on British ships seemed unstoppable. Norman Wilkinson recalls: “I suddenly got the idea that since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer — in other words to paint her, not for low visibility, but in such a way as to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as to the course on which she was heading....

This gallery of Wild West mugshots shows some of the most notorious criminals from the late 1800s and early 1900s, along with details of their daring exploits. Criminals in the Wild West often found themselves incarcerated in harsh and unforgiving environments. One of the most infamous prisons was the Wyoming Frontier Prison. Built in 1901, this facility lacked basic amenities such as electricity and indoor plumbing, making life inside exceptionally tough....

Historically, the purpose of these courses was to professionalize housework, to provide intellectual fulfillment for women, and to emphasize the value of “women’s work” in society and to prepare them for the traditional roles of sexes. By definition, home economics is “the art and science of home management,” meaning that the discipline incorporates both creative and technical aspects into its teachings. Since the nineteenth century, schools have been incorporating home economics courses into their education programs....

At the same time, Nazi warships and troops were entering Norwegian waters, attacking ships, landing troops, and starting a conflict that would last for two months. The western European invasion began at 2:30am on May 10th, involving infantry crossing into Holland and Belgium and joined by German paratroopers taking the Belgian fort at Eben-Emael and its 2,000-strong garrison with the loss of just six German paratroopers. Other key paradrops netted strategic bridges and villages that would allow passage of German armor....

Many parts of the western front essentially became mud holes, where you could often have 6-10 ft (2-3 m) of thick mud before hitting dry earth. Falling in some of these places would be equatable to slower, thicker, stickier quicksand. Once soldiers were trapped in it often it was impossible to extract them. Soldiers would beg their friends to shoot them and spare them the agony of slowly drowning in the mud....

The women who lived during the Victorian era opted for more sober and subdue styles, in contrast to the trends prior to that time. The women earlier would go in for elaborate hairstyles, extravagance and pomp were the highlights of that time. Women, during the Victorian era, liked their hair to be healthy, glossy, soft, and smooth. This enabled them to style it as well as keep it simple and uncomplicated....

Yeltsin was perceived at varying times as a folk hero, as a symbol of Russia’s struggle to establish a democracy, and as a dictatorial figure. Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin was born into a Russian working-class family on February 1, 1931, in the small Siberian village of Butko. His parents were Nikolai and Klavdia Yeltsin. He grew up with a younger brother, Mikhail, and a younger sister, Valya. The Yeltsin family lived in communal, or group, situations, first on a farm and later at a construction site where his father worked....

Chlorine gas was first introduced on the battlefield by the German Army in 1915. It was pioneered by a German scientist later to be a Nobel laureate, Fritz Haber of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, in collaboration with the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, who developed methods for discharging chlorine gas against an entrenched enemy. It is alleged that Haber’s role (the inventor) in the use of chlorine as a deadly weapon drove his wife, Clara Immerwahr, to suicide....

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....

To pay her tuition, Bellucci started modeling. Two years later, she dropped out of school to relocate to Milan, where she signed with Elite Model Management. Besides strutting the cat walk in fashion shows, Bellucci appeared in international advertising campaigns for designers such as Dolce & Gabbana. With her modeling career in full swing, she began to take acting classes and made her screen debut in the television film Vita Coi Figli (Life With the Sons) in 1990....

The watch was crafted by J. Lancaster & Son of Birmingham and produced between 1886 and 1900. The production spanned various models, beginning with a version tailored for men before introducing a more petite edition designed for women. These pictures feature the women’s version of the Lancaster watch camera, a rarer and smaller model. This unique piece sold for a remarkable $36,000 at a Bonhams auction in 2007. Only four of these are known to exist, not because they were challenging to create, but because they proved to be quite tricky to use effectively....

The plan of British Fascists led by Oswald Mosley was to send thousands of marchers dressed in their Blackshirt uniform through the heart of the East End (an area which then had a large Jewish and Irish population). Around 100,000 residents petitioned the Home Secretary to ban the march, but he refused on the grounds of free speech. The government sent a police escort in an attempt to prevent anti-fascist protesters from disrupting the march....

The failed expedition marked one of the first explorations of the vast Siberian wilderness, and George Kennan’s photographs capture the diverse subject of the Russian Empire. George Kennan (1845-1924) was born in Norwalk, Ohio, and was keenly interested in travel from an early age. However, family finances dictated that he begin work at the Cleveland and Toledo Railroad Company telegraph office at age twelve. In 1864, he secured employment with the Russian American Telegraph Company to survey a route for a proposed overland telegraph line through Siberia and across the Bering Strait....

Deriving its name the Purepecha or Tarascan language, which means “to the other side,” the birth of this volcano in the twenties century revealed the amazon secrets of the deep Earth. 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 first morphological feature associated with the birth of Parícutin volcano was perhaps the formation of a small depression around a preexisting pit of 5 meters (16 feet) diameter and 1....

Named after the head of the Krupp family, the Gustav Gun weighed in at a massive 1344 tons, so heavy that even though it was attached to a rail car, it still had to be disassembled before moving so as to not destroy the twin set of tracks as it passed over. This 4-story (12 meters) behemoth stood 20 feet wide (7 meters) and 140 feet long (47 meters). Its 500 man crew, commanded by a Major-General, needed nearly three full days (54 hours, to be exact) to set it up and prep for firing....

A rogue unit of insurgents headed by Algirdas Klimaitis and encouraged by Germans from the Sicherheitspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst, started anti-Jewish pogroms in Kaunas (Polish: Kovno) on the night of 25–27 June 1941. Over a thousand Jews perished over the next few days in what was the first pogrom in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. The most infamous incident occurred in what was later known as the Lietūkis Garage Massacre. During the Lietūkis Garage Massacre, carried out before the invading Germans had actually set up their administration, 40-60 people were killed and publicly humiliated in the process....