1.
This is San Francisco’s Cliff House, a beautiful Victorian building perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean, built in the late 1890s, it would stand for only ten years:
2.
Just a few short years after construction was completed, the house burned down in 1907:
3.
However, the house was rebuilt in a different style, and this is what it looks like today:
4.
Speaking of bad things that happened in California, the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 was the deadliest earthquake in US history, resulting in the deaths of over 3,000 people. In the aftermath of the disaster, you could literally see where the Earth split along the San Andreas Fault:
5.
This is what the San Francisco Ferry Building and Marketplace looked like after the 1906 earthquake, and here is what it looks like 100 years later:
6.
In 1972, a plane flying from Detroit to Miami was hijacked by five members of the Black Liberation Army who intended to fly it overseas. This photo shows an airport worker in his underwar delivering one million dollars in ransom money to the plane:
7.
Here’s a very relaxing photo from the 1955 Transantarctic Expedition, showing a Snowcat vehicle hanging precariously over a chasm:
8.
This is a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, pictured 50 years later as an old man wearing his full sergeant’s uniform:
9.
In 1915, Ernest Shackleton’s Transantarctic Expedition ship, the Endurance, was trapped in ice for a total of 10 months. This is a picture of the doomed ship and what I assume was a very, very cold day:
10.
Here’s a picture of the trapped sailors playing soccer on the ice floe while waiting for the ice to melt:
11.
This week marks the 84 year anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This photo shows the Japanese perspective of Pearl Harbor from an attacking plane during the surprise attack on December 7, 1941:
12.
Here’s another photo taken from the Japanese perspective:
13.
This is the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay the day Japan formally surrendered aboard the ship four years later on September 2, 1945:
14.
Here’s the scene aboard the ship featuring the Japanese representatives:
15.
And here’s President Truman looking quite happy holding the Japanese documents of surrender:
16.
Speaking of Truman, here are Presidents Kennedy, Truman, and Eisenhower at Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral in 1962, with a bonus Lyndon B. Johnson visible in the background:
17.
This is an absolutely unhinged, wild party scene from Daytona Beach in 1898:
18.
Here’s another photo of an absolutely WILD day on Daytona Beach from 1904:
19.
Way back in the 1920s, dentists used FOOT-powered drills to perform dental work. Here’s a look at that extremely relaxing setup:
20.
When the wreck of the Titanic was first discovered in 1985, researchers found rows of neatly stacked plates scattered across the ocean floor in the debris field:
21.
Here’s a man poseing inside the hollowed-out base of a massive tree in California around the turn of the century:
22.
And here’s another picture of a whole bunch of people posing with a gigantic sequoia tree they unfortunately chopped down:
23.
This is Danish clothier Christian Troelstrup and the building he covered with over a thousand coats to attract buyers:
24.
This magnificent picture shows an American supply plane flying over the Great Pyramid in Egypt during World War II:
25.
This is an ad for “the magic mineral” asbestos from the 1960s:
26.
This, in all its glory, is a meeting of the Swansea Cycling Club of Toronto around 1901:
27.
In other questionable history news, there was a time when people tried to make zebras the new horses and it looked like this:
Here’s another picture of a zebra taking on a horse’s job:
28.
This is the scene from a Boston billiards club featuring a whole bunch of newsboys playing pool:
29.
This is Lois Delander, Miss America 1927:
30.
In 1915 the SS Eastwood capsized while still docked in the Chicago River, drowning 844 people. Here is the ship shortly after:
31.
These men are sleeping at the Four Penny Coffin, one of London’s earliest homeless shelters, where visitors were given a tiny wooden coffin to sleep in for the night:
32.
Pictured here are hundreds of prospectors making their way up the Chilkoot Trail in hopes of finding gold in Canada’s Yukon Territory:
33.
Here’s a young enterprising fellow and the wooden bicycle he built:
34.
Speaking once again of magnificent things that burnt down, this is the former Forestry Building in Portland, Oregon, built in 1905 for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Celebration:
35.
Finally, let’s turn to some VERY recent history. This is a picture of Mars that was taken TODAY:
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