contemporary photographs

An Israeli soldiers turns back a pair of elderly Palestinian ladies, looking like ghosts from a long gone past, from the wall dividing the West Bank

The face of this Palestinian boy shows the terror of watching an Israeli gunship attack on the village of El-Khader, in the West Bank, on November 2000.

The al Aqsa mosque, in Jerusalem, was finished in 691, making it one of the earliest Muslim monuments. It is today a national symbol for Palestinians. This picture is a century old.

Reagan and Gorbachev put an end to the Cold War. It was a process of reciprocal concessions and the two chiefs of state met each other in various venues, including, as in this photo, in Moscow, the cathedral of St. Basil in the background.

Mao's cultural revolution was directed not only against people who were considered anti-revolutionary but also at China's most precious past. Here, in 1969, a young Maoist sledge-hammers to pieces a carved gate to a shrine to Confucius near Qufu, his birthplace in Shandong province.

A soldier of the victorious Red Army raises the Soviet flag over the Reichstag building in destroyed Berlin (May 1945).

The Japanese were determined to defend their occupation of the Philippines to the last man. The loss of the Philippines was seen as the base for the assault on the home islands of Japan. Japanese marines occupied the historical center of Manila and went on a killing spree before the Americans arrived. The battle for Manila went on ferociously in February 1945. American commanders were not willing to take unnecessary losses. In this photo a Sherman tank crashes one of the gates to the Spanish colonial fortress inside which the Japanese refused to surrender.

Robert Capa's photograph of a Spanish republican militiaman's last instant is the most dramatic testimony to dying in warfare as well as proof that Capa was perhaps the greatest war photographer ever. It was taken in the Cordoba front 1936 during the Spanish Civil War.