• 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

    “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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  • I have to set this out at the start of this post. None of this has been investigated by me, it has all been done by other journalists. However all of this has been verified by me. All the relevant links are included in the post. It is also noteworthy to mention that I don’t…

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  • On the morning of 27 August 1979, Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, a member of the British royal family and one of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century, was assassinated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). The bombing, carried out while Mountbatten was aboard his fishing…

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