23 Beautiful Colourised Images From The 20th Century

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, commonly known as FDR, was an American statesman and political leader who served as the President of the United States from 1933 to 1945. A Democrat, he won a record four presidential elections and dominated his party for many years as a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic depression and total war. His program for relief, recovery and reform, known as the New Deal, involved a great expansion of the role of the federal government in the economy. As a dominant leader of the Democratic Party, he built the New Deal Coalition that brought together and united labor unions, big city machines, white ethnics, African Americans, and rural white Southerners in support of the party. The Coalition significantly realigned American politics after 1932, creating the Fifth Party System and defining American liberalism throughout the middle third of the 20th century.

Two brothers meet for a Christmas reunion after having been separated by the Berlin Wall (at this point only two years old). It was the first meeting of East/West relatives allowed by the East German government following the wall’s construction. West Berlin – 1963

Unemployed men hanging out on the street in San Francisco, California (April 1939).

Execution of SS concentration camp physician Eduard Krebsach who was convicted of war crimes at the Mauthausen trial. Krebsbach was an SS concentration camp physician who initiated the mass execution of ill and unfit prisoners by heart injections.
Krebsbach often inspected the prisoners and conducted selections for execution. A former inmate recalled Krebsbach’s actions during such an inspection: “As the senior SS doctor in the camp, Dr Krebsbach sometimes came to block 5 and had the still surviving Jews paraded before him. He then asked if any of them were doctors. If there were, he would say: ‘You Jewish pig, you’re just an abortionist.’ The next day they were done away with by the kapos. If a Jewish inmate was lying on the floor with a broken limb – a not uncommon occurrence at work – he was usually thrown over a wall by a kapo. If Dr Krebsbach were passing, he would say ironically: ‘Yes, this broken foot is a hopeless case.’ “Josef Herzler, former Mauthausen inmate”
Dr. Krebsbach´s career at KZ Mauthausen-Gusen ended when he shot Josef Breitenfellner, a soldier from Langenstein who served in the German Army. Krebsbach shot this vacationing young man at his private home, because he and his friends disturbed Krebsbach in the night of May 22, 1943.

Broad Street, New York, 1905.

James Byron Dean (February 8, 1931 – September 30, 1955) was an American actor. He is a cultural icon of teenage disillusionment and social estrangement, as expressed in the title of his most celebrated film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), in which he starred as troubled teenager Jim Stark. The other two roles that defined his stardom were loner Cal Trask in East of Eden (1955) and surly ranch hand Jett Rink in Giant (1956). Dean’s enduring fame and popularity rest on his performances in only these three films.
Dean’s premature death in a car crash cemented his legendary status. He became the first actor to receive a posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and remains the only actor to have had two posthumous acting nominations. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him the 17th best male movie star of Golden Age Hollywood in AFI’s 100 Years…100 Stars list.

Grace Patricia Kelly (November 12, 1929 – September 14, 1982) was an American actress who, after marrying Prince Rainier III, became Princess of Monaco.
After embarking on an acting career in 1950, at the age of 20, Kelly appeared in New York City theatrical productions and more than 40 episodes of live drama productions broadcast during the early 1950s Golden Age of Television. In October 1953, she gained stardom from her performance in the film Mogambo. It won her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination in 1954. She had leading roles in five films, including The Country Girl, for which her deglamorized performance earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress. Other films include High Noon (1952) with Gary Cooper, Dial M for Murder (1954) with Ray Milland, Rear Window (1954) with James Stewart and To Catch a Thief (1955) with Cary Grant, and High Society (1956) with Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.
Kelly retired from acting at the age of 26 to marry Rainier and began her duties as Princess of Monaco. They had three children: Caroline, Albert, and Stéphanie. She retained her American roots, maintaining dual U.S. and Monégasque citizenship. She died on September 14, 1982, a day after suffering a stroke while driving, causing her to crash.

The Banality of Evil: British ID photographs of Bergen-Belsen guards awaiting trial at Celle in August 1945. Herta Ehlert was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.

2 am February 12, 1908. Papers just out. Boys starting out on morning round, New York.

At the German concentration camp at Wobbelin, many inmates were found by the U.S. Ninth Army in pitiful condition. Here one of them breaks out in tears when he finds he is not leaving with the first group to the hospital.

Alphonse Gabriel “Al” Capone (January 17, 1899 – January 25, 1947) was an American gangster who attained fame during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit. His seven-year reign as crime boss ended when he was 33 years old.

In this poignant photograph, people at Times Square in New York City are seen reading a news ticker about D-Day (Normandy landings), the largest seaborne invasion in history. D-Day occurred on 6 June 1944 when Allied forces targeted a 50-mile (80 km) stretch of Normandy, France to begin the invasion of German-occupied western Europe.
The coast was divided into five sectors: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword Beach; and eventually led to the liberation of France from Nazi control, and contributed to an Allied victory in the war.
The photo itself was taken by either Howard Hollem, Edward Meyer or MacLaugharie on the morning of 6 June 1944 and is available through the Library of Congress.

Spanish Civil War

August 1911. “Arthur Chalifoux (4th boy from left), 3 Rand St. North Adams, Massachusetts. Works in Eclipse Mills.” Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine

Blanket covered body of a US paratrooper killed in action near Ste Mere-Eglise in the days following the Allied invasion of Normandy, aka D-Day. June 7, 1944. Photographer: Bob Landry

Gen Dwight D. Eisenhower gives a friendly smile to three German youngsters who were watching as the SHAPE commander’s Jeep drove past their elementary school. Eisenhower was inspecting French troops taking part in Operation Jupiter, an exercise in which an allied force of 150,000 men and 30,000 vehicles crossed the Rhine River. In the back seat is Lt. Col. (later Gen.) Vernon Walters, Eisenhower’s translator, who would go on to become U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and West Germany and deputy director and acting director of the CIA, among many other accomplishments. In his book The Stars and Stripes: World War II & The Early Years, former Stripes editor Ken Zumwalt identified the three boys as Roland Imhof, Guenter Koop and Guenter Kohlross. In 1983, the German newspaper Bild Zeitung tracked them down and interviewed them.
“We immediately recognized Gen. Eisenhower when the jeep stopped,” recalled Imhof, who was working as a technician at a hotel in 1983. “We were always seeing him in German newsreels. So we knew who he was. He asked how we were and an American took the photographs.” The photographer wasn’t exactly an American, though. Henry Toluzzi was a Swiss army veteran who joined Stars and Stripes after working for the U.S. Army Special Services. Zumwalt reported that Toluzzi later worked for NBC News and eventually retired to life on a boat in Australian waters.

Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist, now known as the father of psychoanalysis. Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1881, and then carried out research into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy at the Vienna General Hospital. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology in the same year and became an affiliated professor (professor extraordinarius) in 1902.

Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower (October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961, and the last U.S. President to have been born in the 19th century. He was a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe. He was responsible for planning and supervising the invasion of North Africa in Operation Torch in 1942–43 and the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45 from the Western Front. In 1951, he became the first Supreme Commander of NATO.

The Kennedy family is an American family of Irish descent who are prominent in American politics, government, and business. The wealth and glamour of the family members, as well as their extensive and continuing involvement in public service, has elevated them to iconic status over the past half-century, with the Kennedys sometimes referred to as “America’s Royal Family”.

Lee Oswald Portrait. He was the sniper who assassinated John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, on November 22, 1963. According to five U.S. government investigations, Oswald shot and killed Kennedy as he traveled by motorcade through Dealey Plaza in the city of Dallas, Texas.

Jacqueline Lee “Jackie” Kennedy Onassis (July 28, 1929 – May 19, 1994) was the wife of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and First Lady of the United States during his presidency from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. Five years later, she married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis; they remained married until his death in 1975.

Mugshot of Albert Stewart Warnkin and Adolf Gustave Beutler
Albert Stewart Warnkin is listed in the NSW Police Gazette of 10 November 1920, as charged with attempting to carnally know a girl eight years old. No entry is found for Beutler, whose picture is inscribed ‘wilful and obscene exposure’. This picture is one of a series of around 2500 “special photographs” taken by New South Wales Police Department photographers between 1910 and 1930. These “special photographs” were mostly taken in the cells at the Central Police Station, Sydney and are, as curator Peter Doyle explains, of “men and women recently plucked from the street, often still animated by the dramas surrounding their apprehension”. Doyle suggests that, compared with the subjects of prison mug shots, “the subjects of the Special Photographs seem to have been allowed – perhaps invited – to position and compose themselves for the camera as they liked. Their photographic identity thus seems constructed out of a potent alchemy of inborn disposition, personal history, learned habits and idiosyncrasies, chosen personal style (haircut, clothing, accessories) and physical characteristics.”

Monet’s ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883 Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house and property, and began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best-known works. In 1899 he began painting the water lilies, first in vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature, and later in the series of large-scale paintings that was to occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life.

Lyndon Johnson meeting with civil rights leaders.
The Civil Rights Movement or 1960s Civil Rights Movement, sometimes anachronistically referred to as the “African-American Civil Rights Movement” although the term “African American” was not used in the 1960s, encompasses social movements in the United States whose goals were to end racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans and to secure legal recognition and federal protection of the citizenship rights enumerated in the Constitution and federal law. The leadership was African-American, much of the political and financial support came from labor unions (led by Walter Reuther), major religious denominations, and prominent white politicians such as Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon B. Johnson.