The warden handed him the toy train, and Joe Arridy’s face lit up. He ran it along the floor of his cell, back and forth, the way a small child might, because in every way that mattered, Joe Arridy was a small child. He had the mental capacity of a boy, a fact that had never protected him. He was on Colorado’s death row, waiting to be put to death for a crime the evidence said he did not commit.

The actual attacker had already been identified. The proof pointed away from Arridy. None of it mattered. He confessed anyway, because he did not understand what was happening to him.

He did not understand that the words he gave were being used to destroy him. He spent his time on the row playing with the toy train. The prison warden had given it to him. Those who watched him said he was the happiest prisoner on the row.

He had no idea why he was there. In 1939, the state of Colorado put Joe Arridy to death. Seventy-two years later, in 2011, the governor of Colorado issued him a formal pardon. By then, Arridy was long gone, and the pardon could not bring him back.

It could only say, officially, what the evidence had said all along. Berlin, 1946. The war had been over for about a year. What remained of the city was almost nothing.

Buildings had been reduced to single standing walls. Streets were filled with rubble. Entire city blocks had nothing left at all. It took years to remove the debris.

In some places, the ruins were simply buried and built over. To this day, construction in Berlin occasionally uncovers what lies underneath. The city rebuilt itself on top of its own history, layer by layer. These women carried the last living record of a tradition that had been taken from them.

They were Maori women, photographed between 1890 and 1910, wearing the traditional Tamoko facial tattoos that identified their ancestry, their status, their family history. After British colonization, Tamoko was suppressed and eventually banned. The women in these photographs were among the last generation to wear this marking openly. The practice has since been reclaimed and revived.

But these faces carry the weight of everything that was nearly lost. Marie and Pierre Curie were photographed shortly after their wedding in 1895 in France. Within a few years, Marie would become the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. Then she would win a second one, in a different field.

She remains the only person in history to have achieved that. Pierre passed away in 1906, struck by a horse-drawn wagon on a Paris street. Marie continued the work alone. She eventually died from illness caused by decades of exposure to radioactive materials.

She never knew that was happening to her. This is Cable Street, in the East End of London, 1936. What happened here was not a riot. It was a refusal.

A fascist group planned to march through a Jewish neighborhood. Tens of thousands of local residents, dockworkers, immigrants, and ordinary people from across the city came out to block the route. They held their ground. After hours of confrontation, the march was rerouted and eventually abandoned.

The people of Cable Street stopped it with their bodies. The street still has a mural commemorating the day. Look at this woman. She is standing on the ledge of a skyscraper.

Below her, New York City is spread out forty stories down. Her name is Margaret Bourke-White. The year is 1935. She is not falling.

She climbed up there to take a photograph. Bourke-White was one of the first women employed as a photojournalist. She would go on to cover the Second World War, document the liberation of concentration camps, and photograph Gandhi on the day before he died. She spent her life going to the edge of things to show people what was there.

This is Robert Todd Lincoln. He is 78 years old. Someone is helping him up the steps at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, in May of 1922. He is the last surviving son of Abraham Lincoln.

He was 17 years old when his father was shot at Ford’s Theatre. He was present in the building that night, though not in the box. He lived long enough to see his father become a monument. He passed away nine years after this photograph was taken, at the age of 82.

This photograph was taken in the White House in 1985. Princess Diana is dancing with John Travolta. She is smiling. He is wearing a tuxedo.

The image became one of the most reproduced photographs of that decade. What most people do not know is that Diana had spent the weeks before this evening in a private battle with her own unhappiness. She later described this night as one of the best of her life. She said she felt free.

She said she forgot, just for a while, everything else. This is an anatomy class, photographed in 1920. The students are gathered around a cadaver on a table. They are all men.

Medical schools did not broadly admit women at this time. The expression on every face is focused, clinical, and slightly guarded. Learning medicine meant learning to set aside the instinct to look away. These students are practicing that skill.

Most of them would go on to treat patients during one of the most consequential decades in the history of medicine. These portraits were taken inside an English institution for the mentally ill in the 1870s. The people in them were not dangerous. Most had been placed there for conditions that today would be treated with medication or therapy.

Depression. Grief. Behavior that did not conform to social norms. The conditions inside these facilities were frequently inhumane.

The faces in these photographs are not the faces of people who have lost their minds. They are the faces of people who have been told they have. This is one of the lifeboats from the Titanic. The photograph was taken after it had been lowered into the water, but before it reached the rescue ship Carpathia.

There are people visible inside. The ocean around them is flat and freezing. The Titanic had sunk hours earlier. Some of these people had been in the water before being pulled into the boats.

The total number who died that night exceeded 1,500. The number who survived in lifeboats was just over 700. This is the pyramid at Chichen Itza before it was restored. The photographs show a structure that is barely recognizable.

Vegetation covers almost everything. Stones have collapsed and scattered. The shape of the pyramid is visible only if you already know what you are looking for. What archaeologists found underneath the overgrowth was not a ruin.

It was a precisely engineered astronomical calendar, built with an accuracy that still astonishes researchers today. The restoration revealed the structure. The structure revealed the sophistication of the people who built it. In January 1949, snow fell on Los Angeles.

Not a dusting, not a few flakes. Real snow, covering streets, sitting on palm trees, lying across rooftops that had never been built to hold it. People who had lived in Los Angeles their entire lives had never seen anything like it. The city had no snow plows, no salt trucks, no preparation of any kind.

Schools closed. Traffic stopped. People walked outside and stood in their yards in complete disbelief. It has not happened at that scale since.

This man was photographed in 1955 as the strongest man in Europe. He is lifting what appears to be an enormous dumbbell with one hand. His expression suggests he is not particularly impressed by his own achievement. Strength competitions had existed for centuries, but the mid-20th century turned them into spectacle.

Men like this one traveled from city to city, lifting impossible things in front of crowds who had paid to be astonished. Most of their names have since been forgotten. This photograph shows three sisters, taken nearly 100 years ago. No names are written on the back.

No location. No date beyond the estimate from the clothing. They are sitting close together, dressed in their best. Someone decided this moment was worth preserving.

Someone saved the photograph for decades. At some point, the connection to the names was lost. What remains is three faces, the fact that they were sisters, and the fact that on one particular day, someone thought they were worth remembering. This is the Ford Model T on a factory assembly line, around 1908.

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. What he invented was the idea that ordinary people could afford one. Before the Model T, cars were handmade luxury items. Ford broke the process into steps, put workers on a moving line, and drove the price down until a factory worker could buy the car he was building.

It changed transportation. It changed cities. It changed how people lived. In January 1885, Niagara Falls stopped moving.

Not slowly. Not partially. The water simply froze. The falls, one of the most powerful forces on Earth, went completely silent.

Visitors walked out onto the ice and stood where all of that water had been crashing down just days before. The temperature that winter was so extreme that even the falls could not resist it. People took photographs. They stood there smiling, surrounded by ice, as if standing on top of something that should have been impossible.

This is Tower Bridge under construction. The photographs were taken between 1886 and 1894. Looking at these images, it is almost impossible to believe this structure was built without the tools that seem necessary to build something like it. No computers.

No electric cranes. No precision equipment. Just engineering calculations made by hand, thousands of workers, and a design that had never been attempted before. The bridge opened in 1894 and has not closed since, except for maintenance.

It still moves today. This is the California Alligator Farm in the 1920s. Children are standing on top of live alligators, riding them, posing with them. The farm, located in Los Angeles, was a tourist attraction that allowed paying visitors to interact directly with the animals.

Safety protocols of the kind that exist today did not exist then. The alligators were kept sluggish and underfed to make them more manageable. The attraction operated for decades before eventually closing. No major incidents were ever reported, which remains remarkable.

This is the oldest surviving photograph ever taken. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce pointed a camera out of an upstairs window at his estate in Burgundy, France, in 1827, and left the exposure running for approximately eight hours. What came out is barely an image at all. Two rooftops.

A courtyard. Shapes made of light and shadow. But it was the first time the physical world had ever been permanently captured by light. Every photograph ever taken since that moment descended from this one.

This is a first-class cabin on a commercial flight in 1960. The seats are wide enough to stretch out in. There is a proper meal on white china. The passengers are dressed formally, as if attending dinner at a restaurant.

Flying at this time was expensive enough that most people never did it. Those who did treated it as an occasion. The aircraft itself was pressurized and relatively new. The entire experience of air travel has been redesigned multiple times since then, in almost every direction except more comfortable.

Before digital effects, the MGM lion was a real lion. And someone had to film him. The lion was placed on a platform surrounded by cameras, lights, and a crew of people who had decided that this was a reasonable thing to do. The animal’s name varied over the decades, but the process remained the same.

Trainers kept the lion calm while the cameras ran. The roar was often recorded separately. The whole arrangement depended on the cooperation of an animal that could have decided, at any moment, not to cooperate. This is the eastern end of the Great Wall of China, where the wall simply stops.

At this point, the wall reaches the edge of the Bohai Sea, at a place called Laolongtou, meaning Old Dragon’s Head. The final section of wall extends directly into the water. It was built during the Ming Dynasty and was intended to be the definitive eastern boundary of the empire. Standing here at the end of 13,000 kilometers of stone, the scale of what was built becomes almost incomprehensible.

This is Gertrude. She is walking a tightrope at the Brockton Fair in Massachusetts, in 1908. There is no safety net visible. She is wearing a long skirt.

The crowd below is watching in silence. Fairs like this one were among the few places where a woman could perform in public and be applauded for it. Gertrude made her living doing something that most people were afraid to even watch, and she did it in front of strangers, dozens of feet in the air, in a skirt. These are coal miners in Montana, around 1889, photographed by John C.

H. Grabill. Grabill spent years documenting life in the American West. These men are standing outside a mine entrance, covered in dust, looking at the camera with an exhaustion that travels through the photograph across more than a century.

Mining accidents during this period were common and frequently passed unrecorded. These men knew that every shift underground carried real risk. They went in anyway. This is West 23rd Street in New York City, in 1905.

The street is crowded with horse-drawn carriages, trolleys, and pedestrians. There are no traffic lights. There are no lane markings. There is no system at all.

People and animals and machines are simply negotiating their way through together. Within ten years, the horses would be almost entirely gone, replaced by automobiles. The city that looks so permanent in this photograph was already disappearing. This little girl is holding a chicken.

The photograph was taken around 1900. She is not smiling. She is looking at the camera with complete seriousness, as if she has important things to attend to after this is over. The chicken is completely still.

Children in rural areas at this time spent their days working alongside their families. They fed animals, carried water, helped with harvests. Childhood, as a protected period of life, was something that mostly wealthy families could afford. This girl had responsibilities.

This is a Hoover electric vacuum cleaner. The photograph was taken around 1908. It weighed nearly forty pounds. It required two people to operate it.

One person pushed, another carried the motor on their back. It was considered a miracle of modern convenience. The idea that you could clean a floor without sweeping, without raising dust, without getting on your knees, was genuinely revolutionary. People paid the equivalent of several months’ wages to own one.

This is Liza Minnelli at Studio 54 in New York, in the 1970s. She is relaxed, comfortable, completely at home in one of the most chaotic and extraordinary venues in the history of American nightlife. Studio 54 existed for only about three years in its original form before its owners were arrested. In that time, it became a symbol of an era.

Everyone who was there says nothing before or since was quite like it. Minnelli was one of the few people who belonged there completely. The Texas State Fair in 1972 was massive, loud, and completely of its time. Women in polyester.

Men in plaid. Enormous hats. Displays of farm equipment, livestock, and food products. The fair has been running continuously since 1886, making it one of the longest-running annual events in the United States.

The version captured in these photographs feels like a world that has passed. The fair itself is still running. The people in the photographs are likely grandparents now, if they are still here at all. These are advertisements from between 1910 and 1960.

They were directed at women. The products being sold varied. The underlying message did not. The advertisements sold housework as identity.

They sold a husband’s approval as the measure of a woman’s worth. They sold fear. Fear of an unclean home. An unhappy husband.

A marriage at risk. Viewed now, the message is strikingly clear in a way that was invisible at the time. These advertisements were not considered unusual. They were considered normal.

This is England in 1928. Workers and families, photographed going about their daily lives. A man reading a newspaper. Children playing in a street.

A woman hanging laundry. These images were taken one year before the American stock market collapse that would trigger the Great Depression and alter the course of the following decade for almost every person alive. The people in these photographs do not know that yet. They are having an ordinary day in a world that is about to change enormously.

This photograph was taken in Brooklyn in the 1930s. A group of children on tricycles are lined up on a sidewalk like a gang ready to move. They are looking at the camera with complete seriousness. The Great Depression was devastating the country at this time.

Families were losing homes, jobs, everything. And yet here are these children on their bikes, treating the street like a kingdom. Children have always been very good at finding room for joy inside difficult times. This is Queen Mary holding her granddaughter.

The year is 1926. The child in her arms is Princess Elizabeth, who is about to turn one year old. Seventy-two years later, that child would still be sitting on the throne, the longest-reigning monarch in British history. Queen Mary lived long enough to see her granddaughter crowned.

She passed away just two months before the coronation in 1953, at the age of 85. She never saw the ceremony, but she already knew what that child would become. This is Al Pacino. He is about eight months old.

The year is 1940. At this moment, nobody on Earth has any idea who this child will become. His family was working class, living in the South Bronx. His parents would separate when he was two.

He would be raised by his grandparents. He would drop out of school at 17. And then, thirty years later, his face would be on every screen in the world. The Great Sphinx of Giza has a tail.

Most people who have seen photographs of the Sphinx have never noticed it, because the tail is almost entirely buried under sand on the rear flank of the statue. It curls around and rests along the body. Egyptologists have known about it for more than a century. The Sphinx also once had a beard, pieces of which are now in museums in Cairo and London.

The monument you see in most photographs is missing several of its original features. This is Diana Dors in 1958. She was 26 years old and already one of the most famous women in Britain. The press called her the British Marilyn Monroe, a comparison she found limiting.

She had a sharper wit than the comparison suggested. She had a longer career. She survived things that the comparison did not account for. She outlived Monroe by more than two decades, continued working until the end of her life, and left behind an image of herself that she controlled more carefully than most people realized.

In 1907, men drove logs down the Hudson River in Glens Falls, New York. They stood on the floating timber with spiked boots, using long poles to steer the logs through the current toward the mills downstream. One slip meant falling into a churning river surrounded by moving timber.

Deaths were frequent.