For me colour photographs provide a fascinating perspective and radically different angle on historical events. They evoke the age when they were taken with a forcefulness of a 1000 words. Notwithstanding the fact that the photographs have been colourised, they nevertheless still radiate their patina of age as if they had been weathered by the elements themselves.
View this array of photos and let me know whether you concur
Main picture: Madison Square Park New York City around 1900
A meeting of Charlie Chaplin by Hellen Keller in 1918
A stunning picture of actress Audrey Hepburn
Albert Einstein who conceptualised the equivalence of energy and matter in his formula E=MC2
An Oklahoman farmer during the great dust bowl in 1939
Burger flipper in 1938
Charlie Chaplin in 1916 at 27 years of age
Claude Monet, the Artist, in 1923
Elizabeth Taylor is stunning in this photograph taken in 1956
Girls delivering ice in 1918
Louis Armstrong playing for his wife in 1961
The sultry & seductive Marilyn Monroe
The German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught on fire and crashed in 1937
Times Square in 1947
Union soldiers taking a break in 1863
W.H. Murphy testing the bulletproof vest in 1923
Winston Churchill epitomised the bull dog tenacity and the fighting spirit of the British during WW2
Personally all of them are gems whether they are portraying a stunning female form or Union troops in the American Civil war, the effect is the same.