Infamous French Commander Napoleon Bonaparte once said “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” The history of the human race, as it stands today, is a collection of stories riddled with conflict, war, heroics, deception, cruelty, and even romance, all the makings of incredible stories. Historians have, for eras, tracked these stories, compiling more and more evidence to determine fact from fiction, and more importantly, to document these stories in great detail.
Perhaps the greatest tool to any fan of humankind's history is the camera, which captures it in their truest essence moments and people that could have been forgotten with time. Here are some photos that anyone can enjoy, history buff or not, that make these moments from the past come alive!
1. The world’s first nonstop solo transatlantic flight ends, as Charles Lindbergh makes his landing in Le Bourget Field, Paris on May 21, 1927
2. Allied troops being evacuated during the Dunkirk Evacuation (also known as the “Miracle of Dunkirk”), code-named "Operation Dynamo" in 1940
3. Harry Houdini, an illusionist who despised the false antics of claimed mystics, exposes the trickery behind talking to spirits to a New York clergymen in 1925
4. Brennan House, the farmhouse (now located at the intersection of 84th Street and Broadway) in Manhattan, where Edgar Allen Poe moved to treat tuberculosis and wrote the famous piece “The Raven”
5. The giant howitzer, named “Big Bertha”, with the Germans on the Western Front in 1915
6. A photo of the Pantheon in Rome, completed in 125 AD, one of the best-preserved Ancient Roman Buildings, taken in 1860
7. Yoshiwara call girls kept on display during the Meiji period in 1882
8. Italian army logistics for lowering artillery to the ground forces in the Alps during World War I, between 1914 and 1918
9. Players of a Chicago High school football team practicing in 1902
10. Children crowd together in a New York City school, in 1888
11. Members of the British Army’s Corps of Royal Engineers, also known as British Sappers, being trained to defuse mines blindly so they can do so in the dark when necessary, in 1943
12. Canadian troops arriving at Juno Beach in the town of Courseulles, in Normandy, France, in 1944
13. At an elementary school in Berlin, students are made to pay tribute to the then Nazi-leader Adolf Hitler, in 1934
14. Queen Genepil (1905-1938), the last queen of Mongolia, who along with a heavy portion of the Mongolian population, was executed as a part of the systematic destruction of their culture
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