August 2026
-
In 1964, Heineken, one of the world’s most renowned beer companies, ventured into a groundbreaking project that fused sustainability, innovation, and corporate social responsibility. This initiative, led by Heineken’s visionary chairman Alfred “Freddy” Heineken, sought to address two pressing global issues: housing shortages in underprivileged regions and the environmental problem of waste from discarded beer…
-
Noor Inayat Khan, a descendant of Indian royalty and a British special agent, is remembered for her extraordinary bravery during World War II. Born in 1914 in Moscow to an Indian Sufi mystic father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, and an American mother, Noor was raised in a spiritual and intellectual household. Her early life was marked…
-
“Reached the age of 9 years” may seem like a very matter of fact and brutal title , but the brutal honesty is many of the 1.5 million children murdered during the Holocaust did not even reach that age. Reached the age of 9 years should never be said of any child as the age…
-
In the years 535 and 536, several remarkable aberrations in world climate took place. They were the most severe and protracted short-term episodes of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 2 Millennia. Including bizarrely low-temperatures, with snow fall during the summer months in some locations; widespread crop-failures and famine; greatly decreased levels of…
-
The photograph above is of Gezina de Leeuwe-de Jong with her four children. I presume the photo was taken by her husband and the father of the children, Louis de Leeuw. I reckon that’s why he is not in the picture. He was a son of Barend de Leeuwe and Sientje van Minden. He married…
-
On 17 August 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged above southern England, Pilot Officer William Meade Lindsley “Billy” Fiske III died in a hospital in Chichester. He was just 29 years old. An American citizen serving in the Royal Air Force, Fiske had been badly burned when his Hawker Hurricane was hit by German…
-
Eva was born on 1 January 1924, in Oleszyce, Poland, a small community where over half of the people were Jews. She had seven siblings, and she was the oldest. Her father, was a wealthy merchant and head of the Oleszyce Jewish community. He had an international business that distributed religious articles, including Torahs and…
-
In the great annals of American history, there are certain dates that echo across the decades: July 4, 1776; December 7, 1941; July 20, 1969. And then, of course, January 26, 1998 — the day President Bill Clinton stood before the nation, wagged his finger at the camera, and gave us the immortal line: “I…
-
In the spring of 1919, as the Irish War of Independence was beginning to spread across the island, an extraordinary and largely anomalous episode in revolutionary history unfolded in the mid-west of Ireland. For two weeks, from 14 to 27 April, Limerick was effectively governed not by the British authorities or the newly established Dáil…
-
Now, I don’t want to sound like an old fogey or make the mistake my parents made by dismissing my music taste. There has always been a generational divide in musical taste, but no one can deny that the current popular music lacks quality compared to the music from days of yore. Without even listening…
History of Sorts 