History

  • A slight deviation from my regular  history of sorts. This time I will leave the music do the talking. Throughout the decades there have been many songs that took their inspiration from historical events, below is a list and clips of some of them. Starting of with the one song that covers most of known…

    Read more →

  • Thousands of personal items snatched from those murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz have at last been returned to the memorial after an exhaustive search. Items including thermometers, empty bottles of medicines, jewellery, cutlery, watches, brushes, tobacco pipes, lighters and keys are among a huge number of items finally tracked down by researchers from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial…

    Read more →

  • The statue of Liberty

    On the day it is in lets have a look at the history of that famous French lady that keeps a watchful eye on New York and it’s surrounding area. But is also an international symbol for freedom and liberty. The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World; French: La Liberté éclairant le monde) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty…

    Read more →

  • The Titanic

    There have been far greater sea disasters then the Titanic but for more then 100 years it still captures the imagination of people like no other nautical disaster. Below are just some pictures of that famous unsinkable ship. Unfinished, at Belfast, on May 31, 1911. Under construction. The Titanic, ready to be launched The iceberg…

    Read more →

  • These were once the toys, clothing and medicine of Hugo Steenmeijer, the child of a Dutch father and an Indonesian mother. When Japan occupied the Dutch East Indies in 1942, his father was sent to work as a forced labourer on the Burma Railway. The Japanese imprisoned Europeans in internment camps. The 150,000 people native…

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →

  • 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,…

    Read more →

  • 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”…

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →