Nothing Seems As Pretty As The Past.

Stacks of cannon balls during The American Civil War

bendu:

London, 90 years ago.

naderm:

Captured German submarine on Thames | 1918

lostsplendor:

On Old Broadway, Manhattan c. 1910 (via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive)

(via flawlesscacophony)

life:

April 30, 1945: Hitler commits suicide.

In the spring of 1945, LIFE’s William Vandivert was one of the first photographers to document the ruins of Berlin and the burned-out bunker beneath the city where Hitler and Eva Braun spent their final hours

In his typed notes to his editors in New York, Vandivert described in detail what he saw. For example, of the sixth slide in this gallery he wrote:

“Pix of [correspondents] looking at sofa where Hitler and Eva shot themselves. Note bloodstains on arm of soaf [sic] where Eva bled. She was seated at far end … Hitler sat in middle and fell forward, did not bleed on sofa. This is in Hitler’s sitting room.”

Remarkable stuff — but, it turns out, only about half right. Historians are now quite certain that Braun actually committed suicide by biting a cyanide capsule, rather than by gunshot — meaning that the blood stains on the couch might well be Hitler’s, and not Eva Braun’s, after all.

Read more here.

NYPD deputy commissioner John A. Leach watches as liquor is destroyed after a raid during the height of prohibition

A pile of American Bison skulls during the hunting and near extinction of the species; 1870’s