History is more than just innovations and triumphs. In truth, much of it involves numerous instances of brutality, warfare, and other unsettling, regrettable realities.
Take a look below at some of the most haunting moments from history.
The two siblings shown here are experiencing the thrill of an electrical storm at Sequoia National Park in California around 1975. Shortly after this picture was taken, they were struck by lightning. Both survived.
Joseph Goebbels glares at Jewish photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1933.
Anne Frank’s father Otto, revists the attic where he and his family hid.
Che Guevara’s last moments. Bolivia, 9 October 1967.
Replica dog tags of every soldier who never made it back from Vietnam.
People on display at the Coney Island Human Zoo in 1904.
A father looks for his two missing sons during the Kosovo war in 1999. He would later find them.
The survivors the 1972 Andes plane crash.
The last photo ever of Nikola Tesla, 1943
Segregationists harass 6 year old Ruby Bridges with a doll in a coffin.
Windows on the World, the restaurant on top of the WTC North Center, 1976.
Shells from an Allied bombardment all fired in a single day on German lines in 1916
Women and girls using Radium paint, not knowing the health issues that would soon follow. 1922.
The Gadget, the first atomic bomb, 1945
Temporary NYPD headquarters at a Burger King, September 11, 2001.
Leftist woman handing out anti-shah manifesto. Tehran, Iran, 1979.
Pyramid of WWI German helmets in New York, 1919.
Austro-Hungarian trench raiders near Caporetto, 1917.
A young shrimp picker named Manuel, 1912. Photo by Lewis Hines
Kids work in a factory. Photo by Lewis Hines.
The Imprint of a Mitsubishi kamikaze Zero along the side of H.M.S Sussex. 1945.
Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic from Nirvana at Kurt Cobain’s funeral. Seattle, Washington (1994)
The temporary grave of Theodore Roosevelt Jr. in Normandy, July 1944.
Coal miner waiting to get into the communal shower at the end of his shift, taken in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, 1958. by photographer Max Scheler.
Russian inmate identifies a cruel camp guard at Buchenwald.
JFK’s funeral at the capitol. November 1963.
“The Thousand Yard Stare”—USMC Private Theodore J. Miller is helped aboard a ship after intense combat on Eniwetok Atoll. Miller was KIA a month later, 1944.
British infantryman in 1941 with a long WWI-style bayonet affixed to his rifle
Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family, 1913
Anne Frank, with her sister Margot at Zandvoort Beach, 1940.
Earliest known photo of Chernobyl disaster, taken by powerplant’s photographer, dawn of April 26th, 1986
Indian Soldiers arriving in France, World War I, 1914
A young private waits on the beach during the Marine landing at Da Nang, 1965.
Little John F. Kennedy Jr. waiting for his Dad, President John F. Kennedy to land at Camp David, Maryland in October 1963.
A firefighter looks towards the heavily damaged Belgrade’s tallest building, NATO bombing, April 1999
Boy standing in front of fallen statue of Lenin, Ethiopia, 1991
The lost girl, 1874 Blanche Monnier was a Parisian socialite, known for her beauty. In France, she is referred to as “La Séquestrée de Poitiers” which means “The Confined Woman of Poitiers”.
John List takes a family portrait.
This is a photo of a British veteran of the Napoleonic wars posing with his wife. He can be seen wearing a campaign medal, commemorating the fact that he served in Spain.
Freddie Mercury said to Mary Austin in his will: “If things had been different you would have been my wife, and this would have been yours anyway.” (1984)
The last photo of The Dyatlov Pass Victims
A newly liberated women from the Bergen-Belsen camp is dusted with DDT powder to treat lice which spreads typhus in 1945. Photograph by Sgt. Hewitt, No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit.
Throughout the USS Triton’s secret mission to circumnavigate the world submerged, the only unauthorized individual to spot the submarine during those sixty days was a Filipino man on his canoe, who noticed its periscope. April 1, 1960.
Kurt Cobain cries after an emotional set.
A photo of Joe Arridy giving his toy train to another inmate before he’s taken to the gas chamber for a crime he never committed.
Taken at the Michigan Carbon Works factory in Rougeville, the pile of bison skulls in this photo was slated to be processed and used in making products like bone glue, fertilizer, bone ash, bone char, and bone charcoal.
This photo of Heath Ledger is from his last film ‘The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,’ a few days before his passing.
The elephant’s foot of Chernobyl
4 Children for Sale
In 1925, a man flying from Casablanca to Dakar photographed a Barbary Lion in the Atlas Mountains. This photo is special because it’s the last known picture of a wild Barbary Lion before they went extinct.
