If you're looking to take a step back to the past, we're here to share a few before and after photos. Whether you live in these cities or hope to visit them one day (fingers crossed), it's amazing to see just how far (or how far backwards) certain places have gone. Over the years, these influential places have seen wars (sometimes at the global scale), pandemics, industrialization, agricultural movements and many more things that changed the landscape and history of a region in such monumental ways that they can't be seen today without looking back at a history textbook.

Times have definitely changed, and it's often difficult to grasp just how much this statement is true without historical photos to prove it. It's impossible to imagine the world all those years ago, so we've picked some of the wildest comparisons that do the work for you, and you'll never look at the same places the same way again. Here are 15 of the most visually striking photographs collected from the subreddit /r/OldPhotosInRealLife.