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Even during this tumultuous era, Hollywood’s Golden Age stars, including the enchanting Rita Hayworth and Katharine Hepburn, continued to captivate audiences with their impeccable style, gracing the silver screen in a dazzling array of exquisite gowns. These stunning photos show the fashion trends that defined this remarkable decade. The 1940s marked a period characterized by resilience and resourcefulness, as women navigated the challenges of wartime life. Practicality became a primary consideration as women took on new roles in factories and workplaces, actively contributing to the war effort....

For many members of the public, Skylab is perhaps best known for two things — its beginning and its end. During the May 1973 launch of the Skylab workshop, an unanticipated problem damaged the station and its way to orbit. And of course, Skylab captured the world’s attention and its fiery reentry over the Indian Ocean and Australia in 1979. But between those bookends lies a fantastic story of a pivotal period in spaceflight history....

Prior to World War II’s conclusion, North and South Korea had been a single country known as Korea. After the war, Korea became two countries. By invading South Korea, North Korea hoped to reunite the two nations as a single country under communism. With North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, the United States feared the spread of communism. Determined to stop North Korea, the United States sought permission from the United Nations to support the South Korean government military....

The word bushi means “man of arms.’ Another document from the Heian period, listing various professions, includes bushi along with other specialists such as men of letters, doctors, singers, dancers, and others. As numerous studies have pointed out, they were neither landowners nor armed farmers; from the beginning, they were professional warriors. They were the well-paid retainers of the daimyo (the great feudal landholders). They had high prestige and special privileges such as wearing two swords....

Inside the wagon, 100 pounds (45 kg) of dynamite with 500 pounds (230 kg) of heavy, cast-iron sash weights exploded in a timer-set detonation, sending the weights tearing through the air. The horse and wagon were blasted into small fragments, but the driver was believed to have left the vehicle and escaped. The powerful blast turned the nation’s financial center into a horrific war zone and left 38 dead and hundreds more seriously injured....

Originating in Europe and spreading to the United States, physical culturists included strongmen and women who routinely competed against one another for prestige and popularity. Later on, part of this culture branched out into bodybuilding. In the past, strongmen would perform various feats of strength such as the bent press (not to be confused with the bench press, which did not exist at the time), supporting large amounts of weight held overhead at arm’s length, steel bending, chain breaking, etc....

On February 9, 1964, an estimated 73 million people tuned in to see the Beatles perform live on The Ed Sullivan Show, a popular television program. This meant that 45% of homes with televisions in the U.S. were watching the Beatles, a record at that time. Their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, coupled with radio play and album promotion, spurred their meteoric rise in America. By April 4, 1964, the group held the first five spots on the Billboard Hot 100 list of popular songs, with “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Twist and Shout,” “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me” crowding the top of the charts....

His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from relativity theory, has been dubbed “the world’s most famous equation”. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”, a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His intellectual achievements and originality resulted in “Einstein” becoming synonymous with “genius”....

However, the gas stations we encounter today bear little resemblance to their early counterparts from the 1920s and 1940s. In this article, we delve into the past through a captivating collection of old photos, providing a fascinating glimpse into the appearance and atmosphere of gas stations in the United States during these transformative decades. During the early 1920s, gas stations were still in their infancy, evolving alongside the burgeoning automobile industry....

During this time, London underwent a “metamorphosis from a gloomy, grimy post-war capital into a bright, shining epicenter of style”. The phenomenon was caused by the large number of young people in the city (due to the baby boom of the 1950s) and the postwar economic boom. Following the abolition of the national service for men in 1960, these young people enjoyed greater freedom and fewer responsibilities than their parents’ generation, and “[fanned] changes to social and sexual politics”....

These rare pictures depict the final days of 400 years of Turkish rule over Jerusalem. In its long history, the inhabitants and rulers of the city of Jerusalem have changed countless times, from ancient pagans to Biblical Israelites to Byzantine Christians to Ottoman Muslims. In 1517 the Ottoman sultan Selim I took the city and inaugurated a Turkish regime that lasted 400 years. The 16th century was a period of great urban development....

During the summer of 1863, Tsar Alexander II issued Temporary Rules for State Junior Schools of the Northwestern Krai, ruling that only Russian-language education would be allowed there. Therefore, the use of the Latin alphabet for the Lithuanian language was totally banned. The book smugglers worked to circumvent this ban printed Lithuanian language, enforced by the occupying Russian Empire, from 1865 to 1904. Sure, the official language for state business is one thing, but crucially, schoolbooks had to be written using the Cyrillic alphabet, rather than Latin, which the Lithuanian language uses....

The Skeleton Dance is a sacred Tibetan dance ritual found in Himalayan Buddhist lineages. It is intended to reflect the transient nature of things, including states of mind and the body itself. The monk pictured in the above photo seems to be performing the dance known as Durdak Garcham, “Dance of the Lords of the Cemetery”. The dance celebrates the liberation that comes from the acceptance of our impermanence. The skeletons depicted in the dance are Chitipati, a pair of lovers known as the Lord and Lady of the charnel ground whose dance represents the eternal dance of death, as well as the attainment of perfect consciousness....

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....

For five straight days rioting and looting enveloped the city, prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson to mobilize the National Guard. When the smoke cleared, 43 people were dead and over 1,000 more were injured. In total, over 7,000 people were arrested and over 2,000 buildings destroyed. The Detroit police force was overwhelmed. Officers made so many arrests that they had to hold detainees in makeshift jails. Many of those arrested were among the estimated 100,000 spectators watching the 10,000 rioters....

This help came in the form of families, usually women and children from London, who would arrive in Kent for three weeks in September to pick hops. Many saw it as a kind of holiday, a chance to exchange city life for the green fields of the countryside. Hops are the flowers (also called seed cones or strobiles) of the hop plant Humulus lupulus, a member of the Cannabaceae family of flowering plants....

No stranger to scenes of despair, the photographer Tony Vaccaro caught the defeated man in the throes of grief, as the bombed shells of former houses loom eerily behind him. It’s an unimaginable pain, to be pulled into a war that would scar a country for generations to come and then to return home, seeking relief after all the hell you went through, to find no one there. He having thought of them time and time again just driving himself to get home safe....

Everything moves slower in extreme cold. Apparatus slows down from poor road conditions, firefighters move slower on snowpack and ice and when advancing lines, and hitting fire hydrants is tougher. Water can freeze on the inside and outside of hoses, rendering them unusable. Even the hydrants can be buried under the snowdrifts. Firefighters typically need protection from both heat and cold at the same incident. They’re exposed to the cold while responding and setting up, and then they may encounter extreme heat while fighting the fire....

These photographs were taken in 1988 by Bruno Barbie and Carl De Keyser and show the everyday life in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. By the end of the decade, the Soviet Union was a country descending into chaos, torn apart by natural and industrial catastrophes, political and economic crises. Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost (English: restructuring and openness) failed to reach Ukraine as early as other Soviet republics because of Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, a conservative communist appointed by Brezhnev and the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, who resigned from his post in 1989....

Claude Joséphine Rose “Claudia” Cardinale (born 15 April 1938) is an Italian film actress. She has starred in several acclaimed European films of the 1960s and 1970s, acting in Italian, French, and English-language films. Born and raised in La Goulette, a neighborhood of Tunis, Cardinale won the “Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia” competition in 1957, the prize being a trip to Italy, which quickly led to film contracts, due above all to the involvement of Franco Cristaldi, who acted as her mentor for a number of years and later married her....