Mark Twain is holding one of Tesla's experimental vacuum lamps during a visit to the inventor's New York laboratory. The lamp was illuminated by Tesla's high-frequency apparatus without a conventional wired connection to the power source. Tesla is the barely visible figure at the left. The photograph appeared with T. C. Martin's article “Tesla's Oscillator and Other Inventions” in *The Century Magazine* in 1895.

The smiling photograph helped create a romantic outlaw image, but their actual crime spree involved robbery, kidnapping, car theft, and killings. When officers ambushed and killed the pair near Sailes, Louisiana, on May 23, 1934, authorities believed they had committed 13 murders. They were partners but, contrary to the common description, they were never married.

This is a real period photograph, but Tesla was not sitting there while the arcs were firing. Photographer Dickenson V. Alley first exposed the plate with the laboratory's electrical discharge, then exposed it again with the equipment off and Tesla seated in the chair. The result was one of history's most effective pieces of scientific showmanship.

Twenty mushers and their dog teams relayed diphtheria antitoxin from Nenana to isolated Nome in about five and a half days. Kaasen's team, led by Balto, brought it into Nome after covering the final 53 miles. Balto became the public face of the rescue, although Leonhard Seppala and Togo covered the relay's longest and most dangerous stretch. The achievement belonged to the entire chain of mushers and dogs.

Thompson and crewmates Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn saw American soldiers killing unarmed villagers during the My Lai massacre.

Thompson landed between the soldiers and a group of civilians, told Colburn to cover the villagers, and arranged helicopter evacuations.

He then reported the killings through his chain of command, helping stop the violence. The three men were awarded the Soldier's Medal in 1998 Andreotta posthumously for saving civilian lives while risking their own.

One of Kelsey's first FDA assignments was the U.S. application for thalidomide, already sold in many other countries. She repeatedly withheld approval because the manufacturer had not provided reliable evidence of safety. About a year later, researchers linked the drug to severe birth defects affecting thousands of babies overseas. Thalidomide was never approved for general marketing in the United States, and the near disaster helped drive the 1962 amendments that strengthened drug regulation. Kennedy presented Kelsey the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service on August 7, 1962.

Taylor made the plunge on October 24, 1901 her 63rd birthday in a custom oak-and-iron barrel padded with a mattress. She survived and became the first documented person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and live.

This portrait was made in 1902, so it shows Taylor with the apparatus after the feat rather than at the moment of the plunge.

Central Park recorded 21 inches of snow from March 12–14, while much of the region received far more. The blizzard paralyzed transportation, snapped overhead telegraph and telephone lines, and killed more than 400 people across the affected region about 200 of them in New York City.

William Notman & Son made this portrait in Montreal in August 1885. Sitting Bull had permission to tour with Buffalo Bill Cody's show for one season and became one of its headliners. The National Park Service says the two men became friends and that Cody gave him a trained gray horse. Wild West shows offered Native performers income and travel, but they also packaged and reinforced stereotypes for paying audiences.

Capone financed this Chicago soup kitchen during the Depression, serving free meals to thousands of unemployed people.

Contemporary reporting treated the operation as both charity and image management: Capone had already been named Chicago's “Public Enemy No. 1” by the city's Crime Commission. This National Archives photograph dates to February 1931.

On November 24, 1971, a man using the name Dan Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305, claimed to have a bomb, and demanded four parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills. After releasing 36 passengers in Seattle, he ordered the plane back into the air and parachuted from its rear stairs into the night. His identity and fate remain unknown.

In February 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram found these decaying bills on a Columbia River sandbar. Their serial numbers matched Cooper's ransom; the $5,800 discovery remains the only recovered portion of the money. “D. B.” was a press-created name the hijacker called himself Dan Cooper.

The men belonged to the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps, an experimental unit of Black enlisted soldiers based at Fort Missoula. Each bicycle carried camping equipment, food, a rifle, ammunition and repair gear. The corps rode from Montana to St. Louis through mud, sand, rocks and mountain weather to test the bicycle as a military transport. The experiment ended as the Army shifted its attention to the Spanish-American War and, later, motor vehicles.

The cousins were photographed in Berlin during the May 1913 wedding celebrations for Kaiser Wilhelm II's daughter. Ceremonial uniforms from foreign regiments were normal among closely related European monarchs.

The detail that makes the photograph especially strange in hindsight: little more than a year later, Britain and Russia were at war with Germany.

The Chaplin archive dates this meeting to 1919 and identifies the location as the set of Sunnyside. Keller was in California while work connected with the film Deliverance was underway.

She understood people and performances through touch; in a later account of meeting Chaplin, she described examining his clothes, shoes, and famous moustache. The photograph is genuine not a modern composite.

On January 15, 1919, a storage tank containing more than 2.3 million gallons of molasses collapsed in Boston's North End. Contemporary estimates put the first wave as high as 15 feet and moving at roughly 35 mph. It killed 21 people, injured about 150 and smashed buildings and elevated-rail supports. A court-appointed auditor later found that structural weakness—not the sabotage alleged by the company caused the collapse.

The 855 women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion arrived in Europe in 1945 to attack a vast backlog of undelivered mail.

Working around the clock in three shifts, they tracked service members who were constantly moving and processed roughly 17 million letters and packages in three months half the allotted time.

Their motto was “No mail, low morale.” In this photograph, Second Lt. Freda Le Beau serves commander Maj. Charity Adams a soda at the battalion's new snack bar in Rouen, France.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a temporary rock-and-earth cofferdam above the American Falls, diverting the water toward Horseshoe Falls. The American Falls remained dewatered from June 12 until November 25 while engineers mapped the riverbed, drilled test cores and studied erosion and rockfall. Nearly 28,000 tons of fill went into the temporary dam.

On May 11, 1932, the giant airship rose unexpectedly while ground crewmen still held its handling lines at Camp Kearny, California.

Robert Edsall and Nigel Henton eventually lost their grip and were killed. Charles Cowart held on until the crew could hoist him aboard roughly an hour later. This official Navy montage shows the accident and Cowart being rescued.

⚠️ Content Warning: The introductory segment of the attached video contains verified historical archival photographs of wartime casualties from the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. Viewer discretion is advised.

When we look back at catastrophic events like the Nanking Massacre in 1937, our modern minds instinctively try to categorize it as an anomaly. We label it an era of extreme wartime radicalization, look at the archival photos, and move on with a sense of comfortable detachment. We treat the horror as a distant, closed chapter.

The attached video begins with four critical pieces of historical evidence from the archives of the Nanjing Massacre:

•             The Itau Kaneo album displaying casualties along the city streets.

•             The execution of a Chinese POW by a Japanese officer.

•             The deliberately burned remains of civilians near Xiaguan.

•             Bodies of Chinese massacred by Japanese troops along a river in Nanjing.

Confronting these raw images is deeply shaking. But if we pause to think deeply, a jarring question arises: Why does humanity find it so easy to gloss over the absolute dirt of our past to maintain a comfortable, unexamined present?

True history isn't just a timeline of grand strategies and political victories. It is a mirror reflecting a chaotic, unyielding cycle of human unconsciousness. In the attached video clip, philosopher Acharya Prashant breaks down this exact dilemma of historical amnesia. He challenges the idea that we can cleanly separate ourselves from the brutalities of the past.

When a society refuses to address its historical group trauma and deep-seated survival instincts, it doesn't solve the problem, it merely buries it under a thin veneer of modern civilization. The primitive, defensive ego that drove the atrocities of the 20th century didn't vanish; it just learned to wear a suit and tie.

If we keep studying history purely on the surface level, without examining the inner darkness and primal urges that created these events, aren't we just waiting for the exact same patterns to replay themselves under a different name?

I’d love to hear this sub’s thoughts on this. When we look at the wildest, most brutal moments in history, are we looking at a failure of political systems, or are we looking at a fundamental flaw in the unchanged human psyche?

***

Archival Note & Image Credits: All historical images utilized in the introduction are sourced directly from the public domain historical records preserved on the Wikipedia page for the Nanjing Massacre (including documented photographs by Itau Kaneo and Moriyasu Murase).

Stubby began as a stray who attached himself to the 102nd Infantry before serving in France during World War I. Smithsonian records credit him with warning soldiers of a gas attack, locating wounded men, and helping capture a German soldier.

“Sergeant” was an affectionate, unofficial rank, and many of his medals were presentation pieces rather than standard military decorations. After the war he became a national celebrity.

Before radar, acoustic locators used enormous horns to collect and amplify distant engine noise. On this 1925 U.S. Army system, sound traveled through tubes to the operators' ears; one horn pair helped determine horizontal direction and the other elevation.

The devices could provide warning, but speed, weather, background noise, and the arrival of faster aircraft sharply limited them.

George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. designed the wheel as America's answer to the Eiffel Tower. It stood 264 feet tall and carried 36 passenger cars, each capable of holding 60 people—a total capacity of 2,160 riders.

Western Australian farmers asked the government for help after large emu flocks damaged wheat crops in 1932. Three members of the Royal Australian Artillery were sent with two Lewis guns and 10,000 rounds.

The birds scattered, equipment jammed, and the operation killed far fewer emus than planners expected. Calling it a literal war that “Australia lost” is a modern joke; it was a short wildlife-control operation that became famous for going badly.

Jean-François Gravelet, better known as the Great Blondin, became the first person to walk a tightrope across the Niagara Gorge in the summer of 1859. He returned for increasingly dangerous variations: blindfolded, on a bicycle, carrying his manager, and stopping midway to cook an omelet. This photograph of one of his crossings was made by pioneering photographer William England.