History
General history issues, although a lot will be about WW2
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I don’t want to tell your story, but I have to. It is my duty as a father and as a human being to ensure that no child will ever get treated, they way you were. My heart breaks each time when I see a photograph of innocence—knowing the war destroyed that innocence. What makes…
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(Originally posted on November 26, 2017) I was listening to some of the testimonies of the Eichmann trials yesterday, and I think they actually had a physical effect on me. I woke up this morning feeling a bit sick and for some reason the little toe on my right foot was paralyzed, this has never…
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(Originally posted November 2017) We might have been able to get out of it, but we didn’t want to. Since we’re in it, we’re going. In this case, it’s best to leave things as you find them. We’ve been allowed to take all our luggage—a good sign. Maybe they were right and we’re following the…
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On March 10, 1865, just weeks before the final collapse of the Confederacy, a slave named Amy Span was hanged on a sycamore tree before the courthouse of Darlingon, S.C., for anticipating her liberty a little too exuberantly. Amy Spain’s slave master was Major Albertus C. Spain, a Mexican-American War veteran who owned a large…
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It was billed as a contest for the heavyweight championship of the world. And yet, by noon on Dec. 2, 1896, with the fight slated to take place that same evening in San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Pavilion, they had the boxers, they had the venue but they didn’t have a referee. It was the problem promoters…
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On this day, July 5, 1937, Hormel Foods Corporation, headquartered in Austin, Minnesota, USA, first introduced the product SPAM, a square can of pork, salt, water, sugar, potato starch, and sodium nitrite that rolled off the assembly lines 82 years ago during the late Depression era. Hormel created SPAM to capitalize on the previously unprofitable pork…
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A picture tells a thousand words, and in this case, they truly do. The drawings and cartoons are made by Emile Franken. I am not sure what happened to Emile. I do know he was born on 15 April 1921 somewhere in the Netherlands and he survived the war. I also know he spent time…
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Renia Spiegel was born on 18 June 1924, in Uhryńkowce, then in Poland and now in Western Ukraine, to Polish-Jewish parents Bernard Spiegel and Róża Maria Leszczyńska. Like many other teenage girls, Renia kept a diary. She started hers at age 15, on 31 January 1939, nine months before German and Slovak troops invaded Poland.…
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On Sunday, 19 February 2023, I had the privilege of interviewing Michael Jacobs. Michael is a confrontational speaker. We discussed the rise of Anti-Semitism, and intolerance in general. I don’t think anti-semitism ever went away, it just laid dormant for a few decades. We are now at the point where the same mistakes of 1920/30s…