31 Rare Historical Photos You Had No Idea Even Existed

While this perspective makes for a powerful image, it obviously doesn't capture the blasts' terrifying scope to those on the ground at the time. This is what makes this photo of the atomic cloud rising over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 so devastating. The blast pictured here would soon kill at least 75,000 people.

Here, we see a lesser known photo worth popularizing: Armstrong back in the module just after making history, the whole story written right there across his face.

Taken in 1826 or 1827 by French photography pioneer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, this image used a unique process known as heliography. First, Niépce set his camera to an eight-hour exposure over a pewter plate coated with asphalt. He then wiped away the areas of the asphalt not hardened by sunlight to reveal a primitive photograph.

To see Lincoln out in the real world and towering over his peers is another thing altogether. Pictured: Lincoln stands on the battlefield at Antietam, Maryland with Allan Pinkerton (the famed military intelligence operative who essentially invented the Secret Service, left) and Major General John A. McClernand (right) on October 3, 1862.

Pictured: Tesla sits near his firing transmitter in his Colorado Springs laboratory, 1899.

Yet the samurai, long after their medieval rise, persisted into the late 19th century, by which time the camera could document them. This photo was taken in 1860, around 15 years before the reformist government abolished this warrior class.

Kneeling beside Kennedy on June 5, 1968 is a waiter named Juan Romero, who happened to be shaking the senator's hand when assassin Sirhan Sirhan fired the fatal bullets.

This photo (entitled "Into the Jaws of Death"), on the other hand, brings the event to life by offering the perspective of Allied soldiers about to storm the beaches and make history.

Fought in and around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania between July 1 and July 3, 1863, the battle saw nearly 8,000 people killed and turned the Civil War in favor of the Union. All totaled, Gettysburg was the costliest battle ever fought in the U.S. Partially titled "A harvest of death," this image begins to reveal that cost.

Images of a haggard Hussein post-capture made headlines around the world, but the photos of the actual capture largely didn't. Here, we see just that: Iraqi-native-turned-American-translator known only as Samir holds Hussein to the ground just after U.S. forces discovered him.

This July 1888 photo reveals a rare glimpse of the tower under construction, 15 months into the process and still nine months away from completion.

On June 17, 1885, those crates reached the U.S. and the great unboxing began. Pictured: The statue's face not long after removal from its crate.

While other images of exploding ships provide a sense of the chaos, this image, with stunned soldiers in the foreground, brings the true scale and anarchy of that destruction into focus.

Yet amid that pandemonium, at least one photographer managed to capture a stark, evocative image that reveals the $10 billion destruction.

Not only is this just one of two confirmed photographs of the famous painter (and the only one of him post childhood), this photo provides a jarring look at the actual visage of a man we tend only to envision by way of his famous self-portraits.

Four days later, on April 19, the nation mourned as funeral marchers made their way down Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C.

Here, we can see police arrest the man who "started it all" just after the assassination. (Some scholars say that this photo actually depicts the arrest of an immediate bystander initially mistaken for Princip.)

Indeed, with bold colors and an enormous Reichsadler, it was a scene of spectacle when Hitler addressed the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin on December 11, 1941 to declare war on the U.S.

Unlike Booth, they failed to follow through. Like Booth, they were eventually captured and killed. On July 7, 1865, four of the plotters — Mary E. Surratt, Lewis T. Powell, David E. Herold, and George A. Atzerodt — died at the end of a rope in Washington, D.C.

The 1878 photo here, however, presents Billy the Kid (left) in relative clarity, playing croquet with his posse, the Regulators, in New Mexico.

Pictured: Soldiers wait outside the court house in Appomattox as the higher-ups work out the official terms of surrender.

Of the images that have survived, many portray Armenians being rounded up for execution. Fewer show the brutal reality of those executions. Pictured: An Armenian woman kneels beside her dead child in Aleppo, Syria, circa 1915-1919.

In spite of our familiarity with Edison's inventions, it's rare to see the genesis of those inventions themselves. Pictured: Thomas Edison unveils his phonograph in Washington, D.C. on April 18, 1878.

On December 29, 1890, U.S. troops followed orders to disarm Native Americans they'd forcibly relocated to a camp near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. Accounts vary, but most say a scuffle started after one Lakota refused to give up his rifle. In the end, more than 400 troops killed as many as 300 Lakota men, women, and children, and wounded another 50. The regiment then buried the Lakota in a mass grave (pictured).

Pictured: Bones at the site of Custer's Last Stand in the aftermath of the battle.

However scarce, these images provide a glimpse into a period when dysentery and malaria were the norm and food was so scarce that salt was worth its weight in gold. Pictured: Miners at work, circa 1899.

This mass migration likewise saw about 300,000 settlers head to California in a move that would shape American history far more than you'd think. Indeed, if not for the influx of people, the accompanying development of San Francisco, the Transcontinental Railroad, and the state of California itself might very well look a lot different. Pictured: A prospector pans for gold in the American River of California's Sacramento Valley, circa 1850.

It's likewise hard to believe that a moment so antiquated was actually captured — with terrific clarity, no less — on film.