Iconic Photographs

For six months in the summer and fall of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were “de-watered”, as the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a geological survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion. These stark images reveal North America’s iconic – and most powerful – waterfall to be almost as dry as a desert.

Niagara Falls is the collective name for three waterfalls that straddle the international border between Canada and the United States. From largest to smallest, the three waterfalls are the Horseshoe Falls, the American Falls and the Bridal Veil Falls. The Horseshoe Falls lie mostly on the Canadian side and the American Falls entirely on the American side, separated by Goat Island. The smaller Bridal Veil Falls are also on the American side, separated from the other waterfalls by Luna Island.

Blimey what a diversion 

The man who modeled as Uncle Sam poses in front of the iconic poster, 1970.

The term Uncle Sam is reputedly derived from Samuel Wilson, a meat packer from Troy, New York, who supplied rations for the soldiers during the War of 1812. There was a requirement at the time for contractors to stamp their name and where the rations came from onto the food they were sending. Wilson’s packages were labeled “E.A – US”. Although intended to stand for “United States”, this caused some consternation because the more typical abbreviation at the time was “U. States”. Samuel was widely known by friends and business acquaintances as “Uncle Sam” for his genial character and sense of humor. Taking their cue from his reputation and the “U.S.” he stamped on meat casks, army troops began joking that their food came from “Uncle Sam” and calling themselves “Uncle Sam’s soldiers”. After the war, people started to associate “Uncle Sam” with anything related to the U.S. government.

Uncle Sam didn’t get a standard appearance until the well-known “recruitment” image of Uncle Sam was created by James Montgomery Flagg (inspired by a British recruitment poster showing Lord Kitchener in a similar pose). It was this image more than any other that set the appearance of Uncle Sam as the elderly man with white hair and a goatee wearing a white top hat with white stars on a blue band, a blue tail coat and red and white striped trousers.

The iconic Uncle Sam was shown publicly for the first time, according to some, on the cover of the magazine Leslie’s Weekly, on July 6, 1916. The figure in the long-tailed coat, stove pipe hat and sideburns was captioned “What Are You Doing for Preparedness?”. More than four million copies of this image were printed between 1917 and 1918.

Who me

An artist painting a picture of the ruins of the San Francisco earthquake, 1906.

One of the most appalling disasters that has ever been recorded in American history befell San Francisco in 1906, when an earthquake struck the California city on the early morning of April 18th. Modern analysis estimates it registered 8.25 on the Richter scale. The events are remembered as one of the worst and deadliest natural disasters in the history of the United States.

The greatest destruction came from the fires the quake ignited. The earthquake ruptured the gas mains even as it allowed ignition accidents in various ways from the hundreds of open flames being used for lighting and cooking. The wooden buildings caught fire easily, and the water mains damaged by the quake were useless for firefighting.

The fires ravaged the city for three days before burning themselves out. The maelstrom destroyed 490 city blocks, a total of 25,000 buildings and made over 250,000 homeless. At the time only 478 deaths were reported, a figure concocted by government officials who felt that reporting the true death toll would hurt real estate prices and efforts to rebuild the city. This figure has been revised to today’s conservative estimate of over 3,000 people. Property estimated to the amount of $400,000,000 was destroyed. Buildings, in some cases with people still in them, were dynamited, while military rule was enforced about the streets, looters being shot on sight.

Would you sit there

No hard hat either    x

The Trinity explosion 0.016 seconds after detonation, 1945.

On July 16, 1945, the United States became the first country to successfully detonate an atomic weapon, signalling the beginning of a new era in warfare and in politics. In the early 1940s, the U.S. government authorized a top-secret program of nuclear testing and development, codenamed “The Manhattan Project”. Its goal was the development of the world’s first atomic bomb. Much of the research and development for the project occurred at a facility built in Los Alamos, New Mexico. In July 1945, Los Alamos scientists successfully exploded the first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site, located in nearby Alamogordo.

The code name “Trinity” was assigned by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, inspired by the poetry of John Donne. The test was of an implosion-design plutonium device, informally nicknamed “The Gadget”, of the same design as the Fat Man bomb later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. The complexity of the design required a major effort from the Los Alamos Laboratory, and concerns about whether it would work led to a decision to conduct the first nuclear test.



The evolution of the Trinity fireball over the first 9 seconds, with the Empire State Building for scale. Image by Alex Wellerstein.

Execution of the Lincoln conspirators, 1865.

This set of pictures from 1865 showing the hanging execution of the four Lincoln conspirators: David Herold, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt and Mary Surratt. Their deaths were a culmination of sorts of a nation ravaged by war, bitter conflict, and the death of the nation’s commander-in-chief, Abraham Lincoln. Scottish photographer Alexander Gardner captured the macabre scene, including pictures of the condemned seen moments before they walked to the 12-foot gallows, specially constructed for the executions. It was hot that day, reportedly a hundred degrees (38 degree Celsius). Sweat surely dripped down the accused’s faces as they passed by the cheap pine coffins and shallow graves that had been dug for them.

After the Lincoln assassination the government arrested several hundred people. Most were soon released due to lack of evidence. However, the government did charge eight people with conspiracy. On May 1, 1865, President Andrew Johnson ordered the formation of a military commission to try the accused persons. The actual trial began on May 10th and lasted for about seven weeks. The defendants were allowed to have lawyers and witnesses, but they were not allowed to testify themselves.



David Herold — An impressionable and dull-witted pharmacy clerk, Herold accompanied Booth to the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set Booth’s injured leg. The two men then continued their escape through Maryland and into Virginia, and Herold remained with Booth until the authorities cornered them in a barn. Herold surrendered but Booth was shot and died a few hours later.

Lewis Powell — Powell was a former Confederate prisoner of war. Tall and strong, he was recruited to provide the muscle for the kidnapping plot. When that plan failed, Booth assigned Powell to kill Secretary of State William Seward. He entered the Seward home and severely injured Seward, Seward’s son, and a bodyguard.

Mary Surratt — Surratt owned a boarding house in Washington where the conspirators met. Sentenced to death, she was hanged, becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.

George Azterodt — German-born Azterodt was a carriage painter and boatman who had secretly ferried Confederate spies across Southern Maryland waterways during the war. Recruited by Booth into the conspiracy, he was assigned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson, but lost his nerve and stayed in a hotel bar, drinking, instead.





Over the years, critics have attacked the verdicts, sentences, and procedures of the 1865 Military Commission. These critics have called the sentences unduly harsh, and criticized the rule allowing the death penalty to be imposed with a two-thirds vote of Commission members. The hanging of Mary Surratt, the first woman ever executed by the United States, has been a particular focus of criticism. Critics also have complained about the standard of proof, the lack of opportunity for defense counsel to adequately prepare for the trial, the withholding of potentially exculpatory evidence, and the Commission’s rule forbidding the prisoners from testifying on their own behalf.

Guardian Angels on the NYC subway, 1980.

Guardian Angels first made an appearance on the New York subway in 1979 in an attempt to quell rising levels of violence. As in all of New York, crime was rampant in the subway in the 1970s. Thefts, robberies, shootings and killings became more frequent. The subway cars were very often graffiti-painted or vandalism-damaged both inside and outside.

As the New York City Police Department was completely overwhelmed, the public reacted with unease, and the subway was deliberately avoided. Around 1980, the reliability of the vehicles was a tenth of their reliability in the 1960s, and 40 percent of the network required speed restrictions.

The subway system became New York’s most ravaged symbol of urban decay, deemed un-patrollable and unsafe even for the most street savvy commuter. In 1979, a group of angered residents led by Curtis Sliwa began taking crime prevention into their own hands, donning red berets – looking very much like a gang and calling themselves the Guardian Angels. Their membership was mostly young men, black and Latino, who had eschewed gang life in their own neighborhoods to better their city. They were identified by their red berets and red jackets or white T-shirts with the red Guardian Angels logo of an eye inside a pyramid on a winged shield. While their presence was oftentimes flamboyant, many New Yorkers grew to feel relieved to see the muscle-y red-beret-wearing youths when boarding the train at night. Soon the Angels, over 500 in total, were out patrolling the city streets, their training and audacity standing in for actual civic authority.



Guardian Angles had a really interesting system of checking to see whether there was a problem in a particular train car. When the train would stop at a station, each member would pop their heads out of the open subway door and if they noticed that one of the doors was unattended, it meant someone needed backup.

The picture was taken by photographer Bruce Davidson who recalls the atmosphere of fear and dread that attended his daily journeys underground into the New York subway system in the early 1980s:

“As I went down the subway stairs, through the turnstile, and on to the darkened station platform, a sense of fear gripped me. I grew alert, and looked around to see who might be standing by, waiting to attack. The subway was dangerous at any time of the day or night … Passengers on the platform looked at me, with my expensive camera around my neck, in a way that made me feel like a tourist – or a deranged person.”

It was not until the 1990s that the crime in the city and its subway declined significantly and the Guardians Angels became no longer necessary.

Mmm

I remember they came over to UK for a while and started patrolling the tube...at least I think I remember!

Big job now to kick out all the undesirables, almost impossible, let see how far Trump gets,

A KKK child and a black State Trooper meet each other, 1992.

The Trooper is black. Standing in front of him and touching his shield is a curious little boy dressed in a KKK hood and robe. In this picture innocence is mixed with hate, the irony of a black man protecting the right of white people to assemble in protest against him.

The Ku Klux Klan was holding a rally in the northeast Georgia community of Gainesville, where the white supremacist group hoped to breathe some life into its flagging revival campaign of the late 1980s and earl 1990s. Assigned as a backup photographer for the local daily, The Gainesville Times, was Todd Robertson. At the Klan rally, there wasn’t a tremendous amount of action for Robertson to record. According to news reports from the day, there were 66 KKK representatives, encircled by three times as many law enforcement personnel. The downtown square was otherwise empty, with about 100 observers at the fringe, mostly there to demonstrate against the Klan.

The white supremacists were out-of-towners with no real local support in Gainesville. Many people who came to these Klan events were not from the city. While reporters and the staff photographer focused on the speakers at the rally and watched for potential signs of conflict, Robertson chose to follow a mother and her two young boys, dressed in white robes and the KKK’s iconic pointy hats.

One of the boys approached a black state trooper, who was holding his riot shield on the ground. Seeing his reflection, the boy reached for the shield, and Robertson snapped the photo. Almost immediately, the mother swooped in and took away the toddler, whom she identified to Robertson as “Josh”. The moment was fleeting, and almost no one noticed it, but Robertson had captured it on film.

"Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the bigot"...



Glad I ain't that way inclined,,, I just shoot all of them religious twats, feckin troublemakers the lot of them...

Thats funny, my kids hate muslims too.

Bison skulls to be used for fertilizer, 1870.

Bison were hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century and were reduced to a few hundred by the mid-1880s. They were hunted for their skins, with the rest of the animal left behind to decay on the ground. Hides were prepared and shipped to the east and Europe (mainly Germany) for processing into leather. Homesteaders collected bones from carcasses left by hunters. Bison bones were used in refining sugar, and in making fertilizer and fine bone china. Bison bones price was from $2.50 to $15.00 a ton.

When modern Europeans arrived in North America, an estimated 50 million bison inhabited the continent. After the great slaughter of American bison during the 1800s, the number of bison remaining alive in North America declined to as low as 541. During that period, a handful of ranchers gathered remnants of the existing herds to save the species from extinction.

By the 1830s the Comanche and their allies on the southern plains were killing about 280,000 bison a year, which was near the limit of sustainability for that region. Firearms and horses, along with a growing export market for buffalo robes and bison meat had resulted in larger and larger numbers of bison killed each year.

The railroad industry also wanted bison herds culled or eliminated. Herds of bison on tracks could damage locomotives when the trains failed to stop in time. Herds often took shelter in the artificial cuts formed by the grade of the track winding though hills and mountains in harsh winter conditions. As a result, bison herds could delay a train for days, or potentially wrecking the engine. The railroads would hire marksmen to ride their trains and just shoot the bison as the train went by.
The US Army sanctioned and actively endorsed the wholesale slaughter of bison herds. The federal government promoted bison hunting for various reasons, to allow ranchers to range their cattle without competition from other bovines, and to weaken the North American Indian population. The US government even paid a bounty for each bison skull recovered. Military commanders were ordering their troops to kill bison — not for food, but to deny Native Americans their own source of food. One general believed that bison hunters “did more to defeat the Indian nations in a few years than soldiers did in 50 years”. By 1880, the slaughter was almost over. Where millions of bison once roamed, only a few thousand animals remained.

Thats a lot of Bison

Another extinct Bison...

Engine had no cylinder head, therefore no head gasket problems,,, problem it did have some eejit decided to put timing gears at the rear of the engine so the gearbox was bolted to the timing case, problem was timing case was bolted to the block with a few poxy little bolts that couldn't support the weight of the bell housing/gearbox so it all fell to bits with the timing gears mincing the shit out of the timing case...

The marine and the kitten, Korean War, 1952.

In the middle of the Korean War, this kitten found herself an orphan. Luckily, she found her way into the hands of Marine Sergeant Frank Praytor. He adopted the two-week-old kitten and gave her the name “Miss Hap” because, he explained, “she was born at the wrong place at the wrong time”. There’s a juxtaposition between the soldier and the human. He’s dressed for war but hasn’t lost the ability to care for another living creature.

In the photograph, Praytor is seen leaning against sandbags with a pistol holstered to his hip and his helmet resting on his knee. In his left hand he holds a kitten, nursing it delicately with a medicine dropper. Praytor wrote that the kitten was one of two who were orphaned after a solider shot their mother for “yeowling”. The marine who adopted the other kitten killed it after rolling over on it in his sleep.

But Praytor’s kitten survived. He fed her on meat from ration cans. After Praytor left her to return home, she became something of a mascot for the company’s public information office. Praytor believed another marine, corporal Conrad Fisher, eventually adopted her, and brought her home to the United States.

The lengths some people will go to over a bit pussy...

In 1962 at Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs. A friend of Marilyn’s is quoted as saying:

Later, once the rumor mill was grinding, Marilyn told me that this night in March was the only time of her “affair” with JFK. Of course she was titillated beyond belief, because for a year he had been trying, through Lawford, to have an evening with her. A great many people thought, after that weekend, that there was more to it. But Marilyn gave me the impression that it was not a major event for either of them: it happened once, that weekend, and that was that.

The next and last time Marilyn Monroe crossed paths with JFK was at Kennedy’s 45th birthday party at Madison Square Garden. The knowledge that Monroe and JFK had already had a one-night stand by this point makes the sensuality she brought to her performance of Happy Birthday, Mr. President even more palpable.

The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, 1930.

On a hot August night in 1930 a crowd gathered in front of an Indiana jail — men, women, and children shouting and jeering, demanding that the sheriff release his three prisoners. Three African-American teenagers: Tom Shipp, Abe Smith, and James Cameron — huddled inside their cells, charged with the murder of a white man and the rape of white woman.

Some among the thousands of people in front of the jail formed a mob. They beat down the jail doors, pulled the three youths from their cells, brutally beat them, and dragged them to a tree on the courthouse square. At the last minute the mob spared Cameron, the youngest and most boyish of the trio. Smith and Shipp died, lynch ropes around their necks, their bodies hanging as the town photographer captured one of the most famous lynching photographs in American history. They weren’t even hung properly. They had a noose put around their neck and were then pulled up into the tree. And one of them tried to get free so they hauled him down, broke his arms and hauled him back up again.

The corpses hung in the square for hours, attracting crowds of gawkers — including the photographer Lawrence Beitler who was able to snap this picture. The photo sold thousands of copies, which Beitler stayed up for 10 days and nights printing them.

The third person 16-year-old James Cameron, narrowly escaped lynching thanks to an unidentified participant who announced that he had nothing to do with the rape or murder. Cameron was moved out of town, convicted as an accessory to the murder and served four years in jail. After the lynching, Cameron became a very devout man and vividly describes this day in his autobiographical account “A Time of Terror”. He became an anti-lynching activist in Indiana and, later, Wisconsin — where he founded a Black Holocaust Museum. He believed that the voice that came from the crowd to save him was the voice of an angel. Cameron died on June 11, 2006, at the age of 92.