Some of these we’ve seen, some not. There’s some really good ones, including childhood pics of Hitler, bin Laden, young Bill and Hillary, Che Guevara possibly taking a bong hit, etc.
I love this kind of stuff.
Being Argentinian, he’s drinking mate, the national drink. It’s traditionally sipped from a gourd using a metal straw. Here’s another photo.
My historical photo threads often don’t garner much attention, so I took artistic liberties with that picture…plus with his long hair, Guevara goatee and his slant-eyed expression he looks kinda stoned…
(I honestly didn’t know it was a traditional drink, but I didn’t really think it was a bong either)
Interesting that Shatner is missing from the Shuttle photo. And that shit-brown polyester leisure suit … hoo-boy! Why-oh-why did anyone ever dress like that?!? :smack:
Personal aside: The place where the plane crashed in Moscow is now a huge intersection of (as I recall) four different thoroughfares. The language school where I used to teach is just up the hill and around the corner from it.
If it was a “traditional, national drink,” odds are it was pretty powerful in any case! :o
Wow. Thank you for that. I really enjoyed all the photos, even the less cheerful ones. Those with famous (or infamous) figures as children really make you think - I mean, right now the next legendary President or world changing musician or psychotic maniac is happily swinging on some monkey bars . . .
I wonder if the photos of Custer and the Mississippi steamboats were hand-colored or experiments with new technology. These pictures blew me away when I first saw them ten years ago:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html
That Hillary was a cute little bit o’ stuff back in the day, eh? 
Here is another link with the entire Prokudin-Gorskii collection. The pictures are nothing short of stunning!
I’d seen one of those photos before, the one from the San Francisco Earthquake, in a book about the quake.
That photo of Mussolini’s headquarters in Rome creeps me out big time.
Can someone interpret Einstein’s report card (third photo from the top)? Does “G” stand for “GOTT IN HIMMEL IS THIS GUY SMART!?!”?
They’re not "G"s, they’re sixes. Students were graded on a numerical scale; presumably, 3 (the grade he got in French) is average, while 6 (which he got in Math and Physics) is beyond excellent.
In the States, he would have gotten C and A+.
The other grades are
German Language and Literature … 5
English … NA
Italian … 5
History … 6
Geography … 4
Chemistry … 5
Natural History … 5
Art … 4
Technical Drawing … 4
I prefer this version of the Einstein photo. The guy on the left was my grandfather. The photo you liked was in his house for years.
“Stalin goofing around”
Immediately after the picture was taken, he had the photographer shot, and his family sent to the Siberian gulag.
Just ‘goofing around.’
“The only photograph of a living Quagga from 1870.”
According to Wikipedia, there were 5 photos. They have two more pictures.
If you can’t trust random websites for facts, who can you trust? 
Yeah, that’s a really weird picture.
One of my favorites in the collection is the one with the liberated Jewish prisoner holding a rifle to the back of a captured Nazi soldier. Talk about poetic justice.
For some reason, I liked seeing that Einstein’s desk was a cluttered mess. Kind of like his hair.
I thought the same thing. I also thought that if someone like the maid or something cleaned it up and organized it that he wouldn’t have been able to find anything.
“Where’s my napkin with e=mc2 on it? It was just right here!”