Fascinating Photos Collected From History

makes you think

Published 9 years ago in Wow

makes you think

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Thích Quảng Đức, moments before the inferno, 11th June 1963. I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think … As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him. David Halberstam of the NYT recalling the event

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The “Big Three” – Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill – meet at the Tehran Conference, 1943. Roosevelt was mostly wheelchair bound…he and his staff went to great lengths to keep this quiet. So out of courtesy/respect to him, the other world leaders most likely elected to sit down next to him so he would not look inferior sitting next to the others while standing.

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History’s first atomic artillery shell fired by “Atomic Annie” at Frenchman’s Flat, Nevada, 25th May 1953. “The fireball ascending at Frenchman’s Flat, Nevada from a test of history’s first atomic artillery shell. The shell was fired from the Army’s 280-mm Atomic Cannon. The MK-9 artillery shell was propelled a distance of seven miles, culminating in a 15 kiloton airburst. Hundreds of high ranking military officers and members of the U.S. Congress were present, including Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson and designated Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Arthur W. Radford. Operation Upshot-Knothole, Test Grable, 25 May 1953.

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Adolf Hitler on a walk with Helga Goebbels, 1936. Helga was later killed with cyanide by her parents with her siblings in Hitler’s bunker in 1945.

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Bodies of Goebbels children. They had been poisoned by their parents rather than face the end of Nazi Germany, May 1945.

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A candid Joseph Goebbels at the moment he realized his photographer, Alfred Eisenstaedt, was a Jew, 1933 “He looked at me with hateful eyes and waited for me to wither. But I didn’t wither. If I have a camera in my hand, I don’t know fear.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt.

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German civilians, air wardens and soldiers collect the civilian dead following an Allied bombing raid on Dresden. February 16, 1945. “On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden — possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me. After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city. ” Excerpt from page 2 of a letter to his folks, from Prvt. Vonnegut, U.S. Army.

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John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s billboard in Times Square during the increasing opposition of continuing the Vietnam War, 1969. “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” was the culmination of more than two years of peace activism undertaken by John Lennon and Yoko Ono that began with the bed-ins they convened in March and May 1969, the first of which took place during their honeymoon. The song’s direct antecedent was an international multimedia campaign launched by the couple in December 1969 – at the height of the counterculture movement and its protests against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War – that primarily consisted of renting billboard space in 12 major cities around the world for the display of black-and-white posters that declared “WAR IS OVER! If You Want It – Happy Christmas from John & Yoko”.