10 Amazing Historical Photos
History Is Often Challenging And Should Be
As a historian, I have always been fascinated by primary historical documents such as journals, diaries, letters, artwork, and architecture—political, church, personal records, as well as photography over the last two hundred years. These ten amazing historical images each tell a story as straightforward or as complex as you want to see. They indicate a moment in time and also how the world as we experience it has changed with time.
Mokomokai: Heads Of The Māori
The native Māori people of New Zealand preserved the severed heads of the fallen. Known as mokomokai, the heads were chopped off, boiled, smoked, dried in the Sun, and dipped in shark oil.
When the British moved in during the 1840s, they plundered the mokomokai. Major General Horatio Gordon Robley (1840–1930) served in the British Army during the New Zealand Land Wars in the 1860s and stole 35 heads for himself. Outrageous today, obviously not back then.
Postmortem Portraits
Children's life expectancies in Victorian England were extremely low due to disease and lack of medical treatment. And because the relatively new use of photography was costly, most people could never get their portraits taken.
However, for some, when young children passed away, their parents often dressed them in their best clothes for their first and last portrait, creating strange lifelike images of their children who had already died.
Children For Sale
This photo from 1948 illustrates how much poverty can destroy a family. The Chalifoux family faced eviction from their Chicago apartment and desperately needed money. And so, the unemployed coal truck driver and his wife choice to sell their children.
Members of the Chalifoux family claimed the mother was paid to stage the image. However, the children were sold to different homes within two years.
The children — Lana (six, top left), Rae (five, top right), Milton (four, bottom left), and Sue Ellen (two, bottom right) — were sadly later found to have been abused by their new families.
Time Magazine and "The Most Beautiful Suicide"
On May 1, 1947, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale jumped to her death from the 86th-floor observation deck of New York's Empire State Building and landed on top of a United Nations limousine, where this dramatic photograph was immediately taken.
The photograph became famous worldwide as Time magazine printed the photo and called it "the most beautiful suicide." Much later, Andy Warhol used it in one of his prints, Suicide (Fallen Body).
Sadly her motive for jumping is a mystery. Evelyn McHale was described as a happy young woman who was only a month away from her wedding.
John Wayne Gacy As A Child
American serial killer, John Wayne Gacy, was caught in 1978. He had raped, tortured, and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and men in his Illinois home.
Before his murderous spree, John Wayne Gacy was just a boy. However, knowing today what was to come years later makes it a scary image. Little children playing cowboys or cops can turn out to be serial killers. Thankfully, only rarely.
Jack The Ripper and His Last Victim
The last victim of serial killer Jack the Ripper was Mary Jane Kelly. Mary was murdered and mutilated on November 9, 1888. A rent collector found Kelly on a bed with assorted body parts and organs cut out and placed beside her corpse.
Mary Jane Kelly was far more mutilated than any of the other four victims in the London Whitechapel and Spitalfields districts. Behind the closed door, Jack the Ripper had nearly two hours to carve up her body before sneaking away, never to be caught or even heard from again.
A World War I Shell-Shocked Soldier
Soldiers of World War I were largely left to fight their own mental health battles. Now known as post-traumatic stress disorder or combat stress reaction, experts and doctors did not understand the psychological trauma that war could cause at that time. Shell shock was a term from World War I (British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers) to describe many soldiers' trauma. It was a reaction to the intensity of the bombardment and fighting that caused deep feelings of helplessness, appearing as panic and being scared, flight, or an inability to reason, sleep, walk or talk.
This well-known and sad historical image of a shell-shocked soldier starkly highlights the horror of war. Taken in September 1916, this photograph was taken two years before World War I ended. Eventually, countless other men would suffer the same fate.
The Deliberate Slaughter Of The American "Buffalo"
Before European settlers arrived on the North American continent, at least 30 million buffalo roamed the land. Between 1800 and 1900, that number was reduced to around 325!
This disturbing historical photo from 1892 shows a mountain of Buffalo skulls waiting to be ground down for uses such as refining sugar, producing fertilizer, and making bone china. More disturbing is that the U.S. government purposefully slaughtered some buffalo to deprive Native Americans of this crucial natural resource. As the transcontinental railroad was built across the USA and completed in 1869, the lives of the native peoples were to change forever. As the buffalo died, so, indeed, did the Native Americans.
Inside A Mental Institution In 1900
Few old photos are more disturbing than those captured inside mental institutions decades ago.
The photograph shows one of the countless patients restrained in a French mental institution in 1900. It's unclear what condition this patient suffered from. At that time, people were committed to institutions for depression, shell shock, schizophrenia, and learning disabilities.
With the abuses of patients like this one happening behind closed doors, we'll never know the extent of the trauma these people suffered. Only 50 years before my birth, mental health issues and challenges were dealt with this way.
The Columbine Massacre Foretold
The Columbine High School shooting on April 20, 1999, left all of the USA in shock after teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold massacred 12 of their classmates and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves.
Perhaps the most unsettling photograph uncovered in the wake of the shooting was this class photo taken just a few weeks before the massacre. A typical high school photo? But take a closer look at the top left corner, and you will see the two shooters posing their hands like guns and pointing them at the camera.
© Stephen G. Arrowsmith 2022
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