80 US History Photos That Show The Past In A Way Textbooks Usually Don’t

Mr. Rogers decided to invite Officer Clemmons to join him and cool off his feet in a pool, breaking a well-known color barrier.

Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate—just five years after slavery was abolished.

LUDLOW, Vt. - Seventy-five years ago, the government cut 65-year-old Ida May Fuller a check. It was numbered 00-000-001 - the first Social Security payout.

But his name remains on the honor roll as one of the university's top three students.

These are his words:

"Some colleagues looked at me as if I were an animal, no one gave me a word, the teachers seemed like they weren't even there for me, nor did they always take my questions. But I dedicated myself so much that later, they started looking for me to give them explanations and clarify their questions."

Each time she was discovered to be a woman and was dismissed. She served in both infantry and cavalry. She was wounded at the Battle of Stones River in 1862.

So, I was traveling America on the backroads, trying to find some old buildings/communities that haven't changed since their incorporation, and I found it ! This is Richwoods, Missouri, a town with a industrial past that started in the 1830s. That's about all the history that existed online, so I decided to park and walk around town and talk to locals and hear the stories of this old town.

During the 1940s, women played a vital role in shipbuilding across the Rust Belt as World War II created an urgent demand for industrial labor and thousands of men left for military service; in cities along the Great Lakes, women stepped into skilled positions as welders, riveters, electricians, and draftspeople, helping keep shipyards operating at full capacity. At the Toledo Shipbuilding Company in Ohio, women were an essential part of the workforce that constructed naval and Coast Guard vessels, including the icebreaker Mackinaw (WAGB-83), a massive and technologically advanced ship designed to keep Great Lakes shipping lanes open year-round for wartime transport of iron ore, coal, and other critical materials. Built with the combined efforts of male and female workers, the Mackinaw symbolized both industrial innovation and social change, demonstrating how women’s labor in Rust Belt shipyards directly supported the war effort while permanently expanding opportunities for women in American manufacturing.

December 15, 1827 – The city of Boston, Massachusetts, the School Committee voted to require, effective 1 Mar 1828, that public school students show that they had been vaccinated against smallpox prior to the school entrance

In this picture, a two-year-old Franklin is unbreeched. Breeching” was the occasion when a small boy was dressed in trousers for the first time. Before this, young boys were often dressed in gowns or dresses until they first wore breeches, typically between the ages of two and eight.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, to James Roosevelt I and his second wife, Sara Ann Delano. James was 54 at the time, 27 years older than Sara, and his eldest child from his first marriage was actually older than his new wife.

Franklin grew up deeply privileged. He played tennis and golf, traveled frequently to Europe, and benefited from substantial family wealth on both sides, as well as his father’s successful business and political career. James often brought young Franklin along to meetings, including one with President Grover Cleveland. During that meeting, Cleveland famously told the boy, “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be President of the United States.”

But Franklin’s childhood wasn’t defined by privilege alone; it was also marked by affection. Though James was a reserved patriarch in the style of the era, he was more involved with his son than many men of his status. Sara, meanwhile, utterly doted on Franklin. Unlike many wealthy parents of the time, she personally educated and cared for him rather than relying entirely on servants. Franklin returned her devotion, and the two remained close throughout her life.

This upbringing shaped Franklin into an optimistic, confident young man, though one also insulated by privilege and lacking broader empathy early on. That perspective would only change after his later diagnosis with polio.

Published anonymously in Philadelphia, the work challenged British authority in plain language accessible to the average colonist.

His father, Lieutenant George Black, joined the 21st Indiana Volunteers with his son, William, accompanying him as the regiment’s drummer boy.

During the 1862 Battle of Baton Rouge, Confederates captured William and imprisoned him at Ship Island. Union troops eventually liberated the prisoners, leading to William’s discharge in September 1862. In February 1863, he re-enlisted and became the youngest Civil War soldier injured on active duty when a shell damaged his left hand and arm. He remained with his unit until he was mustered out of service in January 1866. His wartime drum was passed through generations of his family until it was eventually gifted to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum.

From NASA:

A close-up view of the lunar roving vehicle (LRV) at the Taurus-Littrow landing site photographed during Apollo 17 lunar surface extravehicular activity. Note the makeshift repair arrangement on the right rear fender of the LRV. During EVA-1 a hammer got underneath the fender and a part of it was knocked off. Astronauts Eugene A. Cernan and Harrison H. Schmitt were reporting a problem with lunar dust because of the damage fender.

Following a suggestion from astronaut John W. Young in the Mission Control Center at Houston the crewmen repaired the fender early in EVA-2 using lunar maps and clamps from the optical alignment telescope lamp. Schmitt is seated in the rover. Cernan took this picture.

Technical information: Rear View from Station 2, Lunar Roving Vehicle LRV, taken during the second Extravehicular Activity EVA 2 of the Apollo 17 mission. Original film magazine was labeled C, film type was SO-368 Color Exterior, CEX, Ektachrome MS, color reversal 60mm lens with a sun elevation of 27 degrees.

On January 11, 1937, striking General Motors workers battled Flint police at GM's Fisher Body No. 2 in a bloody night of fighting and a turning point in the Sit-Down Strike.

Known as the "Battle of the Running Bulls," the fight triggered the mobilization of the National Guard by Michigan Gov. Frank Murphy the next day.

"On Jan. 11, violence began outside of Fisher Body 2 when company police shut off the heat, locked the gate to the plant and removed the ladder used to supply food to the strikers," according to the book "The Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37: Witnesses and Warriors."

"When the sit-downers forced the gate open, the company police called in the Flint police for help and they responded with tear gas and bullets," the book says.

Car parts and water from fire hoses were launched at the police. Law enforcement fired buckshot and tear gas at the strikers.

Fighting ended with strikers controlling the gates to the plant and with the police retreating. Governor Frank Murphy sent in the National Guard to maintain peace and order but refused to direct them to act with force against the workers.

"In the morning Chevrolet Avenue looked like a battlefield of the industrial age," recalled Victor Reuther. "Smashed and overturned vehicles, broken windowpanes, shattered bottles, stones, hinges, splintered picket signs, used tear-gas canisters, and everywhere the ice formed by the water that had served so effectively as a defensive weapon."

OwlEyes00: Fun fact - in 1936 FDR won South Carolina with 98.57 percent of the vote. Landon only received 1,646 of the almost 120,000 votes cast there. It's the most lopsided result in a contested state in any US presidential election (on a few occasions early in US history some states were completely uncontested, with only one candidate, who naturally got 100 percent of the vote).

Poland’s Pulaski and Kosciusko helped mastermind it. Pulaski as father of US Cavalry and Kosciusko being the founder of West Point. Also; look up the crazy gay Prussian General Von Steuben who hosted no pants parties. No joke.

Out of 164 students that year 59 of them became Generals. Two Five stars, two four stars, 7 three stars, 24 two stars and 24 one-star Generals.

“I therefore hate the corrupt, [...], women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land…I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.”

252 years ago, American colonists in Boston carried out the Boston Tea Party, one of the most famous acts of protest leading up to the American Revolution. In defiance of British authority, members of the Sons of Liberty boarded ships in Boston Harbor and dumped large quantities of tea into the water.

The protest was directed against the Tea Act, which allowed the British East India Company to sell tea directly to the colonies while maintaining Parliament’s right to tax them. Colonists opposed the measure not because tea was expensive, but because it reinforced the principle of taxation without representation.

Disguised as Mohawk Indians, the protesters destroyed 342 chests of tea, worth a significant sum, while carefully avoiding damage to other cargo or ships. The action was organised, symbolic, and deliberately nonviolent toward people, yet it represented a direct challenge to British rule, and inflamed tensions in the years preceding the Revolutionary War.

togetherweserved says:

His extensive understanding of historical battles also made the great general a staunch believer in reincarnation, believing he had been a soldier in many previous lives and a quote that is credited to him reads; “So as through a glass and darkly, the age-long strife I see, where I fought in many guises, many names, but always me.”

"Among the many warriors, Patton thought he had been in a former life was a prehistoric mammoth hunter; a Greek hoplite who fought the Persians; a soldier of Alexander the Great who fought the Persians during the siege of Tyre; Hannibal of Carthage whose brutal tactics enforced loyalty among his troops and power over his enemies; a Roman Legionnaire under Julius Caesar who served in Gaul (present-day France, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Switzerland, parts of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the west bank of the Rhine); the Roman Soldier who pierced Jesus’ heart with a spear; an English knight during the Hundred Years War; and a Marshal of France under Napoleon."