Here is part 24 of Interesting Historical Photos series.
01. Protestors
Two girls linking arms during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. These were student-led popular demonstrations in Beijing which took place in the spring of 1989 and received broad support from city residents, exposing deep splits within China’s political leadership. The protests were forcibly suppressed by hardline leaders who ordered the military to enforce martial law in the country’s capital.
The crackdown that initiated on June 3–4 became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the June 4 Massacre as troops with assault rifles and tanks inflicted casualties on unarmed civilians trying to block the military’s advance towards Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, which students and other demonstrators had occupied for seven weeks. The number of civilian deaths has been estimated at anywhere between hundreds and thousands. The Chinese government condemned the protests as a counter-revolutionary riot, and has largely prohibited discussion and remembrance of the events.
The protests were triggered in April 1989 by the death of former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer who was deposed after losing a power struggle with hardliners over the direction of political and economic reforms.
02. Dealer
Two women buying cocaine capsules from their dealer in Berlin in 1929. The pinch costs 5,- Reichsmark. His victims are mostly from the women’s demimonde. The “Peeping Tom”, always in the background, warns the cocoain dealer when strangers come closer by whistling. For comparsion: 1kg of bread went for 0.38 RM at that time.
03. Beatles
The Beatles step onstage in Tokyo, Japan. 1966. This was just 21 years after the horrors of war. The Beatles did much to reintegrate different peoples by a common interest: music. They played a total of 5 shows at the Budokan, each set exactly the same. Here is a video of their performances.
According to Bob Spitz the Japanese Tour was one of the biggest reasons that The Beatles went off playing live entirely. For a couple of years by now they had been playing gigs with audiences so loud that they literally couldn’t hear themselves play; conversely, Japanese audiences were extremely quiet except for polite applause at the end of each song. The group realized that they had become absolutely awful at playing live due to sheer lack of real practice. Combine this with the fact that due to death threats by right-wing Japanese extremists that meant that they were basically either trapped in their hotel or moving around in armored cars and it quickly becomes clear how horrible the Tokyo dates were – the fact that immediately following this came the unmitigated disaster in the Philippines makes it easy to understand why the group retreated into the studio after 1966.
04. President Photobombed
President Reagan gets photobombed during a photo op with Congressman Curt Weldon and his family in the Oval Office, 1987.
05. Library
London readers continue to browse at a bombed-out library during WWII. One slogan that was commonly used during the First World War, and revived during the Blitz was “Business as Usual.” Shopkeepers would commonly put signs with that phrase in their windows in place of an Open/Closed sign.
06. Female snipers
Female snipers of the Soviet 3rd Shock Army. Bottom Row, left to right: 20, 80, and 83 confirmed kills. Second from bottom row: 24, 79, 70. Third from bottom row: 70, 89, 89, 83. Top row: 64 and 24 confirmed kills. 775 confirmed kills in one picture. Germany, May 4, 1945. Deadliest female sniper in the Russian army, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, had over 300 confirmed kills.
07. Mark Twain
Mark Twain in Tesla’s lab with Tesla in the background, 1894.
08. Queen Marie
Queen Marie of Romania, late 1890. In the first half of the 20th century, there was no royal figure who had the celebrity status of Queen Marie.
Born into the British royal family, she was titled Princess Marie of Edinburgh at birth. She refused a proposal from her cousin, the future king of England.
In WWI she pleaded successfully for her husband to declare war on his country of origin (Germany), leading the French minister to Romania, Auguste Félix de Beaupoil, to remark that Marie was twice an ally to the French: once by birth and once by heart. That also meant fighting on two fronts.
After the war, at the peace treaty in Paris, she was instrumental in gaining back Transylvania and other territories back to Romania. The only unimpressed party there was president Woodrow Wilson, due to her comments on Russian laws dealing with sexual relations, which were considered inappropriate.
Visit to America: Upon her arrival, Marie was welcomed enthusiastically by the American people, with “whistle of steamers, roar of guns in white smoke puffs against gray fog, voices cheering in a stinging rain”. She was formally greeted by Jimmy Walker, the serving Mayor of New York City. Constance Lily Morris, author of On Tour with Queen Marie, wrote that the people were excited for Marie’s arrival mainly because of her almost mythical allure, which had been created by papers and rumour throughout her life; she observed that “the modest Queen of the Belgians had once come with her king for a brief visit and years ago the dusky Hawaiian ruler had honored us, but there had been no others. Before leaving the United States, Marie was presented with a bullet-proof armored town car by Willys-Knight.
During the summer of 1937, Marie fell ill. She was eventually transferred to a sanatorium in Dresden. Growing weaker and weaker, she requested that she be taken back to Romania, in order to die there. She declined a medical flight offered by Hitler, instead choosing to return to Romania by train.
Marie died on 18 July 1938. Marie’s heart, according to her own wishes, was placed in small golden casket embellished with the emblems of the Romanian provinces and interred in her Stella Maris chapel in Balchik. In 1940, after Southern Dobrudja was ceded to Bulgaria during World War II, her heart was transferred to Bran Castle.
09. Lower East Side
Colorized photo of NYC Lower East Side in 1900.
10. Charles Tyner
Coast Guardsman Charles Tyner, Fireman First Class, inspects his helmet hit by shrapnel during the Allied landings in southern France in 1944.
11. Young Protestor
A young boy takes part in a protest by residents of Love Canal demanding to be evacuated. Homes had been built on a 21,000 ton landfill of toxic waste, after the heavy snowfall of 1976 the waste started leaching. Niagara Falls, NY in 1978.
12. Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy sleeps on the floor of a plane during his 1968 presidential campaign.
