This video presents 100+ rare historical photographs documenting dark moments across different eras, including the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during WWII, the devastating 1991 Kuwait oil fires that burned for 10 months, the 1929 stock market crash that wiped out fortunes, the Mount St. Helens eruption that killed 57 people, and the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans. These images reveal forgotten stories, tragic events, and powerful moments that many people have never seen before, showing how photography has captured both the darkest and most significant moments in human history.
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Deep Dive
π΄βΆ100+ Dark Moments in History Caught on CameraAdded:
Welcome to the Secret History [music] Channel. Be sure to subscribe and like so you don't miss out on more videos like [music] this one. Look at these people.
They are behind a barbed wire fence.
They are American citizens. The year is 1942.
After Pearl Harbor, the United States government rounded up 120,000 Japanese Americans and sent them to camps in the desert. Most of them had never been to Japan. Many of their sons were fighting for the United States Army in Europe.
They lost their homes. They lost their businesses. They lost their farms. They were released at the end of the war with $25 in a bus ticket. In 1988, the United States apologized. By then, half of the people in this photograph were already dead.
Look at this sky. It is black at noon.
The shepherd is leading his sheep through the smoke. The year is 1991.
The place is Kuwait. As Saddam Hussein retreated from the Iraqi invasion, his soldiers set fire to 700 oil wells. The fires burned for 10 months. They consumed 6 million barrels of oil per day. The smoke covered an entire country. Doctors reported black rain in countries hundreds of miles away. The sand turned to glass in places. The air was unbreathable. Children were born with breathing problems for years afterward. It was the worst environmental disaster of the 20th century.
Look at this stage. There is a giant photograph of a man behind a movie camera. Below it is a banner. It says, "In Italian, cinematography is the most powerful weapon. The man with the camera is Benito Mussolini. The year is 1937.
He had built a state film studio called the institut loose. It made every news real in Italy. It told Italians what to think. He used film the way Hitler used radio. 8 years later, Mussolini was hanged in a public square by his own people. The studio survived him. It still exists today. They are still making films.
Look at this room. It is the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The papers on the floor are not litter. They are stock tickets. Each one represents money that no longer exists. The man with the broom is sweeping up what used to be a fortune. The date is October 30th, 1929.
The day before the stock market had collapsed. 25% of America would lose their jobs in the years that followed.
Men jumped from the windows of the buildings outside. Banks closed.
Families lost their homes. The janitor kept his job. He was the only one left to clean.
Look at this road. The car is parked.
The man behind the camera is named Richard Lasher. He came to ride his motorcycle in the woods. He is taking a photograph instead because the mountain ahead of him just exploded. The mountain is Mount St. Helens. The date is May 18th, 1980. The blast traveled at 300 mph. It flattened every tree for 15 mi.
57 people died, including a geologist who had refused to leave. Richard turned his motorcycle around and rode for his life. The cloud caught him. He survived.
The photograph is one of the most famous ever taken in the United States.
Look at these four officers. They are standing in front of a French farmhouse near the city of Verdun. The year is 9,8118.
The man second from the left is 34 years old. His name is Captain Harry S.
Truman. He commanded an artillery battery, 200 men with 12 cannons. They never lost a single soldier. 27 years later, he was president of the United States. He was the man who decided to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. He thought about Verdun every time. He had seen what artillery did to men. He thought the bomb would end it forever.
It did not.
Look at this gate. The woman behind it is laughing. Her hands are in the air.
The American soldier outside the gate is laughing too. The year is 1944. The place is Straber, France. The Germans had occupied the city for 4 years. They had renamed the streets in German. They had banned the French language. They had deported the Jewish population to death camps. The day of this photograph, the city was free again. The woman had been waiting for that moment for 1,400 days.
She did not know if any of her family had survived. She found out later that night.
Look at this street. The buildings on either side are gone. The walls are broken. The roofs are missing, but the street itself is swept perfectly clean.
A man in a hat walks down the middle carrying a suitcase. The year is 1945.
Taro. The place is Germany. 2 months after the war ended. The man could be going home. The home is gone. Or he could be leaving. There is nothing to leave behind. We do not know his name.
We do not know what is in the suitcase.
But someone every morning came out and swept the street. That is how cities come back.
Look at these officers. They are wearing masks. The year is 1918. The place is Seattle, Washington. The Spanish flu has just reached the West Coast. By the end of the year, 675,000 Americans will be dead, more than every American killed in every war in the country's history combined. The mayor of Seattle ordered everyone in public to wear a mask. The police arrested those who refused. They were not popular. The pandemic ended in 1919.
Wow. The masks went into closets. They came out again 100 years later when no one could remember the last time.
Look at these two men. The one on the left is Ronald Reagan, president of the United States. The one on the right is Muhammad Ali, the greatest boxer who ever lived. The year is 1983. Diy Reagan is pretending to throw a punch. Ali is pretending to flinch. The room is laughing. Behind the smile, Ali was already sick. Parkinson's disease was beginning to slow his hands and his voice. He had taken too many punches in the ring. The disease would steal everything from him over the next 30 years except his face. The face that everyone knew. The face still worked.
Look at this young man. He is 19 years old. His name is Ernest Hemingway. The year is 1918. He had volunteered to drive an ambulance for the Red Cross in Italy. 2 weeks before this photograph, a mortar shell exploded next to him.
He had 227 pieces of metal in his legs.
He carried a wounded Italian soldier almost 100 yards to safety. The Italian government gave him their highest award for valor. He went home. He wrote a book about it. The book made him famous. 43 years later, he ended his own life in his kitchen in Idaho.
Look at this woman. She is 19 years old.
Her name is Bridget Bardau. The year is 1953.
She has just walked onto the beach at the Can Film Festival. She is barely known. By the end of the week, every photographer in Europe will have her photograph. By the end of the decade, she will be one of the most famous women in the world. Within 20 years, she will retire from acting completely. She will move to a farm in southern France. She will spend the rest of her life trying to save dogs. She still does it now.
Look at the two cars. The small one on the right was built in 1896 by a man named Henry Ford in his backyard. The larger one on the left was built in 1924.
It is the 10 millionth Model T to roll off his assembly line. In 28 years, he had gone from a single inventor with one machine to the most powerful industrialist in the world. The Model T cut the price of a car by 90%. working people could finally afford one. He paid his workers $5 a day, double the going rate. He also tried to influence the politics of an entire country.
Look at this man. He is hanging from a cable in the sky. Below him is the Hudson River. There is no harness. There is no safety net. The year is 1930. The building under his feet is not yet finished. It is the Empire State Building. They built it in 14 months.
Five workers fell to their deaths. The man in this photograph was photographed by Lewis Hine, who climbed up the cables with him to take it. The photograph went around the world. It was meant to celebrate the men. Their names were not written down. Most of them are forgotten.
Look at this man. He is balanced on a single steel beam. The wind is blowing his shirt. Below him, the Chrysler building rises out of the streets of Manhattan. The year is 1931. The man is a steel worker. He is helping to build the Empire State Building. They built one floor every 4 days. The men walked the beams without harnesses. They ate lunch sitting on them hundreds of feet above the ground. Five men fell. Many more were injured. None of them are remembered by name. The Empire State Building is. It was the tallest building in the world for 40 years.
Look at the hillside. There are 60,000 soldiers on it. Every one of them is looking at the small figure on the stage. The figure is Marilyn Monroe. The year is February 1954.
She was on her honeymoon with Joe Deaggio. She left him in Tokyo. She flew to Korea and sang for the troops in below freezing temperatures in a seaquined dress for 4 days. The Korean War had ended 6 months earlier. Most of the men in the crowd had not been home in years. She told a journalist later that performing in front of those soldiers was the happiest moment of her life.
Look at the sky. There is a balloon hanging in the air. From the balloon, long steel cables run down to the ground. The year is 1915. The place is London. The Germans had begun using zeppelins, giant airships, to drop bombs on the city. They flew at night. They flew above the range of any anti-aircraft gun. The British answer was these balloons. The cables were meant to slice the wings off the zeppelins as they flew through.
Sometimes it worked. Mostly it did not.
London was bombed for years. Hundreds of civilians died. It was the first time bombs had ever fallen on a major capital.
Look at these men. They are inspecting artillery shells. There are thousands of them in perfect rows on the floor. The factory is in Canada. The year is 1942.
The shells are being shipped to Britain to drop on Germany. Canada built 3/arters of all the munitions used by the British army during the Second World War. The factories ran 24 hours a day.
Most of the workers were women. The men in this photograph were not allowed to fight. Their job was to make sure no defective shell reached a soldier. A bad shell could kill the man who fired it.
Look at this man. He is at the edge of a swimming pool. The year is 1961.
daughter. The man is Mao Zidong, ruler of China. Two years earlier, his great leap forward had killed 30 million Chinese people through famine. He insisted it had not happened. He was nearly 70. He could barely walk, but he was determined to swim across the Yangze River, the largest river in Asia, in front of the entire country [music] to prove he was still strong. He did it 5 years after this photograph. State photographers said he covered 9 miles in 1 hour. No human in history has ever swam that fast.
Look at this woman. She is holding a glass of milk. A small boy is sitting next to her. He is drinking through a straw. The year is 1957.
The woman is Marilyn Monroe. She is at the height of her fame. The boy is a stranger. He had won a charity raffle.
The raffle paid for milk for poor children in New York. Marilyn donated her time and her face for free. She did this often. She gave away most of what she earned. She had grown up in foster homes herself. She remembered what it was like to want milk and not have it.
Look at this man. He is throwing a slot machine off the side of a barge into Long Island Sound. The man is Fierella LaGuardia, mayor of New York City. The year is 1937.
He had ordered the police to confiscate every illegal gambling machine in the city. They got tens of thousands of them. He invited the press to watch as he dumped them all into the sea. He smashed some of them with a sledgehammer first. The mob hated him. The voters loved him. He was reelected three times.
The machines are still down there. New York Harbor is full of them.
Look at this woman. She is standing in a flooded street with a saw in her hand.
She is cutting apart a wooden cart that the water has trapped. The year is August 1945.
The place is Gavl, Sweden. A hurricane had crossed the Baltic Sea and dumped a year's worth of rain in 2 days. The river burst through the city. Houses floated. Bridges collapsed. The woman in this photograph is salvaging what she can. The Second World War had ended one week before. Most of Europe was in ruins. Sweden had been neutral, untouched by bombs. And then the rain came.
Look at this woman. She is wearing a costume covered in jewels. Her stomach is showing. The year is 1973.
The place is the Academy Awards. The woman is chair. The dress was made by a designer named Bob Mackey. It cost more than most American houses at the time.
The morning after the photograph, every newspaper in the country printed it.
Half the country called it scandalous.
The other half called it the most beautiful dress they had ever seen.
Chair would wear 60 more Mackie originals over the next 40 years. She is still wearing them now. She is 79.
Look at this woman. She is surrounded by dolls that look exactly like her. Her name is Agnetha Feltskog. The year is 1976.
She is one of four members of the Swedish band ABBA. They had won Eurovvision 2 years earlier with a song called Waterloo. By 1976, they were the biggest pop group in the world after the Beatles. The dolls in the photograph were a real product. Children all over Europe owned them. By 1982, the band had broken up. Agatha walked away from music almost completely. She lived alone in a house in Sweden for 30 years. She rarely gives interviews. She still sings sometimes.
Look at this man. He is sitting on a bench between takes. He is bald. He is wearing dark clothes. His name is Max Shrek. The year is 1922. The film he is making is called Noseratu.
He plays a vampire. The film is a stolen, unauthorized version of Dracula.
The author's widow sued the studio. She won.
The court ordered every copy of the film to be burned. Most of them were. A few survived. They circulated underground for 50 years. Today, Noseratu is considered one of the greatest horror films ever made. Every vampire movie you have ever seen comes from this man.
Look at this man. He is sitting inside a robot. The robot is R2-D2 AUA. The man is Kenny Baker. He is 3'8 in tall. He was hired in 1976 because he was the only actor in England small enough to fit. The film was Star Wars. No one expected it to make money. It made more money than any film ever had. Kenny stayed inside R2-D2 for 40 years across nine films. He never got famous. He never got rich. He was paid less than anyone else in the cast. When he died in 2016, the entire cast came to his funeral.
Look at this man. He's holding a small silver disc. The man is Jupyu, a Dutch engineer at Phillips. The year is March 1979.
He has just shown the world the compact disc for the first time. Until that moment, every recording in human history had been physical. Bol tape do box. Euo.
The compact disc was different. The music was stored as numbers read by a laser. It was perfect. It would last forever. Within 10 years, the disc had killed the cassette tape. Within 20, the digital file had killed the disc. Within 30, streaming had killed everything. He started it all from a podium in Einhovven.
Look at this man. He is standing next to a black car. The back of the car has rows of rocket engines pointed backward.
The man is Fritzvan Opel, son of the German automaker. The year is 1928.
The car is called the Opal Rack to Wing Shu. 20,000 spectators came to watch him drive it. He hit 140 mph. The car nearly came off the ground. Fritz lived. The car did not last long, but the engineers who built it went on to build the V2 rockets that bombed London during the Second World War. The rockets came from this car.
Look at this machine. It is a railroad car down wall. On top of it is a MiG 15 fighter jet engine. The engine is pointed at the tracks ahead. The year is 1970. The place is Czechoslovakia.
The engineers had a problem. The winters were so cold the rails froze and the trains could not run. So they took the engine out of an old Soviet fighter jet, mounted it on a flat car and used it as a giant blowtorrch. It worked. The hot exhaust melted the ice in seconds. They built dozens of them. Some of them are still in service today, 50 years later.
Look at these two cars. They are in the water. They are not sinking. They are driving across the English Channel. The year is 1965. O. The cars are Emperors, German vehicles that worked on land and water. Two propellers turned by the same engine that drove the wheels. They went 7 knots in water and 70 mph on land.
Only 3,800 were ever made. The crossing in this photograph took 7 hours through choppy seas. They made it. The empar was discontinued 3 years later. They were too expensive. Today, a working one sells for over $100,000.
Look at this woman. She is wearing a crown made of sausages. She is wearing a skirt made of sausages. She is wearing a necklace made of sausages. The year is 1955.
The place is Los Angeles. The contest was called Miss Sausage Queen. It was sponsored by a meat company called Zion.
The winner got $50 in a year of free hot dogs. The photograph went out to every newspaper in the country. The company sold three times more sausages that year. The woman in the photograph kept a copy of it on her wall until she died.
She thought it was funny.
Look at these children. They are wearing masks. The masks are huge. They are made of pepier mΓ’e and paint. They are terrifying. The year is the 1930s. The place is the United States. Halloween costumes were not bought in stores. They were made at home by hand, often by the children themselves. Most of the masks were monsters. Some were dead relatives.
Some were celebrities. Children walked doortodoor collecting candy, but they also played pranks. The pranks could be cruel. Burning houses, stealing animals.
The candy was a bribe to keep them from doing worse. That is how Halloween really started.
Look at this woman. Another woman is painting a line down the back of her bare leg. The year is 1941.
The place is London. Silk and nylon were rationed. Every parachute, every uniform, every map needed silk. There were no stockings left for women, so the women painted them on. They mixed gravy browning with water for the color. They drew the seam down the back with eyebrow pencil. From a distance, it worked. Up close, it did not. They did it anyway.
Every morning for 4 years. When real stockings came back in 1946, women lined up for hours to buy them.
Look at these five young women. They're sitting on a giant block of ice on a golf course. They are wearing what passed for athletic wear in 1926. Do three of them are smoking. The block of ice was placed on the course because it was over 100Β° that day. The women paid more than most workers earned in a week to be there. Golf clubs in 1926 did not allow women to play on Saturdays or before noon or in the main clubhouse.
The women in this photograph laughed about it. They beat the men anyway. They never made it into the records.
Look at this woman. She is wearing a Star Wars t-shirt. Her name is Cheryl Lad. The year is 1977.
Two months earlier, the most famous actress on television, Farah Faucet, had quit a show called Charlie's Angels. The network needed a replacement. They picked Cheryl. The press said she would never measure up. She did. The show ran for four more years. Cheryl became famous in her own right. She still acts today. The Star Wars t-shirt was a joke during the photo shoot. The first Star Wars film had come out the same week. No one knew yet what it would become.
Look at this woman. She is leaning against a Lincoln Mark 5. Her name is Katherine O'Hara. The year is the late 1970s. She has just been hired by a small Canadian comedy show called CV Ka.
Most people in America have never heard of her. Within 10 years, she will star in Beetlejuice. Within 20, she will be the mother in Home Alone.
Within 40, she will win an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Shits Creek. None of that has happened yet in this picture.
She is laughing at the photographer. She has no idea what is coming. Almost no one ever does.
Look at this woman. She is 17 years old.
Her name is Susan Dy. The year is 9,970.
A television show had just hired her to play a teenage musician in a family band. The show was called The Partridge Family. It became a hit overnight. Susan became a poster on every teenage bedroom wall in America. She received over 200,000 fan letters in one year. She turned down most of them. She went to college. She became a serious actress.
She walked away from television completely in the 2000s and never came back. She lives quietly now. She prefers it that way.
Look at this woman. She is laughing. She is on a beach. Her name is Jian Carman.
The year is the 1950s. Most people have never heard of her, but she lived three lives. She was a champion trick golfer.
She was a Hollywood pinup model who made the cover of every magazine in America, and she was a close friend of Marilyn Monroe. She told a story for the rest of her life. The day Marilyn died, she said. The phone rang and it was Marilyn calling for help. She did not pick up.
She regretted it for 45 years.
Look at these men. They are gathered around a motorcycle in a factory. The factory is in Milwaukee. The motorcycle is a Harley-Davidson.
The year is the 1920s. By this point, Harley was selling more motorcycles than every other American manufacturer combined. They paid better than the car factories. The workers were proud of what they made. Each motorcycle was testridden by the man who built it. If it failed, he had to fix it himself. The factory ran for almost a hundred years on those rules. The motorcycles in this photograph are still on the road today.
Some of them anyway.
Look at this truck. The sides are painted with the Coca-Cola logo. The year is the 1910s. Two men in suits stand [music] next to it. They are delivering bottles to corner stores in the American South. Coca-Cola had been invented in a pharmacy in Atlanta in 1886. Do by the time of this photograph, it was sold in every state. The original recipe contained cocaine. They had quietly removed it in 1903. Almost no one noticed. The drink became the most recognized brand in the world. It still is today. Hey, more people on earth can recognize the Coca-Cola logo than can recognize a cross.
Look at these 11 people. They are sitting in front of a wooden train car in Germany in 1926. Dutch do. They are circus performers, acrobats, clowns, animal trainers. Two of the women on the right would be killed by the Nazis 10 years later for being Jewish. Two of the men in the back would die fighting on the Eastern front. One of the children would survive the entire war and immigrate to Argentina where she opened her own small circus. We know all of this because someone wrote it on the back of the photograph. Most circus families did not survive the century.
Look at these three women. They are sitting in a room in Britany, France in 1920. They are making lace. The piece in front of them has taken 9 months. It will sell for less than a week's pay in Paris. Lace making was the second largest industry in Britany. Tens of thousands of women did it. Most of them went blind by 40 from the close work.
Their daughters refused to learn the craft. Within 50 years, no one in Britany made lace by hand anymore. The white headdresses they are wearing are still part of regional festivals. Almost no one remembers what the women below them did.
Look at this building. The roof is half finishedish. Cranes and scaffolding rise from the top. The year is 1857.
The place is Washington. The building is the United States capital. The dome on top was being built out of 9 million pounds of cast iron. 3 years after this photograph, the Civil War broke out.
President Lincoln ordered the construction to continue anyway. He said the dome had to keep rising as a sign that the nation would survive. It was finished in 1863 while soldiers were dying at Gettysburg. The dome stood. So did the country. Just barely.
Look at this club. The umbrellas are made of palm leaves. The musicians are dressed in red. The guests are drinking rum. The place is Varadero Kuba. The year is 1946.
American tourists came here by the thousands to escape prohibition, to escape divorce, to escape winter. Cuba was the playground of the rich. Hotels were owned by the American mob.
Hemingway lived a few miles down the coast. Within 13 years, Fidel Castro would seize the country and close every casino. The Americans never came back.
The Castalito Club is still there. The same building, different country, different century.
Look at this street. The buses are red.
The signs are huge. This is Piccadilly Circus London in 1949.
4 years earlier, German bombs had been falling on the same intersection. Four years earlier, the buildings had no glass in their windows because every pane had been blown out. Four years earlier, food was rationed and soap was rationed and meat was rationed. By 1949, London was rebuilding. Slowly, the lights had come back on. The advertisements were lit again. The young people wanted to forget. The old people did not [music] need to. They had lived it. They could not.
Look at this child. He is on a swing.
The swing is hung between two metal posts in a yard. Behind him, smoke stacks rise into the gray sky. The year is 1955. Darin, the place is leadeds England. Half the children in northern England were growing up like this. The factories ran day and night. The smoke turned everything gray. The children played in the soot. Many of them developed asthma. Many of them never knew what fresh air smelled like. The factory in this photograph is gone now.
The houses around it have been torn down. The boy on the swing would be in his 80s. Now look at this menu. It is from a restaurant in Manhattan on January 1st, 1907.
The price for a complete dinner is $1.50.
That bought you oysters, soup, fish, lamb, beef, sherbet, three [music] kinds of pie, ice cream, and cheese. A working man earned about $2 a day. So, the dinner cost most of a day's wages.
[music] But the rich came in the thousands. They drank champagne. They danced. They believed the new century would be the best one yet. 7 years later, the First World War would begin.
The world they were toasting did not survive it.
Look at this advertisement. The year is 1938. A magazine for single women lists the things they are forbidden from doing on a date. Do not use a car mirror to fix your makeup. The sign warns the man needs the mirror to drive. The article goes on, "Do not talk too much. Do not eat too much. Do not laugh too loud. Do not look at other men. Do not order anything expensive." The same magazine that same year told men to bring flowers and pay for everything. None of the rules survived. The photograph did. So did the women who ignored them.
Look at this corner. The sign says Dairy Queen. The year is 1957. The place is Studio City, California. The store had just opened. [music] They gave away free ice cream all weekend. The line went around the block. Children rode their bikes for miles to be there. Dairy Queen had started in Illinois in 1940 with a single store. [music] By 1957, they had over a thousand. The chocolate dipped cone was their most famous [music] product. It was invented because a worker accidentally dipped a cone in melted coating and it hardened. They sold it the same day. They have been selling it for 80 years.
Look at this small structure on a Paris street corner. The year is 1875 Tart.
The structure is a public urinal. They were called Vespigen after a Roman emperor who taxed urine. There were hundreds of them in Paris. The city had no public toilets for women, just for [music] men. The emperor Napoleon III had ordered them built as part of his redesign of the city. By the 1980s, they were almost all gone. The last one in Paris was demolished in 1990. The streets were cleaner. The men had to find somewhere else. The women still had nowhere to go.
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