If you think you know your history, get ready to be amazed. Keeping you old big books aside, what’s better than looking at your history through photographs.

A picture is worth a thousand words, it’s true because putting a strong moment into words is very hard, especially when those moments come about after looking other people in times of complete loss and despair.

The rare photos below show a different angle of historical events, and you probably wouldn’t find them in any school textbook.

#01. Testing a bulletproof vest, 1923

#02. Samuel Reshevsky, age 8, defeating several chess masters at once in France, 1920

#03. The 2800 year old kiss

#04. A V-1 flying bomb “buzzbomb” plunging toward central London, 1945

#05. The molten radioactive core after the Chernobyl accident. Known as the “Elephant’s foot”

#06. A picture of 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters taken by serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades shortly before he murdered her

#07. Gadget, the first atomic bomb

#08. The last picture that was taken of the Titanic before it sank

#09. General George S. Patton’s dog on the day of Patton’s death on December 21st, 1945

#10. Control room of the UB-110 German submarine, 1918

#11. 1963 – JFK’s funeral in the Capitol Building.

#12. Young Winston Churchill, 1895

#13. Gas masks for babies tested at an English hospital, 1940

#14. A politician in the Philippines Reynaldo Dagsa photographs his own assassination

#15. Laughing at Auschwitz – SS auxiliaries poses at a resort for Auschwitz personnel, 1942

#16. The last Jew in Vinnitsa, 1941

#17. 1989 – East German soldier passing a flower through the Berlin Wall before it was torn down.

#18. USAAF B-25 sinks Japanese destroyer Amatsukaze off the coast of Xiamen, China, 6 April 1945

#19. 1912 – The first World Series Game in New York.

#20. Illegal picture inside the Supreme Court. A man faked a broken arm and hid a camera in his cast

#21. Execution of a German Communist in Munich, 1919

#22. Einstein’s desk photographed a day after his death

#23. Nazis singing to encourage a boycott of the allegedly Jewish-founded Woolworths, 1933

#24. The first photograph upon discovery of Machu Picchu, 1912

#25. Annual midnight swearing-in of Nazi SS troops, Feldherrnhalle, Munich, 1938

#26. Underwater detonation of 15 kiloton nuclear weapon

#27. U-118, a World War One submarine washed ashore on the beach at Hastings, Sussex, England

#28. Using banknotes as wallpaper during Hyperinflation, Germany 1923

#29. An illegal picture atop the Giza pyramids in Egypt

#30. The Cologne cathedral stands tall amidst the ruins of the city after allied bombings, 1944

#31. Turkish official teasing starved Armenian children by showing bread during the Armenian Genocide, 1915

#32. Henry Ford receiving the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Nazi officials, 1938

#33. Two German soldiers and their mule wearing gas masks in WWI, 1916

#34. Using a traditional Japanese blade, 17-year-old Otoya Yamaguchi assassinates socialist politician Inejiro Asanuma in Tokyo, Japan

#35. Archduke Franz Ferdinand with his wife on the day they were assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, 28 June 1914

#36. Germans testing a Messerschmitt Bf 109 E3, 1940

SHARE these amazing historical events with your friends and family. NEXT? Look at Most Powerful Photos Ever Taken.