Yep, that's a 26-year-old Adolf Hitler looking stoked that his country is going to war, or possibly asking people if they like his new mustache. He's two decades away from hijacking the nation into Nazism and leading them into an even more devastating global conflict.

Altona-Behrenfeld, 1933
You can't see his legs, but judging from that haircut, he must have been wearing cigarette jeans.

The photo was taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, who would go on to become Hitler's personal photographer. In 1932, Hitler visited Hoffmann's photo lab and mentioned that he was in the 1914 Odeonsplatz crowd. Hoffmann looked in his negatives and, sure enough, found a face that could only belong to the future Fuhrer.

Hoffmann Collection, U.S. National Archives
"Or Charlie Chaplin. But most likely the Fuhrer."

Recently, German historians have put the authenticity of the photo in doubt, claiming that Hoffmann could have faked it to shut up critics who questioned his boss' patriotism. While we wouldn't put something like that past Hitler, those guys will excuse us if we don't trust the historians in a country where half the children still don't know what Nazism was.

If someone posted this image in your Facebook feed, you'd probably glance at it for half a second and assume that it's a completely normal photo of two guys running in the park (even though they have some perfectly good bikes right in front of them that they could use instead). However, once you look at the background, two odd little details stand out. The first one, of course, is that there are tanks coming from the upper right corner:

Where's the Tiananmen Square Tank Man when you need him?

So, despite the first guy's amused expression, these guys aren't just jogging: They're escaping from tanks. The second, even more significant detail is the lone man who can be seen between the trees behind Chuckles here -- a lone man standing in the middle of the street, carrying two grocery bags, in front of some tanks.

"The gypsy lady said that when the time came, I would know what my nickname means."

Yes, that's the (still unknown) dude from the famous photo of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, seconds before he planted himself before a bunch of tanks sent to disperse protesters and forced them to stop there for an awkwardly long time.

Wikipedia
"So, uh, what mileage do you get from these things?"

The photo was taken by Reuters correspondent Terril Jones, who figured that no one would care about it once he noticed that someone else had photographed the same situation from a far better angle. Jones didn't publish the photo until 2009, after reading a New York Times retrospective on Tank Man, but the most mind-blowing part is that it shows how deliberate the unknown man's actions were. He didn't just cross the street one day and run into some tanks -- he saw them coming a mile away and intentionally stayed there to block their passage.

Meanwhile, this dude was probably looking for the nearest bathroom.

Even with the red circle and all, it's still hard to understand how the next Saddam Hussein could be in this picture, since not only does it look fairly recent, but these seem like average, happy children having fun. In case you haven't guessed it yet, the kid in the circle is Kim Jong Un, the current "Dear Leader" of North Korea, a communist regime that, yes, still murders its citizens whenever it feels like doing so and labels them as "war criminals" for so much as talking on a cellphone.

As it turns out, in his teenage years, Kim Jong Un was sent to Switzerland for schooling. From 1996 to 2001, he studied and made friends with classmates who were unaware of his true identity. At that point the only thing Kim cared about was playing basketball and, given the time frame, possibly his namesake from the Power Rangers.

Esquire.com

Nationofchange.org
It's the exact same face, give or take a few chins.

In 2001, "Pak Un," as his friends knew him, simply didn't show up to school one day, and they didn't see him again until about 10 years later, when North Korea's then-ruler Kim Jong Il died and his successor turned out to be a guy they went to school with. That should make the next class reunion awkward, whether he shows up and kills a bunch of people or not.

You can probably tell, just from the lustful look on the face of every woman (and some of the men) present in this picture, that they are looking at president John F. Kennedy. In fact, this picture was taken while Kennedy was giving a speech at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, the same day he was shot and killed.

So what crazy detail are we looking for here? Lee Harvey Oswald waving from a window? The Illuminati? Nope, but check out the little kid in the back:

Hint: Upon learning what happened to the president, he started yelling "Game over, man! Game over!"

Look familiar? If you've seen Aliens, Twister, Apollo 13, Titanic or Aliens (no one's seen it just once), then it damn well should, because that's freakin' Bill Paxton at age 8.

Getty
We feel it would be criminal not to remind you that he was Chet in Weird Science.

On the day of Kennedy's assassination, little Billy Paxton's brother convinced their dad to take them to see the president talk. Apparently Paxton's dad wasn't a huge fan of civic acts, because in the photo the kid is actually sitting on the shoulders of some guy he'd never met. Here's another angle:

Roy Cooper Collection, Dallasobserver.com
Paxton was 8 feet 10 inches tall by age 9.

Paxton even has the photos himself -- you know, just in case anyone asks him to provide an alibi for that day. And speaking of presidents ...

As it happens, on the day when Washington sat for the portrait that would go on to show up on your money, he was wearing a spare set of dentures because his usual ones were broken. In a letter to his doctor, he begged him to fix his other dentures quickly because these "are both uneasy in the mouth and bulge my lips out in such a manner as to make them appear considerably swelled."

"My friends will think Martha has been hitting me again."

Washington withstood the torture and sat in front of artist Gilbert Stuart for hours because his wife had personally commissioned the portrait ... and in the end, it was all for nothing, because Stuart intentionally left the painting unfinished so he could keep it in his studio and use it to make duplicates that he'd sell for big bucks. That's how the painting became so popular despite never being finished, and as a result we now think of our first president as being considerably more big-mouthed than he really was.

The above photo from 1838 is a perfect example of this: It's just another lame-ass black-and-white street with no one in it -- except for that one guy getting his shoe shined. See him? Here he is zoomed up:

Gah, it's Slender Man! Start punching!

The image was taken by Louis Daguerre, who probably didn't think it would gain notoriety 170 years later when a blogger would point out that it was the first photo of a human being ever taken, even if he looks more like some sort of shadow creature. Another blogger created a colorized version where you can see him much more clearly:

Lunarlog.com
This was a complicated process, because as you know they hadn't invented color back then.

The identity of the first man to be photographed, of course, is unknown. How much did he pay for the shoeshine? Was he making a duck face when the picture was taken? Sadly, we'll never know.

If you asked us what's so amazing about this picture of an 1886 baseball team, we'd simply point out the obvious: This was taken at a classier time when men wore top hats to the stadium and 18 out of 24 baseball players had objectively awesome mustaches. However, look closely at the man in the upper left corner -- more specifically, at what he's telling you to do with his hand:

"Suck it, future boy."

That's legendary pitcher Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn in the first known instance of someone giving the finger to the camera. Seriously, if there's an earlier picture of this gesture, no one has found it -- how many of you even knew that old-timey people flipped each other off just like we do? We always figured they went straight to dueling each other.

Radbourn was a fairly popular player in the 1880s, and is still the only pitcher in the history of Major League Baseball to win 60 games in one season. Heck, he even had his own baseball card:

"A pack a day keeps me strong and fit!" Anyway, he died at age 43.

Wait, what's he doing with his ...?

"And you suck it, too, even-further-in-the-future boy."

Holy shit, he's the second person to flip off a camera, too. You know what, maybe his fingers were frozen like that -- which makes sense, considering that Charley Hoss, as the other players called him, is apparently where the term "charley horse" comes from.