40 Archival Photos That Might Change How You See the Past (41 photos)

If any field has benefited most from the invention of photography, it’s history. Photos allow us to look back through time and see events and people exactly as they were. Today, we’ve put together a collection of 40 rare historical photographs that everyone should see at least once.







1961. A German soldier defies direct orders to help a young boy cross the newly erected Berlin Wall so he can reunite with his parents.





Princess Diana shakes hands with an AIDS patient without wearing gloves in 1991, taking a powerful public stand against the stigma surrounding the disease.



A San Francisco police officer reprimands a man for not wearing a mask during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.



1945. Overcome with emotion, Jewish prisoners celebrate moments after being liberated from a death train.



Members of the Dutch resistance celebrate the news of Adolf Hitler’s death in April 1945.



Engineer Margaret Hamilton standing alongside the stacks of handwritten navigation code she and her team developed for the Apollo space program, 1969.



Michelangelo's Statue of David encased in protective brickwork to shield it from bomb damage during World War II.



An American pilot shelters an injured Japanese boy from the rain inside his airplane cockpit during the Battle of Saipan, July 1944.



1914–1915. A Serbian soldier sleeps beside his father, who walked to the frontlines near Belgrade just to visit his son.



Louis Armstrong playing the trumpet for his wife in Egypt, 1961.



Anne Frank’s father, Otto, visits the attic where he and his family hid from the Nazis, 1960. He was the family's sole survivor.



A Black man rides a whites-only bus in protest against South Africa's apartheid regime, 1986.



A young Queen Elizabeth working as an army mechanic during World War II, 1939.



A man arrested for wearing women's clothing steps out of a police wagon in New York, 1939.



Albert Einstein, along with his secretary Helen (left) and stepdaughter Margot (right), receives US citizenship to avoid returning to Nazi Germany, 1940.



Troops returning home at the end of World War II, 1945.



A young Freddie Mercury alongside his mother, 1947.



The execution of young Yugoslav partisan Lepa Radić by the Nazis, 1943. When urged to name her comrades to save her own life, she courageously replied: "You will know them when they come to avenge me."



Frankfurt, 1946. A German soldier returns home only to discover that his family is gone.



November 1918. A Canadian soldier tries to comfort a young Belgian child whose mother was killed in an artillery strike.



May 20, 1910. Nine European monarchs gathered together for a photograph—the first and last time so many sovereigns were captured in one frame.



In the 1960s, heavily intoxicated patrons at Istanbul bars were carried home in custom wicker baskets.



A Buchenwald survivor identifies a Nazi guard known for his extreme cruelty.



November 22, 1944. A French woman joyfully greets an American soldier following the liberation of Strasbourg from German occupation.



September 3, 1967. Traffic chaos in Sweden on "Dagen H," the day the country switched overnight from left-hand to right-hand driving.



At 7 feet 3 inches (221 cm), Jakob Nacken, the tallest soldier in the German army, chats with 5-foot-3 (160 cm) Canadian Corporal Bob Roberts after surrendering near Calais, France, 1944.



18-year-old Keshia Thomas shields a white man from an angry mob during an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in Michigan, USA, 1996.



Into the jaws of death: American troops landing on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944.



Crowds pack Times Square to celebrate Germany's surrender on May 7, 1945.



March 1944. American bombers fly past Mount Vesuvius as it erupts in Italy.



The last known photograph of famed inventor Nikola Tesla, January 1, 1943.



A nurse tends to a sick child during a smallpox outbreak in Wrocław, Poland, 1963.



What commercial passenger airplane cabins looked like in the 1930s.



Soviet citizens look at a memorial wall showing thousands of faces and names of people killed during Stalin's purges, 1988.



George Willig scales the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City, 1977. After successfully conquering the skyscraper, he was fined $1.10 for every floor he climbed.



Portrait of Danish Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen and his wife, fashion illustrator Dagmar Freuchen-Gale, 1947.



Allied soldiers mock Hitler from the balcony of his Reich Chancellery in Berlin, 1945.



Two American teenagers on a diner date, 1950.



Mobsters hide their faces behind their fedoras during Al Capone's trial in 1931.



A nuclear explosion captured just milliseconds after detonation, 1952.