50 Rare Photos From History In Color. Now You Can See What Things Actually Looked Like.

Up until the 1970s, color photography was rare. Thus, our vision of history is so often in black and white only. Rare colorized historical photos are our only chance at seeing what the world really looked like…and, boy, was it spectacular.

Claude Monet in 1923

Brigadier General and actor Jimmy Stewart

Stewart flew 20 combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, and even flew one mission during Vietnam.

Pablo Picasso

Lou Gehrig, July 4, 1939

Photo taken right after his famous retirement speech. He would pass away just two years later from ALS.

Times Square 1947

Lee Harvey Oswald, 1963

Oswald being transported to questioning before his murder trial for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Hellen Keller meeting comedian Charlie Chaplin in 1918

Girls delivering ice 1918

Burger Flipper 1938

Winston Churchill 1941

Albert Einstein in 1921

Madison Square Park New York City around 1900

Marilyn Monroe

Samurai Training 1860

American Poet Walt Whitman, 1868

Hindenburg Blimp crash

British Soldiers Returning from the front in 1939

Joan Crawford on the set of Letty Lynton, 1932

Country store in July 1939. Gordonton, North Carolina

Mark Twain in 1900

Albert Einstein on a Long Island beach in 1939

Audrey Hepburn

Union Soldiers taking a break 1863

Charles Darwin

World War 2 soldiers on Easter

Clint Eastwood, 1962

W.H. Murphy testing the bulletproof vest in 1923

Charlie Chaplin at 27 years old in 1916

Elizabeth Taylor in 1956

Big Jay McNeely, Olympic Auditorium, 1953

Louis Armstrong practicing backstage in 1946

Red Hawk of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on horseback, 1905

Babe Ruth’s 1920 MLB debut

A Washington, D.C. filling station in 1924

Boys buying flowers in 1908

An Oklahoman farmer during the great dust bowl in 1939

Louis Armstrong plays to his wife, Lucille, in Cairo, Egypt 1961

Brooklyn Bridge in 1904T

Two Boxers after a fight

1920s Australian mugshots from the New South Wales Police Dept

Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield

Brothers Robert Kennedy, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy outside the Oval Office.

Clint Eastwood working on his 1958 Jag XK 120 in 1960

Cornell Rowing Team 1907

View from the Capitol in Nashville, 1864

Baltimore Slums, 1938

Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels scowls at a Jewish photographer, 1933

Henry Ford, 1919

An RAF pilot getting a haircut while reading a book between missions.

Unemployed Lumber Worker and His Wife 1939

Alfred Hitchcock

A car crash in Washington D.C. around 1921

People standing in line Louisville, Kentucky 1939

President Lincoln with Major General McClernand and Allan Pinkerton at Antietam in 1862