History Untold

What began as a peaceful fishing trip off the coast of Deal, New Jersey, turned into one of the most astonishing ocean encounters of the 1930s. On August 26, 1933, New York silk merchant A.L. Kahn hooked something so massive and powerful that he and his crew battled it for nearly three hours before even the U.S. Coast Guard was called in to help.

When the creature was finally brought to the surface, the crowd stood in disbelief. It was a giant manta ray measuring over 20 feet across and weighing more than 5,000 pounds — one of the largest ever recorded in northeastern U.S. waters. Newspapers across America published photographs of the enormous sea giant, capturing stunned onlookers gathered beside the unbelievable catch.

During the depths of the Great Depression, Kahn later had the manta ray preserved and displayed it to the public for 10 cents a viewing, drawing huge crowds eager to witness one of the ocean’s most mysterious giants with their own eyes.

The story remains a remarkable reminder of how little humanity truly knows about the hidden world beneath the sea — and how an ordinary day on the water can suddenly become history.

Honor King: End Racism!" 🕊️
On April 9, 1968, over 100,000 people filled the streets of Atlanta to say a final goodbye to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This powerful photograph captures the grieving crowd waiting outside Morehouse College, holding onto his message of nonviolence, equality, and justice. Decades later, the call to action on that sign still rings true. ✊🏾✨

Honoring History: April 8, 1968 🇺🇸🕊️
Four days after the tragic assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., African American soldiers stationed in Da Nang, Vietnam, gathered for an emotional memorial service.
Captured by legendary Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams, this powerful image shows servicemen holding hymnals as they mourned the fallen civil rights icon. During the service, the base chaplain beautifully eulogized Dr. King as “America's voice for the wisdom of nonviolence.”
Even while serving on the front lines thousands of miles away, these brave soldiers stood in solidarity with the movement for justice and equality happening back home.

A moment frozen in grief. 🖤 On April 5, 1968, mourners gathered at the R.S. Lewis & Sons Funeral Home in Memphis to pay their final respects to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This powerful image captures the quiet shock and profound sorrow of a nation that had just lost its leading voice for peace and equality.

On April 7, 1968, just three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., grief poured into the streets of America.

In Harlem, thousands of mourners marched together beneath American flags and city buildings, their faces carrying the shock, anger, and heartbreak that followed the murder of the nation’s most prominent civil rights leader. Across New York City, churches overflowed, streets filled with silent processions, and Central Park became the site of one of the largest memorial gatherings in the country.

Dr. King had been assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had traveled to support striking sanitation workers demanding dignity, fair wages, and safer working conditions. He was only 39 years old.

The days that followed were filled with mourning unlike anything the United States had seen in decades. More than 100 cities erupted in unrest and protest, while millions of Americans struggled to process the loss of a man who had become the moral voice of the Civil Rights Movement.

Yet amid the national turmoil, scenes like this one in Harlem revealed another side of the moment: ordinary people walking together in sorrow, remembrance, and quiet determination.

Many carried church programs, flowers, or signs calling for peace. Others simply came to stand beside strangers who shared the same grief. The memorial service held in Central Park drew enormous crowds from every borough, turning the city into a place of collective mourning.

For many Americans, King’s death felt like the end of an era. But the crowds that filled the streets in April 1968 also reflected the movement he helped build — one larger than any single person, carried forward by countless ordinary citizens who refused to let his message disappear with him.

This photograph captures more than a march.
It captures a nation mourning in public.
#1968

He lost the most powerful job on Earth at 56.
Then he spent the next four decades proving that power was never the point.

Born in the tiny town of Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter grew up without luxury, raised by parents who believed service mattered more than status. He became a Naval Academy standout, served in America’s elite nuclear submarine program under Admiral Hyman Rickover, and seemed destined for a life of prestige and command.

Then his father died.

At 28, Carter left his military career behind and returned home to save the family peanut farm. He lived in public housing, managed warehouses, and spent years serving on local school boards, hospital committees, and community organizations — quietly learning the needs of ordinary people long before he ever entered the White House.

He lost races. He kept going.
He shook hands with thousands of Georgians, won the governorship, and in 1976, the man the country called “Jimmy Who?” became President of the United States.

His presidency unfolded during one of America’s hardest eras: inflation, the energy crisis, the Iran hostage crisis, and global instability. He lost re-election in a landslide, and many believed history had already written its verdict.

But history wasn’t finished with Jimmy Carter.

Before leaving office, he brokered the historic Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, normalized relations with China, championed human rights, and showed the world that diplomacy could matter more than force.

Then came the chapter that truly defined him.

While most former presidents pursued wealth and celebrity, Carter went back to work. In 1982, he and Rosalynn Carter founded the Carter Center, helping monitor elections, fight disease, and nearly eradicate Guinea worm disease from the planet.

And year after year, he picked up a hammer.

Through Habitat for Humanity, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter spent decades building homes alongside volunteers — not for cameras, not for headlines, but because they believed everyone deserved dignity and shelter.

Even at 95 years old, after a bad fall that left him with fourteen stitches and a black eye, Carter showed up at a Habitat build site the very next morning.

“ I had a Number One priority,” he said. “And that was to come build houses.”

In 2002, he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
He went back to building houses.

In 2015, cancer spread to his liver and brain. He faced it with gratitude, survived treatment, and kept serving others.

Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, at 100 years old — the longest-lived president in American history.

But what made him unforgettable was never the office he held.

It was what he chose to do after the applause faded.

He could have spent the rest of his life being important.
Instead, he chose to be useful.

He didn’t spend his final decades chasing power.
He spent them showing up.

And somehow, that became the greatest legacy of all.

Grief had shaped Mrs. Mahalia Doyle’s life long before the world ever knew her story. Born in 1855 on Roan Mountain, Tennessee, her name appeared in old census records with different spellings—Mahala, Haley—but to the people of the Appalachian hills, she was simply “Aunt Hal.”

At just seventeen, she married Thomas Doyle and began the hard life familiar to many mountain women of the era: endless labor, bitter winters, and the constant fear of losing children to illness. Between 1873 and 1895, Mahalia gave birth to thirteen children—and buried every one of them. Scarlet fever, influenza, dysentery, and sudden infant deaths swept through isolated communities where doctors were scarce and survival was never guaranteed.

After the death of her sixth child, the sorrow became almost unbearable. Some say she stopped giving formal names to the babies she feared she might also lose. Near the spring behind her small cabin, thirteen smooth river stones marked the resting place of her children and the heartbreak she carried every day.

Then came October 1918. The Spanish flu pandemic reached even the remote hollows of the Appalachian Mountains. Entire families fell ill within days. Mothers and fathers died suddenly, leaving helpless infants with no one to care for them. One by one, desperate neighbors climbed the steep trail to Aunt Hal’s cabin carrying babies wrapped in blankets, begging her for help.

By the end of the month, seventeen orphaned children filled her tiny home.

Mahalia was sixty-three years old. She had no electricity, no running water, little food, and almost no strength left of her own. Yet she refused to turn anyone away. She borrowed a neighbor’s goat to feed the infants, boiled water over an open fire, and tied baskets beside her bed so the smallest babies would not fall while she slept—though for nine straight days, she barely slept at all. Through the long nights, she sang softly to calm frightened children while death lingered outside her cabin door.

When a doctor finally reached the mountain cabin and asked if anyone there had died, Aunt Hal reportedly answered with quiet exhaustion:

“All but me.”

Against every expectation, every single child survived.

As winter passed and the flu wave faded, surviving relatives slowly returned to reclaim the children. Families carried home sons and daughters who might never have lived if not for one grieving woman who chose compassion over despair. A local preacher later recorded the children’s names in the church ledger beneath a single line:

“Saved by Aunt Hal.”

Mahalia Doyle died in 1942 at the age of eighty-seven. At her funeral stood seventeen grown adults whose lives existed because she had opened her door during one of history’s darkest moments. Her cabin is gone now, and the trail to the spring has nearly disappeared into the mountains, but her story remains—a reminder that even after unbearable loss, the human heart can still find room to love again.

On April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final speech in Memphis — the unforgettable “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” In haunting words, he acknowledged the threats against him and spoke as though he sensed what was coming next.

The following evening, King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. His death shocked the nation, but the sanitation workers’ struggle did not end. Coretta Scott King and thousands of supporters marched in Memphis days later, carrying forward his mission.

On April 16, 1968, the city finally agreed to recognize the workers’ union and grant raises to Black employees — a hard-won victory born from sacrifice, courage, and the demand for human dignity.

In the final days of World War II, as N**i Germany collapsed around them, more than 33,000 prisoners were forced out of Sachsenhausen Death March and driven northwest on what became one of the war’s last great death marches.

On April 21, 1945, SS guards ordered nearly all remaining prisoners to leave Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Only around 3,000 sick prisoners were left behind. The marching columns, often 500 people at a time, were told to head toward Schwerin and Lübeck with almost no food — just a loaf of bread and a piece of sausage meant to last for weeks.

Anyone too weak to continue risked ex*****on.

Soviet POWs and Jewish prisoners were often shot first if they fell behind. The march stretched 10 to 25 miles a day through freezing nights, starvation, disease, and exhaustion. Thousands collapsed along the roadsides and were killed where they fell.

One of the most horrific atrocities occurred on April 22 near the village of Below. More than 200 prisoners unable to continue were forced into nearby woods, where SS guards opened fire with machine guns. Their bodies were left where they fell in what became known as the Below Forest massacre.

Three days later, local farmers discovered the site. Soviet troops later forced residents to bury the dead.

The suffering continued across northern Germany. Near Crivitz on April 24, around 300 prisoners were reportedly locked inside a barn and burned alive. By the time Soviet forces liberated the remaining march columns between April 29 and May 3, survivors were skeletal, many weighing barely 70 to 80 pounds.

When Soviet and Polish troops entered Sachsenhausen itself on April 22–23, they found the 3,000 abandoned sick prisoners along with mass graves containing more than 12,000 bodies.

Of the more than 200,000 people imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 died through ex*****on, starvation, forced labor, disease, and medical abuse.

After the war, the camp was used by the Soviet NKVD as Special Camp No. 7 until 1950, imprisoning former N**is as well as political detainees. Today, parts of the site remain preserved, including the “Station Z” ex*****on area and the mass killing trench — stark reminders of how brutality continued even as the Third Reich itself was collapsing.

Today we honour the life and legacy of Dame Jools Topp — musician, comedian, activist, and one half of the beloved Topp Twins.

For more than four decades, Jools and her sister Lynda brought laughter, music, and fearless honesty to generations of New Zealanders while standing at the forefront of some of Aotearoa’s most important social movements. From the occupation at Takaparawhau Bastion Point in 1978 to anti-apartheid protests, nuclear-free demonstrations, and homosexual law reform marches in the 1980s, the Topp Twins used both their voices and their platform to stand up for justice.

The photographs in our collection capture those moments where artistry and activism became inseparable — performances at rallies, concerts, and demonstrations where songs like *Paradise* and *Untouchable Girls* became anthems of visibility, courage, and solidarity.

Jools leaves behind an extraordinary legacy in the cultural and social history of Aotearoa and will be remembered for her warmth, humour, bravery, and unwavering belief in standing up for what matters.

Moe mai rā.

Photos in order:
• Topp Twins performing at Artists Against Apartheid concert, Maidment Theatre, 1982. Photographer: Gil Hanly. Ref: PH-2015-2-GH214-31A
• Topp Twins performing at Concert for Rainbow Warrior, Mt Smart Stadium, Auckland. Photographer: Gil Hanly. Ref: PH-2015-2-GH1274-61
• Topp Twins performing country & western bracket at Classic Cinema, Queen Street. Photographer: Gil Hanly. Ref: PH-2015-2-GH1581-36A

The 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike drew the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who saw the workers’ struggle as part of a larger fight against economic injustice. Invited by Reverend James Lawson, King traveled to Memphis to support the strike and connect it to his growing Poor People’s Campaign.

Speaking before thousands, King reminded the nation that all labor has dignity:
“Whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity… it has worth.”

But tensions rose during a March 28 protest when violence erupted after outside agitators infiltrated the march. Even amid criticism and threats against his life, King returned to Memphis determined to continue the cause.