Which old photographs are incredible and mysterious?

• A 15-year-old girl begins her first day at school. She is greeted by her fellow students and many of their parents, who mock her, call her names, throw trash and stones at her. The girls, encouraged by their parents, spit on her. Dorothy Counts was one of the first Black students admitted to Harry Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina.

• She was the seamstress of Washington DC, her sophisticated, clean dresses designed for an excellent fit, the envy of many. And to her clients, she was often more than a seamstress; she was a dear friend.

• A one-legged mother and her mutilated daughter walk through a Beirut landscape during the Lebanese Civil War, 1985. Photo by Maher.

• Vikki “The Back” Dougan photographed by Ralph Crane, 1958.

• Pompeii, an Italian city, is a preserved ancient Roman city in Campania, Italy, 14 miles (23 km) southeast of Naples, at the southeastern base of Mount Vesuvius. Around noon on August 24, 79 CE, a massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius spewed volcanic debris over the city of Pompeii, followed the next day by clouds of extremely hot gases.

• A painted wooden shabti inside a clay coffin, recently discovered by a Spanish archaeological mission beneath theDjehuty ProjectDating from the 17th or 18th Dynasty. The mission has been working in Dra Abu el-Naga, in the far north of the Theban necropolis, in the West Bank of Luxor, since January 2002.

• A young woman who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima emerges from underground in August 1945.

• First World War recruitment in Trafalgar Square, London, 1914