PFC George Kelly stands near the town of Buckenbar, Belgium, in January 1945, photographed in the final months of World War II. He is from Philadelphia. He is young in this picture, wearing a heavy coat against the Belgian winter. He is alive.

His unit has just come through the Battle of the Bulge, one of the bloodiest engagements on the Western Front. Many of the men who fought beside him are not alive. What happened to George Kelly after the war—whether he made it home, whether he had children, whether he ever talked about Belgium—is not known. The photograph preserves only this: a young soldier who survived a battle that killed so many around him, standing in the snow of a foreign country, alive.

How his war came to that frozen corner of Belgium is a story written across a continent, in photographs, in the faces of people who did not know what was coming and in the lives of those who did. To understand January 1945, you have to go back through the years that led to it—not only the battles, but the ordinary moments that the cameras caught, the everyday scenes that would be overtaken by history. In 1916, French soldiers pose for a photograph wearing German helmets. They are not spies.

They won them. The spike helmet, the Pickelhaube, was standard German military equipment in the early years of the war. French troops who captured German soldiers or overran German positions sometimes kept the helmets as trophies. There is something triumphant in the photograph and also something strange.

These men are wearing the armor of the enemy. They are grinning. The war still has two more years to go. They cannot know that.

That same year, on the other side of the Atlantic, a cable car makes its first crossing over the gorge below Niagara Falls. The car is small, hanging from a wire stretched across the canyon. The system was designed by a Spanish engineer named Leonardo Torres Quevedo, a man who had also built early calculating machines and an automated chess player. He built this cable car as a proof of concept.

He wanted to show that people could cross a gorge safely, suspended above rushing water in a machine made of metal and rope. He was right. The cable car ran for decades. At Niagara, the water thunders below.

Across the ocean, the guns of the Western Front thunder too. The two worlds do not know each other, but they share a moment in history. An older photograph, from 1895, shows a hairstyle called the crescent cut. The sides curve outward in a rounded shape.

The back is cut short. It was considered modern and somewhat daring for its time. Looking at it now, it resembles something you might see in a barbershop today, or in a music video, or on a fashion runway. Hair cycles.

Styles that seem ridiculous in one generation become interesting again in the next. The person wearing this cut in 1895 had no idea they were ahead of something. Another photograph from the same era shows a couple posing on a bicycle built for two. The bicycle is a model from 1886, one of the first generations of the so-called safety bicycle, which had two equal-sized wheels instead of the towering front wheel of the old penny farthing.

This design made bicycles accessible to people who were not already acrobats. Women could ride them in ordinary clothing. Couples could ride together. The bicycle in this photograph helped launch one of the first mass transportation revolutions in human history.

It looks like a curiosity. It was actually the beginning of everything. In Brighton, England, in the early twentieth century, a man named J. W.

Waldron Smith stands in front of his bicycle workshop. Behind him, in the window and along the wall, are bicycles in various states of repair. The bicycle in this era was not a hobby item. It was a serious machine.

It gave working-class people mobility they had never had before. A bicycle mechanic in 1900 was doing work that mattered. Smith poses for the camera with the quiet pride of someone who knows his shop is part of something important. Two women stand beside two motorcycles, sixty years apart.

The first is an 1897 Holden crank drive, one of the earliest true motorcycles ever built. Four cylinders, no gears, direct drive. The second is a 1936 New Imperial Twin, powerful, refined, and recognizably modern. The women are not identified.

The motorcycles are the subject. But the women chose to be in this photograph, standing beside machines that most people in 1936 assumed were not for them. They knew something the world was slow to accept. New York City, 1904.

A small carriage moves through the park. It is pulled not by a horse but by a goat. A child sits inside, being driven in a slow circle. Parents stand nearby, watching and smiling.

Goat-drawn carriage rides were a real business in New York in the early twentieth century. They operated in Central Park and other public spaces. Children loved them. The goats did not seem to mind.

It is the kind of thing that sounds invented but was completely real. A Saturday afternoon in the city 120 years ago: a child and a goat and a carriage going nowhere in particular. That same year, in St. Louis, a Ferris wheel is going up.

The workers on the scaffolding look small against the size of what they are building. This wheel is being constructed for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the World’s Fair that will bring nearly twenty million visitors to St. Louis over the course of seven months. The fair will introduce the world to the ice cream cone, the hot dog on a bun, and iced tea.

It will also showcase the telephone, the automobile, and the X-ray machine. The Ferris wheel going up in this photograph is just the beginning of what people will see here. In New York, at Greeley Square, newsboys gather in the early twentieth century, waiting to sell papers. Some of them look no older than eight or nine.

Selling newspapers was one of the few jobs available to poor children in American cities at this time. They bought papers for a fraction of a cent and sold them on street corners for a small profit. They worked long hours in all weather. There were no labor laws protecting them.

Jacob Riis had already photographed children like these. The photographs changed public opinion. The laws took longer. Westminster Bridge, London, 1903.

Pedestrians walk across in both directions. Horse-drawn carriages move through the traffic. The Palace of Westminster rises in the background. The bridge has existed in some form since the 1700s.

The version in this photograph was completed in 1862. The city around it is in the last years of the Victorian era. The automobile is coming but has not yet arrived. The world on this bridge looks slower, heavier, and more permanent than the one that will replace it.

Nothing about this image suggests that within eleven years, the men walking across this bridge will be called to fight in a world war. The American West was its own world entirely. Wyoming, 1868. A wooden railroad bridge is being built across a valley.

The men working on it do so by hand, using timber and muscle and tools that would not look out of place in a medieval construction yard. The transcontinental railroad is under construction. When it is finished, it will connect the Atlantic coast to the Pacific for the first time. It will shrink the country.

It will end the era of the wagon trail. It will also displace and destroy the lives of Native American nations across the Great Plains. The bridge in this photograph is just wood and labor. The thing it is helping to build will change America forever.

Fort Verde, Arizona, 1887. A wagon is pulled by a mule through dry, rocky terrain. This is how things moved in the American West before the railroad reached every town. Mule-drawn wagons carried mail, supplies, weapons, food, and people across distances that took days.

The mule in this photograph is not a romantic figure. It is a working animal in a working landscape. Fort Verde was a military outpost in the middle of Apache territory. The wagon and its driver were part of the machinery of American expansion.

The mule did not choose sides. Water at Fort Verde was not something you took for granted. The region was dry and remote, and getting water to the people and animals at the fort required moving it by mule. The wagon in another photograph from the fort carries barrels.

The mule walks the same path it probably walked every day. Water transport in arid military outposts was exhausting, constant, and essential. Without it, nothing else at the fort could function. The soldiers who fought, the horses that carried them, the officers who gave orders—all of them depended on this animal and this wagon and whoever was patient enough to drive it.

In Nebraska, 1889, a man named Art Pulliam hunts coyotes. The landscape around him is flat and wide. He is on horseback, rifle in hand. Coyote hunting was common in the rural West, sometimes for sport, sometimes because farmers considered them a threat to livestock.

Art Pulliam is not a famous person. His name does not appear in history books. But someone photographed him, and the photograph survived. And now we know that in 1889, in Custer County, Nebraska, a man named Art Pulliam went out into the plains to hunt.

That is more than most people from that era can say. That same year, a group from Sioux City heads to the Great Hot Springs of Dakota. They are dressed in their best traveling clothes. Some are in carriages.

The landscape around them is open and wide. Dakota Territory had only just been divided into two states that year. The hot springs they are going to visit were already known as a destination for health, relaxation, and curiosity. People traveled long distances in 1889 for the experience of something extraordinary.

The group in this photograph is doing what people have always done. They are going somewhere they have never been. In another photograph, a woman stands with her arm extended, showing muscles built through years of training. She is dressed in costume.

She is an acrobat or possibly a trapeze artist working in a circus in the early twentieth century. Circus performers were among the most physically accomplished athletes of their era. They worked without safety nets. They trained without recognition.

They performed in tents and fields and fairgrounds for people who came to be amazed and then moved on. This woman poses for the camera with the ease of someone who has spent her whole life being looked at. On a rooftop in 1938, two women are boxing. Not performing—boxing.

They are in stance, throwing punches, completely serious. Women’s sports in 1938 existed in a strange space. They were accepted in some forms and mocked in others. A woman boxing on a rooftop was somewhere between the two.

The photo captures something that feels ahead of its time. These women are not asking for permission. They have turned a city rooftop into a gym, and they are training. The world below them has opinions.

They do not appear to care. Waterloo Station, London, 1936. A crowd of men in suits and coats stands in front of a box. The box is showing moving images.

It is a television. Most of these people have never seen one before. The BBC had just launched the world’s first public television broadcast service. For most of the crowd, what they are watching is impossible: a picture moving, transmitted through the air, appearing on a screen in real time.

One of the men in this photograph is seeing the future and does not know it yet. None of them do. Paris, 1930. The contestants of the Miss Europe pageant stand together for a photograph.

They are dressed in the fashion of the era, formal and precise. Europe in 1930 is between catastrophes. The Great War has been over for twelve years. The next one has not started yet.

These women are posed and poised and unaware that within a decade, the continent they represent will be at war again. Some of their countries will be occupied. Some will be destroyed. In this photograph, they are simply standing in the sun in Paris, beautiful and young and completely unaware of what is coming.

John F. Kennedy is twenty-two years old. The year is 1939. He is traveling in Europe, watching a continent slide toward war.

He has not yet served in the Navy. He has not yet lost his brother in that war. He has not yet entered politics, won a Senate seat, or stood in a debate that the whole country watched on television. He has not yet been elected president, given his inaugural address, or been shot in Dallas.

In 1939, he is just a confident young American abroad, watching history begin. He has no idea he is about to become part of it. The war comes. The world burns.

Amsterdam, 1945. A small Dutch boy walks through the street carrying a pot. He is on his way to a community kitchen, one of the distribution points where people in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam came to receive food. The Netherlands in the winter of 1944 and 1945 suffered what became known as the hunger winter.

Thousands of people starved. Children were sent to stand in lines because they were small enough to carry what they received. This boy does not look afraid. He looks like he is doing a job.

Children in occupied cities often did. And in January 1945, somewhere near Buckenbar, Belgium, PFC George Kelly stands in the snow. The Battle of the Bulge—Hitler’s last great offensive in the West—has just ended in failure. The German army has spent its reserves in the Ardennes.

The Allies are preparing to cross the Rhine. The war in Europe will end in four months. George Kelly, a young man from Philadelphia, has survived the worst of it. He stands in his heavy coat, alive, photographed by someone whose name we do not know.

The photograph survives. The rest of his life does not reach us. What happened to George Kelly after the war, whether he made it home, whether he had children, whether he ever talked about Belgium—we do not know. But the photograph keeps him alive in a way that matter-of-fact.

He fought. He survived. He was here. The years after the war bring their own photographs.

Coney Island, New York, sometime in the 1950s. The beach is packed. There is almost no sand visible between the people. Thousands of families from Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan came here every summer to escape the heat of the city.

Coney Island was the great equalizer. Rich and poor, different neighborhoods, different backgrounds—all of them crushed onto the same strip of beach. The amusement rides ran all day. The smell of hot dogs and salt water was everywhere.

These were the years before air conditioning changed how people spent their summers. If you were hot in the 1950s, you went to Coney Island. March 6th, 1953. Joseph Stalin has been dead for one day.

On a street in New York City, a group of Soviet immigrants are giving away borscht, free to anyone who wants it. They are celebrating. These are people who fled Soviet rule, who lost family members to purges, who lived for years not knowing if they were safe. When the news arrived that Stalin was dead, they came outside.

They brought soup. They poured it into cups and handed it to strangers. It is one of the strangest celebrations in New York City history. It is also one of the most understandable.

Atlantic City, 1930s. A couple has been dancing for 1,473 hours. That is more than sixty days without stopping. Dance marathons were a Depression-era phenomenon.

Couples competed for cash prizes by dancing until they collapsed. The rules varied, but the desperation was always the same. People needed money. People needed something to watch.

The couple in this photograph won. They are smiling, exhausted, and still on their feet. The crowd has gone home. The music has stopped.

But they are still standing, which is the only thing that ever mattered in this contest. Louisiana, 1937. A mother sits with her children in a small, plain room. She is teaching them to read and write.

There is no school bus coming. There is no classroom nearby. In rural Louisiana in 1937, many families lived far from any public school. And many schools that did exist were underfunded, segregated, and incomplete.

This woman decided that was not good enough. She sat down with her children and taught them herself. The photograph is quiet. There is no drama in it.

But what is happening in this room is one of the most stubborn acts of hope in American history. November 4th, 1966. Venice is underwater. Six feet of floodwater poured into the city after a catastrophic combination of rain, tides, and wind.

The high water stayed above normal for twenty-two hours. It stayed above a dangerous level for more than forty hours. Priceless artwork was damaged. Ancient buildings soaked up water they had been built to avoid.

The flood changed everything about how Italy thought about Venice. It launched a global conversation about how to save a city that is slowly sinking. More than half a century later, that conversation is still happening. In the 1960s, Anita Ekberg—best known for the scene in La Dolce Vita where she stands in the Trevi Fountain—is doing something completely different.

She is serving Thanksgiving dinner. The table is set. The turkey is there. She is dressed for the occasion.

She is one of the most famous women in the world, and she is standing in a kitchen, passing food to someone off camera. Fame is strange. The most glamorous people still have to eat. And sometimes someone has a camera when they do.

A device marketed in the 1940s promised to shake the fat away. You strapped it around your hips, thighs, or waist. It vibrated. Advertisements claimed dramatic results.

Women bought it. Department stores sold it. Doctors sometimes endorsed it. It did not work.

The science behind it was never real. But in an era before consumer protection laws had any teeth, you could sell almost anything if you gave it a professional-looking machine and a confident name. The device in this photograph is a piece of history. It is also a reminder that people have always wanted an easy answer.

And someone has always been willing to sell them one. Ford introduced a car with a built-in television in 1965. This was not a concept car. Ford actually built and demonstrated this vehicle.

The television sat in the dashboard, a small screen facing the driver. Whether anyone thought this was safe is a question the era did not spend much time asking. The 1960s were full of innovations that moved faster than the safety thinking around them. The car-mounted television did not catch on.

It took another forty years for screens to become standard inside vehicles, and another decade after that for the arguments about distraction to start in earnest. Princess Diana is laughing. Standing next to her is Rowan Atkinson, the comedian best known for playing Mr. Bean.

The year is 1984. Diana is twenty-three years old and three years into a royal marriage that is already struggling. She is surrounded by protocol and pressure and public expectation. In this photograph, she is just laughing at something funny.

Her face is completely unguarded. Moments like this one, rare and unplanned, remind you that the person inside the princess was someone who liked to laugh and found fewer and fewer chances to do it. These are the moments the cameras caught across a century—soldiers in enemy helmets, mules hauling water, acrobats and boxers and dancing couples, a boy with a pot in a starving city, a young man from Philadelphia standing alive in the Belgian snow. Most of the people in these photographs are not famous.

Their names do not appear in history books. But someone photographed them, and the photographs survived. And now we know they were here, doing what people have always done: working, riding, fighting, loving, celebrating, hoping, and waiting for whatever came next.