History

General history issues, although a lot will be about WW2

  • Hessy Levinsons Taft (born May 17, 1934) is a woman, born to Jewish parents in Berlin, best known for having been featured prominently as an infant in Nazi propaganda after her photo was surreptitiously entered in, and then selected as the winner of, a contest to find the most beautiful Aryan baby. Taft’s image became one of the most subversive of the…

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  • The 1st Sony Walkman

    it is not often I do a piece on technology, in fact this is the first time and it probably will be last time, but this device has had an impact on my life.And today marks the 43rd anniversary of its first release. The transistor radio was a technological marvel that put music literally into…

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  • Walter Kutschmann (24 July 1914 – 30 August 1986) was a German SS-Untersturmführer and Gestapo officer, a member of an Einsatzkommando, based first in Lwów, Poland (today Lviv, Ukraine), and later in Drohobycz. He was culpable for the massacre of 1,500 Polish Jews in Lwów, Poland, in the years 1941–42. At the start of the Second World War, he moved to Leipzig,…

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  • Manzanar is most widely known as the site of one of ten American concentration camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II from December 1942 to 1945. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada in California’s Owens Valley between the towns of Lone Pine to the south and Independence to the north, it is approximately 230 miles (370 km) north of Los Angeles. Manzanar (which means “apple orchard”…

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  • Roger Casement was born in Sandycove, County Dublin in September 1864 and raised in Ballycastle County Antrim following the death of his parents.. between 1911 and shortly before his execution for treason, when he was stripped of his knighthood and other honours, was an Irish-born civil servant who worked for the British Foreign Office as a…

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  • Eternal love

    These human remains were unearthed in 1972 at the Teppe Hasanlu archaeological site, located in the Solduz Valley in the West Azerbaijan Province of Iran. The site was burned after a military attack. People from both fighting sides were killed in the fire, which apparently spread quite unexpectedly and quickly through the town. The skeletons…

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  • In an event that is widely acknowledged to have sparked the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of Emperor Franz Josef and heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was shot to death along with his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914. These assassinations were a spark to the start…

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  • In October 1941 Auschwitz construction chief Karl Bischoff and SS architect Fritz Ertl were developing plans for a camp to be built about a mile and a half away from Auschwitz, on a site the Germans called Birkenau. The original occupancy figure of 550 was crossed out and replaced with 744. The new camp was…

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  • In February 1954, actress Marilyn Monroe traveled to Korea to entertain the American troops. She performed a quickly thrown-together show titled Anything Goes to audiences which totaled over 100,000 troops over 4 days. Then tour was also a chance for the film star to overcome a degree of stage fright. She remarked that the Korea…

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  • Stratford Martyrs

    The Stratford Martyrs were a group of 11 men and two women who were burned at the stake together for their Protestant beliefs, at Stratford-le-Bow or Stratford near London in England on 27 June 1556, during the Marian persecutions. Protestants were executed under heresy laws during persecutions against Protestant religious reformers for their religious denomination…

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