Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary Who Reached Top of Mount Everest, May 28 1953

After years of dreaming about it and seven weeks of climbing, New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Tenzing Norgay reached the top of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, at 11:30 a.m. on May 29, 1953. They were the first people to ever reach the summit of Mount Everest.

Color Photographs of Daily Life in USSR in 1958

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The World in Color Photographs in 1923

Here's a collection of wonderful color photographs of the world in 1923.

Sacred place for bathing in the Ganges river in Varanasi, India.

Taj Mahal, India

Coffee time on the shores of the Golden Horn, Constantinople (now Istanbul)

General view of the Golden Horn in Constantinople.

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Early Color Photographs of Africa and the Middle East From the 1910s

Albert Kahn’s photographic archive is a mesmerizing record of human history.

In 1909, the french banker Albert Kahn began his Archives of the Planet, a project as ambitious as its title suggests. During the next 22 years—and spanning a world war—Kahn sent a fleet of photographers to more than 50 countries around the globe to create a visual record.

Today, the archive is housed at the Musée Albert-Kahn, located in the financier’s former garden estate in suburban Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. His collection of 72,000 perfectly preserved color autochromes documents a world on the verge of the modern era. Snippets of history we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in sepia tones are pictured in vivid color.

A self-made man, Kahn built his fortune on investments throughout the French Empire and beyond. The philanthropic impulse to create the Archives of the Planet grew out of his pacifist beliefs. According to David Okuefuna, author of The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet, Kahn hosted weekly salons at his estate, where politicians, businessmen, and academics discussed international affairs over cigars. But Kahn wanted to do more than talk. Introduced to the autochrome in 1908, he found his mission in its technology. As a stand against war, he documented the rich cultural diversity of the world.

Auguste and Louis Lumière, the same brothers who pioneered cinematography, developed the autochrome process. To create color images, each varnished glass plate was coated with microscopic grains of potato starch—each tiny bit dyed red-orange, green, or blue-violet, with black shading the in-between spaces. The equipment was expensive, fragile, and heavy, which made the journeys taken by Kahn’s photographers (across oceans and continents) all the more remarkable.

From Albert Kahn’s photographic archive, here are some extraordinary color photographs of Africa and the Middle East from the 1910s.

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Incredible Photographs Capture Teenager Melanie Griffith and Her Family Hanging Out With Their 'Pet' Lion in 1971

When Griffith was a teenager, her actress mother, Tippi Hedren, and her stepfather, director Noel Marshall, decided they wanted to make a film about big cats after returning from a trip to Africa and seeing them in person. An animal trainer suggested they get to know them better by living with a lion, so they ended up taking Neil into their home.

The star also confessed it was “stupid beyond belief” to treat the 400lb beast like a domestic pet as it could have killed her or her family at any time.

In a series of vintage photographs, taken when Griffiths was just a teen, the bizarre home life of Hedren and her then husband Noel Marshall is catalogued and shows them sharing their LA house with the giant feline, who was called Neil.

While her family were never harmed by Neil, one night he attacked his owner Ron Oxley during a dinner party for British guests at their home. The pair ‘battled it out’ for dominance in the kitchen, with the lion snarling and batting at the man with a huge paw. Oxley tried to regain control by raising his hands and arms threateningly. Neil eventually tossed his head and mane in surrender, making subdued muttering noises, and the pair marched out of the house.

Their extraordinary experience with Neil lulled them into a false sense of security which was to have disastrous, almost fatal, consequences.

Indeed, after she, Melanie and the rest of their family suffered a string of serious injuries inflicted by the big cats they went on to adopt after Neil, Hedren has turned full circle in her attitude to such exotic pets.

Now she runs a sanctuary, California’s Shambala Preserve, for some 32 big cats, and is an outspoken critic of the practice – still legal in much of the U.S. – of keeping them as domestic pets. As an activist she was successful in lobbying Congress to pass a 2003 bill ending the traffic between states of big cats.

She is now trying to push through another bill that will stop the breeding of these animals for personal exploitation or their sale as pets.

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20 Fascinating Vintage Photographs That Capture Everyday Life in Paris From Between the 1910s and 1940s

Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) was a French photographer and painter noted for the spontaneous, joyful photographs he took beginning in his boyhood and continuing throughout his life. Lartigue’s boyhood photographs were almost always candid images taken of his family and friends.. Lartigue studied painting at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1915 to 1916 and would always consider himself a painter first and foremost. It was nevertheless as a photographer that he would establish his reputation.

In the 1910s and 1920s Lartigue enthusiastically photographed such subjects as automobile races, fashionable ladies at the seashore and the park, and kite flying. These photographs, with their informal approach to everyday subjects, reveal his free spirit and love of life, rather than a concern for photographic technique and craft, and often capture a sense of movement. He generally worked in black and white, but during this period he also experimented with the recently developed Autochrome color process, which satisfied his painterly interests. In the 1930s and ’40s he continued to capture images of middle-class leisure that, like his earlier images, display a charm and joy that is detached from the traumas of world war.

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Streets of Arizona in 1970

Cars moving along congested street, littered with signs, billboards and traffic directives.

(Photos by Michael Rougier, via LIFE Photo Archive)