The Triangle Shirtwaist Company always kept its doors locked to ensure that the young immigrant women stayed stooped over their machines and didn’t steal anything. When a fire broke out on Saturday, March 25, 1911, on the eighth floor of the [...]

The Raid on Dieppe was a test for the full-scale invasion of Western Europe by the Allies during World War II. The plan was to make a frontal assault on the town of Dieppe, across the English Channel on the coast of France. The Raid on Dieppe would give the Allies a chance to test techniques and equipment for landing troops from the sea.
And test them it did. A German ship spotted the convoy coming, and they were ready as [...]

Peter Leibing’s famous picture of the East German soldier Conrad Schumann jumping over the Berlin Wall.  Leibing’s photograph of the 19-year-old East German border guard throwing away his rifle as he hurled over barbed wire on his way into West Berlin was taken on August 15, 1961, two days after East Germany sealed off its border with the wall.

When the Igbos of eastern Nigeria declared themselves independent in 1967, Nigeria blockaded their fledgling country-Biafra. In three years of war, more than one million people died, mainly of hunger. In famine, children who lack protein often get the disease kwashiorkor, [...]

The planning for this picture started in the summer, when Fergus collected sheaves of oats from a local farmer specifically as winter food for the yellowhammers. One evening in February, hearing that snow was forecast for the next morning, Fergus set up his hide in the garden, hung out feeders and carefully positioned a sheaf of oats. ‘I woke early and got into the hide to wait. After a few hours, the garden was full of birds. At one point [...]

As one of the world’s first war photographers, Mathew Brady didn’t start out having as action-packed a career as you might think. A successful daguerreotypist and a distinguished gentleman, Brady was known for his portraits of notable people such as Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. In other words, he was hardly a photojournalist in the trenches.
In fact, Brady had everything to lose by making a career move – his money, his business, and quite possibly his life. Nevertheless, he [...]

June 5, 1989, following weeks of huge protests in Beijing and a crackdown that resulted in the deaths of hundreds, a lone man stepped in front of a column of tanks rumbling past Tiananmen Square. The moment instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide — an anonymous act of defiance seared into our collective consciousnesses.
“It all started with a man in a white shirt who walked into the street and raised his [...]

A mob of 10,000 whites took sledgehammers to the county jailhouse doors to get at these two young blacks accused of raping a white girl; the girl’s uncle saved the life of a third by proclaiming the man’s innocence. Although this [...]

“Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world,” AP photojournalist Eddie Adams once wrote. A fitting quote for Adams, because his 1968 photograph of an officer shooting a handcuffed prisoner in the head at point-blank range not only earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, but also went a long way toward souring Americans’ attitudes about the Vietnam War.
For all the image’s political impact, though, the situation wasn’t as black-and-white as it’s rendered. What Adams’ photograph doesn’t reveal [...]