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Picture Perfect

Can you believe everything you see? Photographs from newspapers and magazines are a common source of evidence for historians. This puzzle asks you to determine what three apparently very different news photos have in common.


What do these three apparently very different photographs of news events have in common?



A man in a suit gestures while speaking from a raised wooden platform to a dense crowd gathered in a public square, with a domed building visible in the background.

Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin addresses Soviet troops in Moscow in 1920
Black-and-white photograph of doctors and nurses in surgical gowns gathered around a patient on an operating table in an early twentieth-century hospital operating room.

Movie idol Rudolph Valentino undergoes surgery in 1926.
Two men in suits stand close together in a black-and-white photo, one gesturing with his hand near the other's chin as they talk intently.

Earl Browder, general secretary of the American Communist Party, confers with Senator Millard E. Tydings (D. Maryland) in 1950.


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