Photo Essays
‘Take off the Silk, Put on the Khaki’: America’s First Women Soldiers, 1942
In light of recent reports of rampant sexual violence against women in America’s armed forces — with an estimated 26,000 cases of unwanted sexual contact last...
Winston Churchill at Leisure: LIFE Portraits of the Private Man
On May 10, 1940, as Hitler’s Germany was invading Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, the British Conservative leader Winston Churchill took the reins of a...
Strangers to Reason: LIFE Inside a Psychiatric Hospital, 1938
For all of the lighthearted and often downright frivolous material that appeared in LIFE through the years — and there was, thank goodness, a lot of...
Women of Steel: LIFE With Female Factory Workers in World War II
The character of “Rosie the Riveter” — as feminist symbol, World War II icon and mid-century heroine — is so ingrained in the American psyche that it’s sometimes...
World War II in Color: American Bombers and Their Crews, 1942
Within weeks of the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s official entry into the Second World War, Allied forces in Europe activated the...
LIFE Behind the Picture: Skull on a Tank, Guadalcanal, 1942
In February 1943, LIFE magazine published a series of photographs from Guadalcanal — the largest of the Solomon Islands and the site of the Allies’ first,...
LIFE in WWII: Photos From the North African Campaign, 1943
So many World War II battlefields have been immortalized in histories, memoirs, novels and films that the names alone can conjure stark and stirring images for...
Hitler at 50: Color Photos of a Despot’s Birthday
We do not usually give so much space to the work of men we admire so little. So began a remarkable editor’s note to LIFE’s readers in an April 1970 issue of the...
After Pearl Harbor: LIFE in the Pacific and on the Homefront
President Franklin Roosevelt declared December 7, 1941 — when Japan launched more than 350 fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes against the U.S. naval base at...
American Atrocity: Remembering My Lai
Through the centuries, whether combatants have fought with spears, bows and arrows, muzzle-loading rifles, naval cannons, long-range bombers, nuclear weapons or...
LIFE at the Liberation of Paris: A Photographer’s Story
In the long, cruel struggle of World War II, opportunities for jubilation were scarce. But even among the era’s handful of “wish you were there” moments — the...
Shock Value: Inside Paris’ Grand Guignol Theater, 1947
Haunted houses are, of course, a Halloween staple. Ghosts, ghouls, pirates (why pirates?) and other assorted creatures pop out from beneath floorboards, hang...
Blast From the Past: Photos From the 1944 Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius
The most storied volcano on earth, Italy’s Mount Vesuvius looms above the Gulf of Naples like an unpredictable god. The story of the mountain’s 79 AD eruption...
LIFE in Korea: Rare Photos From the ‘Forgotten War’
In Korea, it’s known as the “6-2-5 (yug ee oh) War,” a reference to June 25, 1950, when the North Korean People’s Army invaded the South. Among North Koreans,...
LIFE in the Korean War: Classic Photos by David Douglas Duncan
Few people have lived as long, as varied and as complete a life as David Douglas Duncan. And certainly no photographers ever enjoyed a longer, more varied or...
LIFE With Marlon Brando: Early Photos of the Acting Legend
The year was 1949, and 25-year-old Marlon Brando — “the brilliant brat,” as LIFE magazine called him following his astonishing work on Broadway in A Streetcar...
Inside a Nazi Christmas Party, 1941
The images are chilling, bordering on surreal: On December 18, 1941, as World War II rages and the horrors of the Third Reich’s “final solution” grow ever...
World War II: Pictures We Remember
LIFE.com presents some of the greatest pictures made by LIFE photographers during the Second World War — searing, memorable images from the streets of...
LIFE in the Middle East: Photos From Syria in 1940
The ongoing chaos and violence that have come to define the Syrian civil war — a war that has now raged for close to two years, with no signs of abating — not...
LIFE at the Battle of the Bulge: Photos From Hitler’s Last Gamble
From mid-December 1944 through the end of January 1945, in the heavily forested Ardennes Mountains of Belgium, thousands of American, British, Canadian, Belgian...
