History is more than just innovations and triumphs. In truth, much of it involves numerous instances of brutality, warfare, and other unsettling, regrettable realities.
Take a look below at some of the most haunting moments from history.


Joseph Goebbels glares at Jewish photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1933.

Anne Frank’s father Otto, revists the attic where he and his family hid.

Che Guevara’s last moments. Bolivia, 9 October 1967.

Replica dog tags of every soldier who never made it back from Vietnam.

People on display at the Coney Island Human Zoo in 1904.

A father looks for his two missing sons during the Kosovo war in 1999. He would later find them.

The survivors the 1972 Andes plane crash.

The last photo ever of Nikola Tesla, 1943

Segregationists harass 6 year old Ruby Bridges with a doll in a coffin.

Windows on the World, the restaurant on top of the WTC North Center, 1976.

Shells from an Allied bombardment all fired in a single day on German lines in 1916

Women and girls using Radium paint, not knowing the health issues that would soon follow. 1922.

The Gadget, the first atomic bomb, 1945

Temporary NYPD headquarters at a Burger King, September 11, 2001.

Pyramid of WWI German helmets in New York, 1919.
Austro-Hungarian trench raiders near Caporetto, 1917.
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The Imprint of a Mitsubishi kamikaze Zero along the side of H.M.S Sussex. 1945.
Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic from Nirvana at Kurt Cobain’s funeral. Seattle, Washington (1994)
The temporary grave of Theodore Roosevelt Jr. in Normandy, July 1944.
Coal miner waiting to get into the communal shower at the end of his shift, taken in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, 1958. by photographer Max Scheler.
Kids work in a factory. Photo by Lewis Hines.