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On 24 August 1942, six hundred Jews from Limburg received a summons from the Dutch police, municipal police, or a local constable. They were all under the age of sixty and were ordered to report the following day at the assembly point near the public school on Professor Pieter Willemsstraat in Maastricht. Only half of…
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There are moments in history when the violence of an age becomes concentrated into the life of a single human being. Emmett Louis Till was fourteen years old when that happened to him. He was a child from Chicago who travelled south in the summer of 1955 to visit relatives in Mississippi. He arrived carrying…
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It is funny sometimes how you are researching one thing and it leads you to something completely different.I was looking at the origin of a Dutch TV show called ‘Ter land.ter zee en in de lucht” which translates to on the land, in the sea and in the air. It was a light-hearted entertainment show…
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On August 28, 1830, an extraordinary contest took place on the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) in Maryland. It was not a conventional horse race, nor was it a competition between two locomotives. Instead, a living horse found itself competing against one of the most remarkable inventions of the Industrial Revolution: Peter…
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Jehovah’s Witnesses, known in early 20th-century Germany as the Bibelforscher (“Bible Students”), held convictions—refusing military service, political involvement, and allegiance to secular powers—that directly conflicted with the Nazi totalitarian state. Their religious neutrality and international ties led to widespread persecution from 1933 to 1945, making them one of the most persistently targeted religious groups under…
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It is Sunday evening—you turn on the radio and the news breaks that planet Earth is invaded by Mars. So what do you do? You panic, of course. Well, that was the case for many when they switched on the radio on 30 October 1938. By the end of October 1938, Welles’s Mercury Theatre on…
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Some people who read my blog regularly, might think this is an odd piece. However, aside from history my other passion is music, and specifically guitar music I do play guitar myself. The history of the guitar is rich and spans several millennia, evolving through different cultures and technological advancements. Here’s an overview of its…
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“Going Dutch”is a term that indicates that each person participating in a paid activity covers their own expenses, rather than any one person in the group defraying the cost for the entire group. The term stems from restaurant dining etiquette in the Western world, where each person pays for their meal. It is also called…
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Limburg is the southernmost province of the Netherlands, sharing its name with the neighbouring Belgian province of Limburg. During the Second World War, it became one of the first parts of the Netherlands to be liberated by Allied forces. By the end of September 1944, the entire province had been liberated, although the fighting continued…
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In general, I have some level, albeit low, of sympathy for those who chose to collaborate with the Nazi regime in the Netherlands because maybe they felt it was the only way to survive. However, I have no sympathy for the Nederlandse Landwacht. They were in it for their own greed and hungered for power.…
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History of Sorts 