The Images That Define American History

Jun 24, 2026 - 08:08

Buzz Aldrin stands on the moon beside a American flag during the Apollo moon landing, July 20, 1969.

1. The moon landing
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” and perhaps the defining image of U.S. history, a potent symbol of American ingenuity, persistence, and power. The photo originally titled Destitute Pea Pickers in California. Mother of Seven Children. Age Thirty-Two. Nipomo, California, also known as Migrant Mother, taken 1936 by Dorothea Lange

T-2. Migrant Mother
Dorothea Lange’s 1936 classic—depicting a 32-year-old mother of seven surrounded by two of her children and with an infant in her lap, her brow furrowed with resignation and uncertainty—is an image that became synonymous with the desperate poverty facing Americans during the Great Depression.

T-2. Raising the flag at Iwo Jima (at top)
An AP photographer captured this iconic image atop Mount Suribachi in February 1945. Before the year was out, it was on a postage stamp and had won the Pulitzer Prize. Iconic painting of George Washington stands at the bow of a boat crossing the Delaware River, surrounded by soldiers rowing through fog and floating ice.

4. Washington Crossing the Delaware
Seventy-five years after the fact, German American painter Emanuel Leutze memorialized George Washington’s Christmas night raid across the ice-choked and storm-sieged Delaware River in one of the nation’s most famous paintings. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. waves to the massive crowd gathered at the National Mall during the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.

5. MLK leading the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
The enduring image of a quarter-million people surrounding the reflecting pool and watching a Black preacher deliver a historic speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial celebrates the best of America. A massive mushroom cloud rises high into the sky over Nagasaki, Japan, following the detonation of the atomic bomb, August 9, 1945.

T-6. Mushroom clouds over Japan
The explosive aftermath of the dropping of two atomic bombs by the United States over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 is a fraught symbol of strength and terror, power and horror. Nine-year-old Kim Phúc running naked and screaming after a napalm attack, on a road in Trang Bang, Vietnam, 1972.

T-6. The Terror of War
Also known as Napalm Girl, this 1972 photo depicts nine-year-old Kim Phuc running naked, along with other children, from a napalm attack. It captured the horror of the war the United States was waging in Southeast Asia. A formerly enslaved man displays his bare back, covered in scars from repeated whippings, in a portrait taken in Louisiana, c. 1863.

T-8. The Scourged Back
This early 1863 photograph, which received broad attention when published in Harper’s Weekly, exposes the brutality of slavery in a way words never could.

T-8. The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World)
The 305-foot-tall symbol of America’s role as a beacon of democracy and freedom has welcomed countless immigrants to our shores since its dedication in 1886. Mourners pay respects at the open casket of Emmett Till at his funeral in , with his mother standing by his head. Chicago, September 1955

T-8. Emmett Till in his casket
Two white Mississippians kidnapped and savagely murdered this 14-year-old. Till’s mother elected to display his nigh-unrecognizable body in an open, glass-topped coffin—and then Jet magazine published photos of him. The nation could not look away. Elizabeth Eckford, wearing a white dress, walks calmly carrying her schoolbooks while a hostile crowd of white students including Hazel Bryan jeer at her outside Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, September 4, 1957.

T-8. Little Rock Nine photo of Hazel Bryan screaming at Elizabeth Eckford
The hate-filled Bryan and stoic Eckford instantly became the contrasting faces of school desegregation in 1957 Little Rock, Arkansas. Norman Rockwell's painting entitled The Problem We All Live With , depicts six-year-old Ruby Bridges in a white dress walking to school escorted by four U.S. Marshals, past a wall splattered with a thrown tomato and racial slurs.

T-8. Ruby Bridges integrating New Orleans schools
Six-year-old Ruby just wanted to go to school, but in 1960, she needed federal marshals to get past screaming white protesters. She made an indelible impression photographically, and then in Norman Rockwell’s 1964 illustration for Look magazine, The Problem We All Live With.

T-8. Eugene “Bull” Connor releasing dogs on and fire-hosing civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama
Connor, the city’s commissioner of public safety and a rabid segregationist, took issue with young people protesting in Birmingham. He didn’t count on the media beaming images of the brutality to the rest of the country.

T-14. American Progress by John Gast
It “once represented unabashed notions of manifest destiny, then came to encapsulate for many the hubris of settler colonialism,” Calvin University’s Kristin Kobes Du Mez noted. Is it any surprise that Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security now uses it as a recruiting tool?

T-14. 9/11 images
No American who was alive can forget the scenes from September 11, 2001.

T-16. Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull
Trumbull’s masterwork took more than three decades to complete as he tried to get each of the Founders’ faces correct. The "QAnon Shaman" pictured wearing a horned fur hat, face paint and carrying an American flag, shouting inside the U.S. Capitol in the first moments after the mob breached the building on January 6, 2021.

T-16. January 6
No amount of Trump revisionism will remove this stain from our history, as he rallied supporters to violently halt the peaceful transfer of power. Mary Ann Vecchio kneels over the body of over a student's body on the ground, screaming in anguish, after Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University campus, May 4, 1970.

T-16. Kent State
Mary Ann Vecchio’s face captures the anguish and outrage that would sweep the country when Ohio National Guardsmen shot 13 students, killing four, who were protesting the Vietnam War and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. A grainy black-and-white photograph of the presidential motorcade at the moment of President Kennedy's assassination in in Dallas, November 22, 1963.

T-19. JFK in Dallas, November 22, 1963
That day in Dallas was a demarcation point for a generation of Americans—afterward, the country’s very path seemed to drift into darkness.

T-19. Bloody Sunday/Selma March
1965’s “Bloody Sunday” saw 600 marchers on their way to Montgomery, Alabama, attacked and brutalized by law enforcement officers after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, yet another shock to the nation’s conscience in the civil rights era.