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Photographer Nils Olsson Reppen was born in 1856 on the farm Reppen in Sogndal in western Norway. In 1882, he immigrated to America and worked as a photographer in Browns Valley and Morris in Minnesota. He returned to Norway in the late 1890s and continued to work as a photographer in Sogndal, the village where he was born. Sogndal is a village beautifully situated by the Sognefjord, Norway’s longest and deepest fjord....

The 13 km rail system known as the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn had just been completed 12 years before, and became well-used by locals—by 1925 the company claimed it had transported almost 20 million passengers. The story of The Wuppertaler Schwebebahn starts in 1887 when the cities of Elberfeld and Barmen formed a commission for the construction of an elevated railway or Hochbahn. In 1894 they chose the system of the engineer Eugen Langen of Cologne, and in 1896 the order was licensed by the City of Düsseldorf....

Across the five pictures, an upright, dignified gentleman slowly deteriorates into a sloppy drunk in a wheelbarrow. The set of photos is thought to be staged, educational photos perhaps commissioned by a local temperance group in New South Wales, Australia. Advocates of temperance encouraged citizens to be teetotallers, a term describing those who abstain from alcohol completely. The New South Wales State Library website explains, “Possibly commissioned by a local temperance group for educational purposes, the photographs may also have been used by an engraver for illustrations....

ARC, which was the designer and system integrator, also fabricated the double-walled fiberglass upper torso and brief structures, all the mobility joints and sizing hardware, and all the master plaster patterns used for fabric laminate lay-up. Aerotherm manufactured all the fabric structures and sealed bearing assemblies plus assembled the mobility joints. Air-Lock fabricated the dual plane torso disconnect to Ame’s design, along with the dome helmet, helmet disconnect, and glove disconnects....

The British requested an American slightly shorter than the Brit they were sending. However, the Americans sent someone taller than the Brit. After all, the United States was a continent-sized nation while Britain was a tiny island. So the British used a huge hat to overcompensate. The photo is fascinating because it captures a significant amount of racial/ethnic views of the world at that time. White Anglos at the top (British, Americans, and Australians) and everyone else positioned accordingly with the non-white Japanese at the low end....

European book illustrations and paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries show similar baby walkers and attest to their popularity. Like today’s counterparts, they gave toddlers circumscribed mobility. They also, importantly, prevented dangerous tumbles into hot stoves and fireplaces. With regular usage, wooden and wicker baby walkers had considerable wear and tear. Over time baby walkers have gone by many names, including go-cart, standing stool, baby runners, walking stools, and trainers....

Traudl Junge, his last secretary often told in interviews, that people were amazed about Hitler’s blue eyes. Those who met Hitler, after the War often refer, in their reminiscences, to his remarkable pale, clear blue eyes, which many states, unequivocally, had a distinctly hypnotic quality. Hitler’s eyes are important historically because of the mystical qualities sometimes attributed to them: followers frequently describe them as blazing, hypnotic, dominating. In objective fact, they were physically prominent – large and slightly bulging – and Hitler made a point of using them for dramatic effect....

Factories mass-produced fixtures, ever-more modern appliances, cabinetry, lighting, and storage units, and gas stoves were introduced. But it wasn’t until the 1930s that the kitchen began to take on its modern shape. The kitchen configuration that we all know now, has its roots, like a lot of modern design, in the German school known as the Bauhaus. For Bauhaus designers, beauty was not something to be added to a functional item in the form of extra frills; instead, it was achieved through careful choices of materials, proportions, textures, and colors for the functional features of the objects....

During this decade, the city gained notoriety for high rates of crime and social disorders; the city’s subway system was regarded as unsafe and dangerous, and people were warned not to walk the streets after 6 PM. Prostitutes and pimps frequented Times Square, while Central Park became feared as the site of muggings and harassment. After peaking in population in 1950, the city began to feel the effects of suburbanization brought about by new housing communities such as Levittown, a downturn in industry and commerce as businesses left for places where it was cheaper and easier to operate, an increase in crime, and an upturn in its welfare burden....

Franca Viola became the first Italian woman to refuse a “rehabilitating marriage” (“matrimonio riparatore” in Italian) with her victimizer after suffering kidnapping and rape. She was one of the first Italian women who had been raped to publicly refuse to marry her rapist. Viola grew up in Alcamo, Sicily in a farming family. In 1963, at the age of 15, she became engaged to Filippo Melodia, nephew of local mafia member, then aged 23, but after Melodia was arrested for theft, Viola’s father insisted she break off the engagement, which she did....

Hermogenes was a prominent Russian Orthodox religious figure and a monarchist with extreme right ideas, supporting the Union of the Russian People and Black Hundreds. In 1917, he was appointed as Hermogenes, Bishop of Tobolsk and Siberia. Hieromonk Iliodor (Sergei Trufanov) was a lapsed hieromonk, a charismatic churchman, an enfant terrible of the Orthodox church, and panslavist. He is known primarily for his book, semi-autobiographical, and biographical on Rasputin. In this work, he was supported by Maxim Gorky, who hoped that Trufanoff’s story on Rasputin would discredit the Tsar’s family and eventually contribute to the revolutionary propaganda....

After his lumber family business was destroyed by a tsunami in 1854, Suzuki traveled to Yokohama where he became an established photographer. Many of his photographs were hand-colored, which is why they appear more realistic and modern than the black and white photos of that era. In the 1860s and 1870s, Japan was a place on the brink of massive transition. For the first time, the country opened the door to foreign trade and Western technologies and lifestyles were already making their mark on the Japanese culture....

Born in Birmingham in 1806, Grundy took up photography in 1855 and made dozens of stereoscopic photos, primarily posed genre scenes of rustic pursuits such as hunting, fishing, and farming. The London Stereoscopic Company bought about 200 of his negatives, and individual stereographs still exist. However, Grundy’s work is best known for the twenty original albumen prints based into the anthology Sunshine in the Country, A Book of Rural Poetry Embellished with Photographs from Nature (London, 1861)....

He quickly distinguished himself as a fighter pilot, and during 1917 became leader of Jasta 11 and then the larger unit Jagdgeschwader 1 (better known as the “Flying Circus”). By 1918, he was regarded as a national hero in Germany and respected and admired even by his enemies. A cool and precise hunter, Richthofen’s flamboyance was expressed mainly in his brightly painted aircraft, a Fokker DR-1 Dridecker. His success in the air led to his being named der Rote Kampfflieger by the Germans, le petit rouge by the French, and the Red Baron by the British....

A few years later, despite the success achieved by the company with the legendary video game Pong, Bushnell sold Atari in 1976 to Warner Communications (now Time Warner). Unhappy with the direction the company was taking, Bushnell left in early 1979. However, before his departure, he reached an agreement with Warner that prohibited him from releasing any products that would compete with Atari for a certain period. Once this period expired, Bushnell launched a unique software vending machine called Cumma Metawriter in 1983....

He studied at University of Michigan, and graduated with a degree in sociology at Wayne State University in 1937 and then enrolled in the New Bauhaus at the Armour Institute. There he studied under the school’s founder, László Moholy-Nagy, as well as György Kepes, until 1938, when he returned to Detroit. He then began working as a photojournalist for the New York Times, and took journalism assignments for newspapers, magazines, and government agencies for the next several decades....

Originally made up of about 28 communities speaking dialects of Kwak’wala — the Kwakwaka’wakw language — some groups died out or joined others, cutting the number of communities approximately in half. After sustained contact beginning in the late 18th century, Europeans applied the name of one band, the Kwakiutl, to the whole group, a tradition that persists. Archaeological evidence shows habitation in the Kwak’wala-speaking area for at least 8,000 years....

The North Korean government refers to Kim Il-sung as The Great Leader and he is designated in the North Korean constitution as the country’s “Eternal President”. His birthday is a public holiday in North Korea and is called the “Day of the Sun”. As he aged, starting in the late 1970s, Kim developed a calcium deposit growth on the right side of the back of his neck. Its close proximity to his brain and spinal cord made it inoperable....

A plethora of go-go bars, sex shops, peep show establishments, and adult theaters became symbols of the city’s very apparent decay. These vintage historical photographs, taken by photographers Andreas Feininger and Maggie Hop, give us a glimpse of Time Square at the peak of its social and urban degradation. The decline of Times Square can be traced to the negative impacts of the Great Depression and World War II. In the 1950s, attempts to stop the growth of disreputable businesses through zoning rules met with few results....

The photochrom process was invented in the 1880s by Hans Jakob Schmid, an employee of the Swiss company Orell Gessner Füssli—a printing firm whose history began in the 16th century. Füssli founded the stock company Photochrom Zürich as the business vehicle for the commercial exploitation of the process. From the mid-1890s the process was licensed by other companies, including the Detroit Photographic Company in the US (making it the basis of their “phostint” process), and the Photochrom Company of London....