Every day we’re making history. We just don’t realize it because we’re all caught up in it as it’s happening.
But it’s important to look back from time to time, especially when things seem particularly bleak, just to see how far we’ve come — and maybe how far we haven’t.
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In an unheard of move, Bill Gates put in an appearance at Macworld 1997 to announce he was saving Microsoft’s competitor.
Even though Apple and Microsoft had been engaged in bitter court battles since 1988, Gates agreed to invest $150 million in Apple, which saved the company, and put MS Office and Internet Explorer on Macs.
The Macworld audience booed Gates.
During “The Troubles” in Ireland, marked road hazards included areas where snipers were known to operate.
Snipers were particularly active between 1990 and 1997 in South Armagh , but snipers were responsible for killing as many as 180 British soldiers in Ireland between 1971 and 1991.
On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake spawned a devastating tsunami off the coast of Japan.
Incredibly, two days later, this house was spotted just floating out in the Pacific Ocean.
In 1978, a group of kids playing in some mud discovered what turned out to be a buried Ferrari.
An investigation found that the car had been stolen in 1974 and somehow wrapped in plastic, with towels stuffed into the intakes, and buried, without any of the neighbors noticing.
It’s believed to have been stolen and buried in an insurance scam .
This really makes you appreciate cell phone towers.
The Telefontornet was a tower constructed in Stockholm in 1887 that connected 5,500 telephone lines in the Swedish capital. It was immediately unpopular, and made obsolete by underground cabling by 1913.
What do you do with a massive nuclear test crater? Make it a tourist attraction, of course.
The [Sedan]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test) Crater in Nevada is the largest man-made crater in the U.S., the result of a 104 kiloton underground blast that also has the dubious distinction of being the nuclear test to contaminate more U.S. residents with fallout than any other.
The Sedan blast had nothing on the Mt. Lassen eruption, of course.
The May 22, 1915 eruption near Red Bluff, California, rained volcanic ash down as far as 280 miles away and destroyed three square miles of land around it.
Also in 1915, this cathedral in France is seen packed with sandbags to protect it from explosions.
Notre Dame d’Amiens came under fire in later WWI, but at the urging of Pope Benedict XV, German forces stopped targeting the cathedral.
Before that, several bombs had hit the cathedral, with some failing to explode and having to be removed by hand.
Back before TiVo was even a thing, let alone streaming, a crowd gathered in Times Square to watch the finale of ‘Seinfeld.’
Hard to believe it’s already been 20 years since the show about nothing ended. Also, can you imagine folks doing this for the Game of Thrones finale?
The summer of 1977 was eventful for New York City, and when the power went out on late on July 13, it nearly descended into chaos.
With the Son of Sam murders dominating the headlines and a brutal heatwave in progress, a citywide blackout resulted in widespread looting, vandalism, and arson.
In all, 1,616 stores were damaged and looted, 1.037 fires broke out, and 3,776 arrests were made.
About 40 years earlier, this is what New York’s Central Park looked like.
During the Great Depression, it became the site of a Hooverville, a makeshift camp or shanty town built by the homeless and named after President Herbert Hoover, who was widely blamed for the Depression.
In Central Park, the Hooverville popped up in an area designated for construction of the Great Lawn.
And, amazingly, this is also New York City.
We know it better as the Upper West Side, 84th Street and Broadway, but back in 1879, this was the site of the Brennan farmhouse, which is believed to have been where Edgar Allan Poe wrote his famous poem “The Raven.”
This little girl is part of a human zoo exhibit in Belgium.
As recently as 1958, when Belgium hosted the World Expo , the nation put humans from Africa on display for European audiences, boasting of its colony in Congo.
For the record, Belgium’s King Leopold II was a monster .
These Soviet workers have just completed construction on the “sarcophagus” around Chernobyl’s damaged reactor.
Their banner reads “We will fulfill the government’s order!” The crews working the cleanup at Chernobyl had some of the most dangerous jobs you can imagine — dozens died afterwards.
The workers were rewarded with up to fives times the regular wages and they were allowed to buy a Lada without waiting in line.
Here’s why you don’t make wagers you can’t afford to lose.
The soldiers on the beach here made the foolish bet that the pilots in the air force couldn’t make them “hit the deck.” Pretty safe to say the flyboys won this bet.
Russian cosmonauts once turned a space suit into a satellite.
Known as SuitSat , the cosmonauts basically outfitted the retired suit with a radio transmitter and put it into orbit. It only stayed in orbit for a few months before it came crashing back down to Earth.
The White House once had an indoor pool.
It still sort of does. Originally built for FDR in 1933, the pool became the site of the press briefing room during the Nixon administration. The pool structure is still there, just empty and below the room’s floor.
A photographer managed to capture the last moments before the worst air accident in U.S. history.
In 1979, American Airlines Flight 191 lost an engine after takeoff at O’Hare in Chicago and crashed , claiming 273 lives.
No, this isn’t from the first ‘Purge.’
These kids are actually dressed up in Halloween costumes, circa 1900s. I think Halloween was probably a much more terrifying holiday before the days of cute little cat or pumpkin costumes for children.
Thirty years ago, in June 1989, the Chinese government ended student-led protests for democracy by sending tanks and troops into Tiananmen Square.
This photo of two students on a bicycle hiding out from the tanks above was taken the same day as the famous Tank Man photo.
The last sword duel in history was caught on camera in France in 1967.
This duel was actually between French politicians Gaston Defferre and Rene Ribiere in 1967, after Defferre yelled, “Shut up, stupid!” at Ribiere in the National Assembly. This was how they decided to handle the altercation. Neither men were seriously injured as a result.
Chances are, we all know what happened moments before this photo was snapped.
In their second bout, Mike Tyson bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear, causing the referee to stop the fight. These police officers had to face down an enraged Tyson to separate him from Holyfield.
The first ever selfie, taken in 1839.
This is Robert Cornelius, who produced a daguerreotype of himself that was not only the first ever selfie, but one of the first photographs of a person ever taken at all. The process of taking a picture was incredibly slow, so he had enough time to set it up, run into the shot, stand for a minute or so, and then head back.
Tears of defeat.
This photograph shows a fifteen-year old German soldier, Hans-Georg Henke, who was crying after being captured by the US Army in Germany in 1945.
A picture that’s impossible to recreate.
This is a family of Tasmanian Tigers in 1910. The last living member of this species ever captured was in 1933. These creatures were often considered nuisances and a risk to farm animals, so people were rewarded for hunting them.
Breaking news.
This image captures commuters in New York the day after President Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963. Obviously, no newspaper was going to run with a different lead story.
Not making an appearance at New York Fashion Week anymore.
Hugo Boss was the official designer of Nazi uniforms during the 1930’s and 1940’s. The company has since apologized for its involvement with the Nazi party.
People have always been interested in seeing cute cats.
Even before the Internet, people wanted to find a source for good cat pictures. This is from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 2nd, 1940.
Sometimes, the simplest actions are the most powerful.
The man in this photograph is riding a bus meant for white passengers only in Durban, South Africa to resist and protest apartheid policies in 1986. His face, and the other passengers’ faces, really tell a powerful story.
