The First Flight Around the World

On 6th April 1924, four Douglas World Cruisers and eight American crewmen set out from Seattle to attempt the first around-the-world airplane flight. Each was named after an American city (Seattle, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans). Seattle was lost when it crashed into an Alaskan mountain.

Whereever they went, the six airmen “Magellans of the Air” were welcomed royally. They had to avoid the Soviet Union, which had not given permission for the planes to cross but at a luncheon given by the faculty of the University of Tokyo, they are toasted for “being the first of men to connect the two shores of the Pacific Ocean through the sky.” In Shanghai, girls strewed roses before them. In Calcutta, it took 50 policemen to hold back the mob. They proceeded into the Middle East, and Europe. In Vienna, they were surrounded by Kodaks. They arrived in Paris on the Bastille Day, and greeted by “more generals, ambassadors, cabinet ministers and celebrities than we had encountered in all the rest of our lives”, wrote one airman. In London, they were mobbed by photographers and autograph collectors for the police lines had broken.

En route to Iceland, the Boston sunk during a forced landing caused by engine trouble. At Icy Tickle, Labrador, U.S newspapers eagerly awaited the completion of this 175-day journey. The above picture was taken by Acme/UPI photographer Bob Dorman, who beat the other photographers by dropping the photographic plates and negatives into Manhattan’s East River as he and other photographers were flying back from Labrador to New York. His agency recovered the plates (which were smashed by the impact) and negatives (which were intact) before the plane had landed, thus scoring a beat.

The Mohawk Nation Standoff

It was during the Oka Crisis, a land dispute between the Mohawk nation and the town of Oka, Quebec from July to September 1990. It was the first of a number of well-publicized violent conflicts between First Nations (aborigines people) and the Canadian government in the late 20th century. The Mohawk nation had been pursuing a land claim that brought them into conflict with Oka’s golf course expansions.

During this tense standoff with police in Quebec, Canadian Press photographer Tom Hanson snapped a masked Mohawk warrior – arm raised, rifle in hand – standing atop an overturned Sûreté du Québec police van. This photo of land rights campaigner Richard Nicholas, taken on July 11 (just after a police assault to remove Mohawk barriers failed) became the symbol of the land rights movement.

In March 2009, both Hanson and Nicholas died on the same day – and both at the young age of 41. Hanson collapsed playing hockey and Nicholas (whom he never actually met) was killed in a car crash. “To think that the very man who took that picture died on the same day at the same age — how miraculous is it that something like that would happen?” said Nicholas’ cousin and a Kanesatake band chief Sonya Gagnier. “At that pinnacle moment in 1990 they crossed paths, and then they crossed paths again. It’s another pinnacle point–they crossed paths in death.” For Hanson, it was a fitting end to a stellar career launched by the images he captured during the aboriginal standoff.

The Mad Bomber

On November 20th 1912, “Mad Bomber” Carl Warr enters Los Angeles city jail with 60 sticks of dynamite strapped to himself. After an hour, two detectives attack Warr who then pulls the bomb’ s trigger. Nothing happens, and the freakishly masked bomber begs police to kill him. Warr was sensationalized in the press as the Mad Bomber and the next day, this cover ran on Los Angeles Examiner without mentioning his ‘faulty’ fuse.

The Examiner‘s photographer E.J.Spencer was among 10,000 people who banked against police ropes to follow the story. Spencer went into the jail, where he saw Warr sitting in the corner with the infernal machine in his lap. Everyone warned Spencer of the danger, but he carefully placed his plate camera on a chair and made his picture. The coup was so daring that Examiner credited the photographer as seldom has been done; it read “Here is one of the most remarkable newspaper photographs ever published. It was taken by E. J. Spencer, staff photographer of the Examiner, who risked his life to make the picture.”

Shooting of Mayor Gaynor

Mayor William Jay Gaynor, August 9, 1910, moments after being shot in the throat by a disgruntled former City employee. On the left, moving forward to help the mayor is Robert Todd Lincoln, the only surviving son of President Lincoln.On the right is Robert Marsh, grabbing the mayor’s arm to steady him.

The Evening World photographer William Warnecke was on SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse to cover the mayor’s European vacation. At 9:40 am, Robert Anderson, the mayor’s secretary, shouted a warning as an unknown man (later identified as J.J. Gallagher) drew his pistol and pulled it six inches away from the mayor’s head. It failed to go off. The man fired two more shots (which hit Gaynor in the neck and then in the back) before being subdued. As this moment, Warnecke took this picture. He took another photo of the mayor being carried off the ship.

Despite having shot twice, Mayor Gaynor survived. So did his name. The photo appeared on a four-column ‘cut’. Thanks to the great newspaper man Charles Chapin (Bill Warnecke, as the tradition with many photographers of the day, went uncredited) the name of obscure mayor [Gaynor was a political outsider, never even having set foot in City Hall until the day of his inauguration] was written into history by this one great photo.

James Meredith shot

First African-American student at the University of Mississippi, James Meredith was a reviled figure. During a voter registration march (the March Against Fear) for the African-Americans on June 6th 1967, he was ambushed by the white supremacists who shouted, “I just want James Meredith!” The sniper fire by Aubrey James Norvell hit him in the head, neck, back and legs.

A novice photographer for AP, Jim Thornell was on the scene for the voter registration march and he took two rolls of pictures. He then drove back to Memphis in a panic, convinced he would be fired for failing to photograph both the assailant and the victim. Minutes passed before an ambulance reached Meredith, who lay in the road alone, shouting “Isn’t anyone going to help me?”. The photo (and the event itself) was a flash point in the American civil rights movement. It united and galvanized the scattered civil rights movement. The photo won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in 1967.

Meredith himself survived, and made several attempts to be elected to Congress as a Republican. Increasingly conservative, he accused liberal whites of being “the greatest enemy” of African Americans, opposed economic sanctions against South Africa and making Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.

The Rosenbergs Trial

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, separated by heavy wire screen as they leave U.S. Court House after being found guilty by jury.

Labeling Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as spies is still a matter of debate. Some alleged they are the victims of antisemitism, some that they are framed by a hostile, fear-mongering government. The two were the first–and the only–civilians in United States history to be executed for conspiracy to commit espionage in 1953. Charged with allegedly sharing information about the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union, their death sentences prompted massive public outcry. “Do not let this crime against humanity take place,” wrote Pablo Picasso. Their ‘fellow leftists’ were led by Jean Paul Sartre who wrote “you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb.” Even Pope Pius XII requested a pardon for the couple from President Eisenhower, to no avail. Guilty or not, the Rosenbergs died in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison on June 19, 1953.

In 2008, 91-year old Morton Sobell, an erstwhile co-defendant in the famous espionage trial, finally admitted that he and his friend, Julius, had both been Soviet agents. It was a stunning admission as the Rosenberg’s offspring Robert, then-6, left, and Michael, then-10, still believe their parents were not guilty.

The photo of Rosenbergs was taken by Roger Higgins for New York World Telegram. The younger Rosenbergs photo is of AP.

When he says ‘jump’….

Peter Pan star Mary Martin

Grace Kelly                                                                        Architect Walter  Gropius

Peter Ustinov                                                                  Audrey Hepburn

Artist and curator Edward Steichen                                  Painter Marc Chagall

Marilyn Monroe                                                                   Comic Filmmaker Jacques Tati

Photographer Weegee                                            Television host Bill Cullen

Halsman’s Jumpology

Phillippe Halsman had 101 Life covers to his credit when he died in 1979 by his greatest passion has been to photograph jumping people. In 1959, he published Philippe Halsman’s Jump Book (below), which contained a tongue-in-cheek discussion of jumpology and 178 photographs of celebrity jumpers.

Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis                                                 English Actress Hattie Jacques

Brigitte Bardot                                                                     Elenor Ford (Mrs. Edsel Ford)

Bob Hope                                                                                    John Steinback

Colette Marchand                                                                Salvador Dali

Halsman with Monroe                                                      Marilyn Monroe for LIFE

Judge Learned Hand                                                                Aldous Huxley

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor                                                   British Labor Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell

Dr. Robert Oppenheimer Maurice Chevalier

Margaret Thatcher opens Torness

The last of the nation’s second generation nuclear power plants to be commissioned, Torness at Dunbar in East Lothian, Scotland was not a very popular venture. Although the construction was approved before the conservatives and Thatcher came to power, the completion of Torness (which along with Hunterston would provide half of Scotland’s electricity eventually) not only finalized the political and social transformations Thatcher brought to the United Kingdom but also marked the end of the social turmoils that plagued England in the 70s and the 80s

In 1978, when Torness construction was greenlit, 4,000 people marched from Dunbar to occupy the site. Coincidentally on the day, Thatcher became PM, there were protests at Torness too. People numbering in thousands protested Torness (whose disapproval ratings hovered around 50 percent) throughout the 80s, but on 13th May 1989, when Thatcher opened that plant, only 150 demonstrators were on hand to protest. Britain had moved on from a country of complainers and protesters. Thatcher dedicated, “Nuclear is very good – not only as an alternative source of power, it is also very environmentally conscious and it is very safety conscious.” Deeply distrusting coal miners and Arab oil sheiks, Mrs Thatcher was an ardent advocate for nuclear power. She wanted to build 10 plants, one a year but by the time she published her nuclear White Paper in 1981, this plan had been scaled back to five, at an indefinite rate. In the end only one was finished 15 years later at Sizewell.

The photographer Rod Fleming took this picture of Thatcher for Scotland On Sunday. Because of the controversial nature of the plant, the Prime Minister’s minders had pushed the journalists and photographers as far away as possible. The PM was touring the site and she finally looked up at the assembled photographers who had been shoved onto a tiny platform above the containment unit. “Would you like a picture?” said she, and when the photographers agreed, she stretched her arms and asked, “Will that do?”.

The Stalin Monument Toppled

Built as the birthday present to Stalin on his 70th birthday (December 21st 1949), the Stalin Monument in Budapest has became the iconic scene of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.

The 25-meter, Socialist realism statue was torn down in October 1956 at the onset of the uprising. On October 23rd, Hungarians broadcasted sixteen demands over the radio, one of them being the dismantling of Stalin’s statue. A hundred thousand Hungarian revolutionaries demolished the Stalin statue, leaving only his boots, in which they planted a Hungarian flag. The bronze inscription, saying Stalin was the Hungarians’ leader, teacher and “best friend”, was ripped off from the pedestal. Before the toppling of the statue–an hour public spectacle involving steel ropes, oxygen cylinders and metal cutting blowpipes–someone had placed a sign over Stalin’s mouth that read “RUSSIANS, WHEN YOU RUN AWAY DON’T LEAVE ME BEHIND!” The revolutionaries chanted “Russia go home!” while pulling down the statue. Insulting remarks were scrawled over the fragmented parts of the statue.

Although the Uprising was quickly crushed by the Soviet authorities, the images of the toppled statues became a haunting precursor to what would happen all over the Eastern Bloc thirty years later.

Images of a smaller Stalin destruction in Budapest:

Challenger Explodes

On January 28, 1986, after about 73 seconds into its launch, space shuttle Challenger exploded, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members, which included the first teacher in space. The Challenger’s crew was honored with burials at Arlington National Cemetery. It was the first such tragedy in shuttle history–but sadly not to be the last.

President Reagan postponed his annual State of the Union Address for a week and instead gave a national address on the disaster from the Oval Office. A 32-month hiatus in the program followed, along with the Rogers Commissions, which found that O-rings which failed in the extremely cold and wet conditions of that fateful January day were to blame for the accident. However, the plans Rogers Commission recommended to NASA for its management structure and organizational culture were not followed or properly implemented, thus leading to another shuttle disaster mismanagement in 2003.

The Death of Ohnesorg

It was the year of political turmoil all over the world. But average students in Germany would never have been moved to action to participate in the 1968 protest movement were it not for one iconic photo taken on 2nd June 1967.

Above image of a woman cradling the head of a slain unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement that transformed conservative West Germany into the progressive country it has become today. It became a chief justification for violence by terrorist groups but it was influenced a left-wing movement (Movement 2 Juni) named after the day of his death, and a large number of German politicians who were in their teens and twenties at the time.

The police officer who delivered the fatal shot, Karl-Heinz Kurras admitted that the shooting the demonstrator, Benno Ohnesorg of was an accident. Although it had been recently revealed that Mr. Kurras was in the pay of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, it is not clear whether Stasi ordered him to shoot Ohnesorg or Kurras’ act was indeed accidental. However, Kurras was cleared of all charges in two separate trials.