Leap into the Void was unprecedented in photography. While some photographers used "straight" photography to seek emotional truths, Klein harnessed the inherent malleability of the medium's veracity.
These greeting cards from the late 19th and early 20th-century celebrate the New Year with lucky pigs, foxes fleeing for their lives and at least one drunk frog.
There is not a square-inch of earth that has not been photographed and mapped by satellites today. These spying eyes, flying hundreds of miles above the earth's surface are capable of imaging the entire earth many times over in a single day. Arriving at this level of technological brilliance was no small matter.
From the pretty accurate to the creepy and scary, these eight visions show just how people in the past saw the future.
Photographer Ira Cohen was an avant-garde pioneer, mastering his craft in the era's psychedelic art, rock and jazz scenes.
Imagine a calendar that is the same every year — sort of.
The vice president had spent most of his career trying to lift the restraints on presidential authority. After 9/11, he did just that.
Arnold Schwarzenegger brought us the Hummer. The recession took it away.
John Adams worried that "a division of the republic into two great parties... is to be dreaded as the great political evil." America has now become that dreaded divided republic.
Unaccompanied minors are driven to the middle of the desert to build a society from scratch, what could go wrong?
James "one-eyed" Connelly spent 40 years sneaking into boxing matches, baseball games, and political conventions. His unmitigated gall and boundless creativity got him in pretty much...anywhere.
It was 1960. The United States of America was locked in a race with the Soviet Union to get the first man into space. The US space agency NASA had rushed to prepare its next rocket for testing. But as they watched, things did not go to plan. The whole rocket had travelled 4 inches. 10 centimeters. Less than the length of your smartphone.
Inquiries into Jewish genes always seem to lead someplace ugly.
Before the paper variety, nuts, hops, and dates rained down — and put out the occasional eye.
The pathologies that have plagued the left were all on display one October day in 2010.
From poisoned monks and nuclear bombs to the "transfermium wars," mapping the atomic world hasn't been easy.
Archaeologists say it might also contain the oldest known religious images.
Desperate English bottle-makers turning to a new fuel resulted in a sparkling innovation.
Ivittuut held the world's largest reserve of naturally occurring cryolite, a mineral that was used in the manufacturing of fighter planes.
Three decades ago, two stoner musicians designed a product whose cheap imitations sold into the billions — but today, nobody knows their names.
Once upon a time, we all thought the world was going to end on January 1, 2000. Two decades after the panic of the century, it's time to finally hear from the people who spent years — and billions of dollars — making sure it didn't.
Martin Lewis died in obscurity in 1962; a retired art teacher who had found some success in his early career, but was largely forgotten after the Great Depression took away the demand for his craft, leaving Lewis to spend his last three decades teaching other people how to etch.
On December 23, 1927, a man dressed as Santa Claus walked into a bank and demanded money. Unfortunately, the bank was in Texas, and practically everyone in town was armed. Determining Santa was on the Naughty List, they opened fire.
These ads created during the years after WW2 were almost works of art and skillfully created by hand by wonderfully talented artists and illustrators who worked tirelessly for hours if not days to achieve almost perfect results.
After eight years of honing his craft and finding his own artistic voice, the 12-month period from January 1980 to January 1981 would prove to be pivotal in Vaughan's career.
On the tenth anniversary of the actress' untimely death, her legacy lives on—though not as potently as it should.
Of all the variations on the beloved character, Russia's Ded Moroz might have the strangest history.
With Mister Robinson himself returning to Studio 8H on Saturday, it's worth remembering how his arrival in 1980 changed the show's history
By the time "Carol of the Bells" became a global hit, its original composer had been killed by the Soviet secret police.
Before his rapid rise to the top of the Catholic Church, Pius II had a secret passion for scandalous stories. And they may have been inspired by his own life.
From a wad of pitch less than an inch long, researchers have painted a detailed portrait of an ancient human — and added another layer to the story of human evolution.
A newly released diary shows House Republican leaders pledging to oust the president months before he resigned. Why did they back down?
When the craft beer revolution came, it was swift and merciless.
Variously described as the trembles, the slows, or the illness "under which man turns sick and his domestic animals tremble," milk sickness was a frequent 19th century cause of illness and death throughout much of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Ohio (also Indiana, Illinois and Michigan). It sometimes killed as many as half the people in a particular settlement.
For the past 116 years, a disputed passageway off the Alaskan coast has spurred a war between the two neighboring countries.
There are still a variety of sometimes byzantine laws that govern how and when alcohol can be bought and sold that vary widely state to state.
Flying reindeer? Gifts delivered by a jolly, all-seeing man via chimney? Was someone tripping on mushrooms when they thought up Santa Claus? Well… maybe.
The most futuristic thing about these homes is not "cybernetic" circuitry and electronic gizmos of the technology itself - it's the design sensibility of such decidedly non-high tech elements as wood, copper, and paint.
Howard Scott Warshaw's video game was blamed for single-handedly sinking a multibillion-dollar market. But the true story is more complicated.
In 1989, all of United Airlines Flight 232's hydraulic systems failed, a highly improbable scenario that led to disaster.
Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Ayn Rand, and Rita Moreno were part of a sorority of stars at what amounted to a safe haven for aspiring celebrities.
The tale of the man who found a bomb in an Atlanta park in 1996 fits with the director's late-era work as yet another film that revisits a moment in history — albeit with its mind already made up.
One of Poland's most beloved and honored World War II veterans was not Polish at all: he was a 500-pound brown bear named Wojtek.
An unprecedented project is analysing Rembrandt's masterpiece down to individual chemical elements, to give insight into how the Old Master approached his work
Ever wonder why you can't access the torch of the Statue of Liberty anymore? Historian Coleman Lowndes explains the little-known terror attack in Jersey City in 1916.
From Martin Luther to "The Nutcracker," Germany's original national nightmare was a tangled knot of writhing rats.
Cracking a political joke could land a person in the Gulag — but it could also make life under Stalin more bearable.
Five billion barcodes are scanned each and every day. But how did we get to this point, and who was responsible for the UPC barcode?
The internet's cheerful anarchy has been taken over by ruthless consolidation from Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google.
In 1978, Soviet geologists prospecting in the wilderness of Siberia discovered a family that had never encountered other humans.
How the television producer Konstantin Ernst went from discerning auteur to Putin's unofficial minister of propaganda.
We underestimated the power of fringe believers. Now we're living in the world that QAnon and Pizzagate made.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, AOL's Instant Messenger introduced millions of people to the internet — and the idea that you were always online, even when you were "away."
Deals with Nintendo, Sega, and Microsoft could have dramatically changed the game industry's trajectory
Pine Island seems like strange name for a New York hamlet entirely surrounded by dry land.
Eruption-induced cooling likely exacerbated the "Scottish ills" of the late 1690s.
Nobody is really sure who invented the most famous cocktail from the Big Easy, so how did Sazerac House build a museum around it?
Because that is apparently an opinion you can have.
State laws about pinball, pigs and bumper stickers should be scrapped. Here's why many still aren't.
Heralded as the greatest warship of its time, the Vasa sank within 20 minutes of its maiden voyage. Nearly 400 years later, no-one knows why.
