Archive photos that captured rare historical moments

Sometimes a single photo can tell a lot more than all those dry paragraphs of historical references. These pictures will tell you better than books and lectures about those significant people or events about which you would like to know more. The footage, once made with only one purpose — to document the present, now helps us to witness the past.

Harold Whittles hears for the first time, 1974.

Dorothy Kants became one of the first African-American students at a school for whites, 1957. The photo shows students at Charlotte's Harry Harding High School teasing Dorothy.

The first morning in Sweden after the change of left-hand traffic to right-hand traffic, 1967.

Residents of West Berlin show children to their grandparents who live on the east side, 1961.

Acrobats train on the roof of the Empire State Building, 1934.

Graves of a Catholic woman and her Protestant husband, Holland, 1888.

An Austrian boy enjoys a new pair of shoes, World War II.

A striptease club dancer arrested in Florida shows her underwear to a judge to prove that her panties sufficiently cover her private parts and she was not completely naked.

The Ace of spades hand belongs to mafia boss Joe Masseria, who was killed in a Brooklyn restaurant in 1931.

Same-sex couple, Paris, 1932.

"The most beautiful suicide" - 23-year-old Evelyn McHale, after parting with her fiance, jumped off the Empire State Building. The girl fell from a height of 344 meters on the roof of a limousine parked at the curb. 1947.

Bolaji Badejo is a 2.18 meter tall Nigerian student in an Alien costume, 1978. For Bolaji, this role was the first and last.

The remains of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov after the accident of the descent vehicle of the first Soviet manned spacecraft, 1967.

A German child meets his father, a soldier of the Second World War, whom he last saw at the age of one year, 1956.

Frida Kahlo in men's clothing, 1924.

Orote Peninsula, 1944 - a wounded dog is given medical care.

A woman shows a photo of her son to returned prisoners of war, 1947.

A Scottish piper in a kilt on the battlefield, the First World War.

The Mona Lisa is being returned to the Louvre after World War II.

The surviving passengers of the Titanic disembark on board the Carpathia, 1912.

The first bananas in Norway, 1905.

Physicist Robert Williams Wood, the founder of quantum physics Max Planck and Albert Einstein sit in the front row at the meeting of the Berlin Physical Society, 1931.

A man cuts out the eye of one of the sculptures, Mount Rushmore, 1930s.

Filming of the legendary scene of the film with Marilyn Monroe "The Itch of the seventh year", 1954.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards at Mick Jagger's 29th birthday party, 1972.

The last public execution on the guillotine, France, 1939.

Inscriptions of Soviet soldiers inside the Reichstag, 1945.

The Nazis select Hungarian Jews for Auschwitz, 1944.

The last photo of Vladimir Lenin — he had already suffered three strokes and could not speak, 1923.

Eduard Bloch, a Jew and personal physician of Hitler's family until 1907, was under his special protection. Hitler himself called Bloch a "noble Jew."

Jenny McGregor arrested for distributing alcoholic beverages, Minneapolis, 1924.

The crew of the Japanese aircraft carrier "Zuikaku" salutes the lowered flag before the death of the ship, 1944.

An American slaps a Vietnamese man in the face in a fight for a seat in the last helicopter that flies away from the US Embassy during the evacuation in Saigon, 1975.

Young Hitler welcomes the news of the outbreak of the First World War, 1914.