It is a bit surreal to think that while we can’t physically experience history because we’re born in a particular place and time, the power of technology has empowered us to see it, understand it, and make conclusions from it.
Historical Capsule is a dedicated community that pretty much empowers people to do just that. Join us as we take a journey through time in this listicle of iconic historical photos below.
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100,000 Iranian Women March Against The Hijab Law, Tehran, 1979
In 1979 Muslim fundamentalists overthrew the secular monarchy of Iran and the new Theocrats immediately began dehumanizing and subjugating women. I hope anyone in the USA who reads this is taking notes because it might be happening here in 2025.
Elizabeth Eckford Ignores The Screams Of Students On Her First Day Integrated Into A Little Rock High School, 1957
Two Little Kids Dancing On The Streets Of New York City, C. 1940
So, Historical Capsule is a subreddit that’s a “step into the past”. It’s an online depository for old and vintage photographs that tell stories from significant events and moments in history.
The subreddit is home to 50,000 members, being ranked in the top 3%, and encourages open discussion and celebration of all things history.
Anne Frank’s Father Otto, Revisiting The Attic Where They Hid From The Nazis. He Was The Only Surviving Family Member
Ruby Bridges, The First African-American To Attend A White Elementary School In The Deep South, 1960
This is literally what flipped the South from Dixicrats to Republicans. Never forget that the GOP was (and still is) for apartheid.
A Former Slave Named Gordon Shows His Whipping Scars. Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863
One of the most hauntingly powerful photos I’ve ever seen regarding slavery.
It is. I've seen this many times, and it never becomes less horrifying.
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Ron Desantis: "here is a man ungrateful for all the experice he got learning new skills." Florida is a joke and a cancer to all Americans.
Okay so maybe not Florida in general but DESANTIS. Desantis can go die in a hole. UNGRATEFUL???? He was TORTURED AND ABUSED, you sick little bastard.
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It was beyond hatred. It was white people dehumanizing black people. Anyone who tries to tell you the Civil War was about states rights and not ownership of other humans for the sake of free labor and the commodification of those humans is full of shïț.
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I had a co-worker who firmly believed that slaves were happy & treated like family because - I kid you not - that's how they were portrayed in "Gone with the Wind." I showed her this photo and she still wasn't convinced.
I'd have happily shown her the whipping scene from Roots. The original was bad enough, the remake, I could barely watch.
Load More Replies... Anyone who says slavery was not that bad (looking at you Kanye, who believes slavery was a choice) and the idiot that posted on social media way more people died in 9/11 than in slavery, should be forced to take an awareness class that presents photos like these
I thought that too. Not only the pain during the process but now a lifetime of it. Terrible.
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This is so utterly horrific. I would love for people who try to whitewash slavery to personally experience what this man and countless others experienced.
My nephew suggested that there should be a vote, and those who vote in favour of enslavement... ok, congratulations, meet your new owner. He was like 14 at the time. I thought that was pretty clever. I know it's not realistic, but I thought it was clever.
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The common belief among smugglers and captors and imprisoners of human beings was that Africans were not really human... they were more like livestock that walked on two legs in their minds. Yes, it's a revolting notion. They did not consider them to have the complexity of thought and emotion, and remember this was also a time where few people objected to cruelty to animals. Those attitudes in combination lead to... this. A human being brutalized, generations of trauma passed down, ingrained in DNA.
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Anyone who can look at this and attempt to propose slavery wasn't beyond horrible is themselves horrible - Ron Desantis, I'm talking about you.
Just terrible. Slight thankfulness Gordon lived long enough to be a "former"slave. "Slight" bc it still does not make up for the horror of this picture and what he and many others experienced. I hope you ended up having the happiest life, Gordon.
A quote from Elizabeth Freeman, also known as "Mumbet", who won her freedom in a legal case. "Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God's Earth a free woman—I would." The trauma has certainly been passed down through generations, but most of what I've read from that first generations, the ones born enslaved and died free... the joy of freedom was immense, even if their lives were difficult. It doesn't make up for what happened at all... but I am glad that many experienced that joy they never thought they would. That's... something.
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But he learned valuable skills as a slave, right? Useful training? Kinda like college? Smdh. This is horrible. Absolutely horrible.
It enrages me when they justify kidnapping and enslaving human beings by saying things like "well, they got to become Christian," or "they learned a trade!" I've read every slavery and neo-slavery narrative I could get my hands on. NOBODY was content to be held captive, even if they learned a trade or slept in a decent bed in the Big House. They all wanted to be free.
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Hey Lisa Myers, since you love the idea of living in a time period like the 1800s and early 1900s , maybe you should get off the internet, and stop spreading your hateful b******t. <3
Disgusting. I'll never understand how someone could do this to another person. It's evil.
I cannot fathom what this man possibly could have done to warrant such barbarous punishment!?!
Being black. That was the only reason that someone did that to him. If he was white we wouldn’t see those scars, but he was black and, like many, was treated with an inhumane level of cruelty
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Southern states still want to do this to anyone not white or Christian. Evil!!!
One the MAGA virus doesn't want talked about in schools, because it might upset their white students.
The capability of someone to inflict such pain and poison...I don't have adequate words for that.
That poor man, especially as the physical scars only show half of the story, it's an upsetting picture to look at, however, for me personally, it's the first time I've seen a picture even remotely close to showing the horrors....
Oh My God - this should be higher. How can a person justify doing this to someone else?
And now Republicans are saying that slaves were treated well most of the time but because they were fed and housed we should try to get back to this? Wtf? Is this what MAGAt's mean when they say make America great again let's go back to before Jim Crow?
This is what I don’t understand. They get so bent out of shape when people recoil at “Make America Great Again”, with seemingly no ability whatsoever to understand that their version of “great” was not so great for so many others. Still isn’t.
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I managed to get a scab across my back about the width of one whip strike. It's awful. You can't sit comfortably anywhere and forget about good sleep. Every breath pulls on the wound. I can't imagine living with what this man endured or not spending every last breath trying to kill the people responsible.
This is not a picture that will change my view. Instead, it reassures my view of "slavery is bad, torture is bad, never treat people as lesser than you even if you don't agree with their lifestyle and choices"
The lasting evidence of things like this and those girls trying to go to school amidst jeering, hateful crowds of people, are why Republicans don't want real history taught in schools. Some of the hateful people trying to keep those girls from going to school are still alive. Can't have the family seeing Grandma, Grandad and possibly their own parents behaving like this. Can't have the children asking questions about whether their family owned slaves
I hope his next life is much better than this one, and those who did this to him pay in their next life.
Freddy's sister: see posts above and below! JFC
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"Oh Sethe, you have a cherry tree growing on your back." (Toni Morrison, Beloved) (I don't remember the correct wording...)
Shameful. The people who did this will pay in the afterlife, to be sure. And that's eternal, never ending.
I will never ever understand how humans could do this to other humans! God help us!!
That is truly horrific. May the perpetrator/s ROT IN HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY.
Oh s**t! How can one human being inflict such horror and pain on another!? I hope the parson responsible for this is rotting and suffering in hell!
Shame to those people who thought this was acceptable to any human being . Good they too are now all dead.
Why, to the best of my knowledge, has no one ever admitted that slavery and the genocide of Native Americans were fundamentally the precursors of nazism ?!?
READ Twelve Years a slave. It is a real eye opener. When that plantation owner got a new slave, they were set to picking cotton, someone behind them whipping them the whole time. After that first day, they were expected to pick at least that amount of cotton every day or they were whipped.
And to think, the beating and scars were not enough, they would add salt water to the wounds to make them larger more pronounced
Especially the turds that say that slavery also good aspects had, need to look at this photo.
This is so terrible, how could anyone treat another human being like this.
He was freed by WHITE UNION TROOPS of Gen. Benjamin Butler. My great grandfather was among them.
It's sickening that someone would do that to another human being...
They were not Christians. They were people who claimed to be Christians, but they did not follow the teachings of Christ.
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On the surface, history might sound like a dull and boring discipline. However, if you dig deeper into what it’s all about, you begin to understand just how much essence it has and how much it has to offer in general.
After all, history might be something that’s all about the past, but you’d be surprised just how transformative it might be.
Lonnie Johnson, Inventor Of Super Soaker, 1992
A Lesbian Couple In Semi-Drag Wedding Attire. Kingdom Of Hungary, Budapest, 1920
Following A 23-Hour (Successful) Heart Transplant, Dr. Religa Keeps An Eye On His Patient's Vital Signs. In The Corner, His Assistant Is Sleeping, 1987
The patient lived for 30 more years and outlived the doctor by 8 years. After retiring from active practice, Religa went on to become a politician. He was a good man.
History professor Mary Jo Festle wrote a piece on how history as a discipline transforms students. In it, she explained that since there isn’t realistically any empirical evidence of this hypothesis, she took it upon herself to figure it out.
She asked nearly 60 of her students across 8 different sections of the small research seminars they hosted to give open-ended responses to prompts reflecting upon the change.
Reporters Who Exposed The Watergate Scandal Watch President Nixon Resign, 1974
Woodward and Bernstein. They did an amazing thing. A very corrupt man was elected to the highest office in the land and they, using nothing more than information, took him down.
While Cleaning Up From The World Trade Centers Falling, Crews Found A Shipwreck 7ft Below The Foundation That Dated Back To 1773
A Blind Muslim Named Muhammad Carrying His Best Friend A Paralyzed Christian Who Suffers From Dwarfism Named Samir, Damascus, Ottoman Syria, 1889
If I've learned anything from science fiction movies, it's to make sure these guys are on your side.
One of the main prompts was asking students to describe how their understanding of what history is changed during their studies.
A third of the students provided some form of “I now understand history is not just facts about names, dates, or a chronology of events.”
Remember That Photo Of The Construction Workers Having Lunch On The Unfinished Empire State Building? Well Here's The Photographer Charles Ebbets Taking That Photo, 1932
A Man Browsing For Books In Cincinnati's Cavernous Old Main Library. The Library Was Demolished In 1955
George Mclaurin, The First Black Man To Be Admitted To The University Of Oklahoma In 1948, Was Forced To Sit In A Corner Away From His Classmates
The answers verified the idea that the interpretive nature of history is a crucial lesson that can be considered a threshold concept.
One student elaborated that they realized how much power historians actually have, i.e. the power to construct the past. History is dynamic and a point of debate as a lot of the unknown in it can be argued.
A Father Looking For His Two Missing Sons That Went Missing During The Kosovo War In 1999
A Starving Boy And A Missionary In Uganda, 1980. Mike Wells Took This Powerful Photograph Of A Catholic Missionary Holding The Hand Of A Starving Ugandan Boy
Sharpshooter Annie Oakley Shooting Over Her Shoulder Using A Hand Mirror, Circa 1899
She has said: When men make shots similar to mine, others call it skill. Every time I do it, they call it luck.
Another point to mention is that students didn’t see themselves as books full of facts and figures in history. It’s these same activities of interpreting and analyzing sources, conducting research, looking for influences and biases and challenging what has been read from a critical, multifaceted standpoint, that makes all the difference in the discipline.
Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis: The Last Known Survivor Of The Atlantic Slave Trade Between Africa And North America. (Photo From The Early 1900s)
A Skateboarder Zipping Through Central Park In The 1960s
A 1912 Photo Shows A Woman Plugging In Her Electric Car
Another student pointed out that, before their studies, they enjoyed watching documentaries and furthering their knowledge that way. After them, however, it was an eye-opening experience to understand that they can now discover history for themselves, see how the evidence works and the puzzle pieces fall into place. There’s more of a hands-on approach than meets the eye.
A Filipino-American Family Posing For A Family Portrait, Philippines, 1912
Back when The Philippines were still an American Colony BTW. Just adding some context.
Allied Soldiers Mock Hitler Atop His Balcony At The Reich Chancellery, 1945
Too bad they never caught him or Gobels alive. An easy death was to good for them.
Joseph Goebbels, The Main Propagandist Of The Nazi Regime, Upon Finding Out His Photographer Was Jewish
If anything, the mini study concluded that in 70% of all cases, history topics were personally challenging in terms of values and assumptions about the world. Among these were themes and topics like gender and sexuality, religious history, the Holocaust as well as Nazism. A number of them touched upon issues of race and foreign policy, civil war and ideology.
Greenpeace Tries To Stop Radioactive Waste From Being Dumped In The Ocean, 1982
Rat Pack At The Sands In Las Vegas, Circa 1960
They're all gone. The Sands is gone. The Venetian stands there now.
A Chinese Lady Whose Feet Were Bound From Childhood. Photo From The Late 1800s
This ultimately led to some openly expressing how challenging topics have made them better human beings. One pointed out how Islam studies brought to light racist assumptions. Another changed their opinion on same sex marriage after investigating sources from LGBTQIA+ people. It gave them perspective. Perspective that made them rethink what they thought before.
An Unemployed Man Holding A Troubling Sign During The Great Depression, 1932
I hope he got help. And work in calligraphy, the handwriting is beautiful.
Greasers In New York City, 1950s
That was my Uncle Bobby. The hair, the cigarettes, the leather jacket & jeans! He & my mom grew up in Brooklyn, teens in the 50s.
A True Friend. Taken In A New York Bus Terminal Just Before They Left For The Worsening Situation In The Pacific, 1941
So, what are your thoughts on any of this? Has history changed you, and if so how? Or mayhaps you have an interesting historical story to tell that might fit this listicle. Whatever the case, share your takes and commentary in the comment section below!
And there’s plenty more historical content where that came from.
A Us Marine Gives A Cigarette To A Japanese Soldier Buried In The Sand. Iwo Jima, 1945
An Undercover Police Officer Apprehends A Mugger On The New York Subway, 1985. Photo By Bruce Davidson
Northumbrian Miner Sits Down To Eat His Evening Meal, 1937
My grandfather was a coal miner. He died of black lung when Mom was 11.
In 1963, Wives Say Goodbye To Their Loved Ones In The Navy
Navajo Youth Tom Torlino As He Entered The Carlisle Indian Industrial School In 1882, And Again 3 Years Later
Those schools are easily one of the worst parts of history. [Audible shudder]
View Of Boston, The Oldest Surviving Aerial Photograph Ever Taken. October 13th, 1860
Hot air balloons were used by both Union and Confederate troops during the Civil War. It must have made for a very interesting sight!
The Microsoft Staff, 1978
Last Four Couples In A Dance Marathon, Chicago, Circa 1930
The Rarely Seen Back Of The Hoover Dam Before It Was Filled With Water, 1936
Former Beauty Queen, Miss Wyoming Winner Joyce Mckinney Being Arrested By Police
After kidnapping Mormon missionary Kirk Anderson from his church, forcing him to be her sex slave for 3 days. 1977
An Unknown Woman Stands Close To A Tornado To Take A Photo, 1989
You live in the middle of the US, you get a little desensitized. Like tornado sirens go off, you go out on the lawn and look for it. On a clear day, with so visible a tornado, my guess is they knew how far off it actually was and snapped a quick picture before standing on their porch or the opening of a cellar to see if they'd need to go in and close the door.
Soviet Peasants Listen To The Radio For The First Time, 1928
What Is Now The Fully Developed Las Vegas Strip, 1955
Vegas was once a desert and I'm fairly certain that it will be a desert again someday.
Photo From The Restaurant Windows On The World, Which Sat Atop New York City's World Trade Center's North Tower, 1976
A Young Private Waits On The Beach During The Marine Landing At Da Nang, 1965
The Storyville Jazz Club, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1952
Lenin After His Third Stroke, 1923. This Picture Was Prohibited In Ussr At The Time
Looks like Manson in a snuggie. Crazy eyes (unless the photo was touched up for his eyes, but I don't think so).
Women In Bathing Suits Posing With A Prize Bull, Vancouver, 1927
OK I grew up on a cattle ranch and that is a BIG EFFING BULL!!! That thing is huge! I have honestly never seen one so big.
Anti British Propaganda, Japan 1941
Ironically, with the level of cigar smoking and whisky drinking going on, he would definitely have smelled highly offensive to the modern person.
A Soldier And His Two Girl Friends, Us, 1940s
Thats my grandmother on the left. That wasn't her boyfriend, or girlfriend. Haha
Note: this post originally had 80 images. It’s been shortened to the top 50 images based on user votes.
What I mostly come away with from this post...most of the BP commenters illustrate how ugly, ignorant, and divisive people are. My faith in humanity is abysmally low.
These pictures, some of them are so historically important and are supposed to show the progress (and in some cases, subsequent regression) we've made with regards basic human rights for minority groups, women etc. I don't understand how people can refute, ignore or downright deny these things happened or worse still, advocate for a return to a time when rights were afforded to very few people. Photographs tell stories. Humanity needs to listen a lot more.
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What I mostly come away with from this post...most of the BP commenters illustrate how ugly, ignorant, and divisive people are. My faith in humanity is abysmally low.
These pictures, some of them are so historically important and are supposed to show the progress (and in some cases, subsequent regression) we've made with regards basic human rights for minority groups, women etc. I don't understand how people can refute, ignore or downright deny these things happened or worse still, advocate for a return to a time when rights were afforded to very few people. Photographs tell stories. Humanity needs to listen a lot more.
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