A worker cleans a dragon ahead of the upcoming Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations at the Boen Tek Bio temple in Tangerang, Banten province, Indonesia February 1, 2016. (Photo by Reuters/Beawiharta)

“Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 – April 12, 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer, and actress. Nicknamed the “Bronze Venus”, the “Black Pearl”, and even the “Créole Goddess” in anglophone nations.

Baker was the first African American female to star in a major motion picture and to integrate an American concert hall, and to become a world-famous entertainer. She is also noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States (she was offered the unofficial leadership of the movement by Coretta Scott King in 1968 following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, but turned it down), for assisting the French Resistance during World War II and for being the first American-born woman to receive the French military honor, the Croix de guerre”.

Photo: American entertainer Josephine Baker in costume for her famous “banana dance”. Baker was an overnight sensation when she arrived in Paris in the mid-1920s. (Photo by Walery/Getty Images)

Pilgrims ride their horses on their way to the shrine of El Rocio in Villamanrique, Spain, on Saturday, June 4, 2022, during the annual pilgrimage in which hundreds of thousands of devotees of the Virgin del Rocio converge in and around the shrine. (Photo by Joan Mateu Parra/AP Photo)

A young girl splashes through a waterfall at a park in Washington, DC, on June 28, 2021, as a heatwave moves over much of the United States. Swathes of the United States and Canada endured record-setting heat on June 27, 2021, forcing schools and Covid-19 testing centers to close and the postponement of an Olympic athletics qualifying event, with forecasters warning of worse to come. The village of Lytton in British Columbia broke the record for Canada's all-time high, with a temperature of 46.6 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit), said Environment Canada. (Photo by Jim Watson/AFP Photo)

A young Ukrainian woman wears an ear of grain braid during a traditional Ukrainian celebration of Kupalo Night, in Warsaw, Poland, on Saturday, June 22, 2024. Ukrainians in Warsaw jumped over a bonfire and floated braids to honor the vital powers of water and fire on the Vistula River bank Saturday night, as they celebrated their solstice tradition of Ivan Kupalo Night away from war-torn home. (Photo by Czarek Sokolowski/AP Photo)

Visitors throw colored powder over each other as they attend the 9th annual festival Day of India in Moscow, Russia, 15 August 2024. The festival Day of India is a colorful celebration of Indian culture. The event kicked off on India's Independence Day and will continue until 18 August 2024. India declared its independence from British rule on 15 August 1947. (Phoot by Yuri Kochetkov/EPA)

In the spring of 1965, within weeks of 3,500 American Marines arriving in Vietnam, a 39-year-old Briton named Larry Burrows began work on a feature for LIFE magazine, chronicling the day-to-day experience of U.S. troops on the ground – and in the air – in the midst of the rapidly widening war. The photographs in this gallery focus on a calamitous March 31, 1965, helicopter mission; Burrows’ “report from Da Nang”, featuring his pictures and his personal account of the harrowing operation, was published two weeks later as a now-famous cover story in the April 16, 1965, issue of LIFE.

Photo: Man your battle stations: The crew chief of helicopter Yankee Papa 13, lance corporal James C. Farley, mans an M-60 machine gun during a mission near Da Nang, Vietnam on March 31, 1965. (Photo by Larry Burrows/Time & Life Pictures)

A new book of photos by legendary photographer Weegee shows what industrialized, pre-gentrified New York looked like in the mid-20th century, before the city was crammed with towers and billboards. Here: this combination shows the 1945 photo “Derelict sleeping on the sidewalk outside police headquarters” by Weegee, provided by the International Center of Photography in New York, and a woman walking on the same spot on Wednesday, March 18, 2015. (Photo by AP Photo/Copyright Weegee/The International Center of Photography, Mark Lennihan)