… in 1945 the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Allies. Of the 1,300,000 Jews, homosexuals, Poles and other perceived ‘enemies’ of the Nazi state sent to Auschwitz, 1,100,000 never left.
May we never forget nor trivialise the sheer brutality of war and the darkest extremities of human nature.
For a Titanic-obsessed, WW1-enthusiast, you can imagine how delighted I am to find myself currently working on a World War One battleship. Not that I am doing anything nautical in my job, I should add, but the digital agency I work for happens to have its office onboard the HMS President.
Naturally, I did a bit of investigating…
The witch-hunts of Early Modern Europe (think the Tudors and the Stewarts) are remembered for their hysteria, their brutality and, more recently, their apparent misogyny. Yes, they could be brutal, yes they provoked hysteria (I know it occurred in America but The Crucible, anyone?) and yes, many poor women lost their lives as a result, but here are a few facts that will hopefully nuance these beliefs…
Originally posted on nowasIwrite:
France is reeling. A secular nation, proud of its disentanglement from the complications of religious rule, has this morning been savaged by Islamic extremists. Today’s attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris is symptomatic of what the…
Death In Disguise: The Amazing True Story of the Chelsea Murders
– Gary Powell
Verdict:
A short but powerful book, well worth a read for both history and crime fans.
…In 1612 Galileo observed Neptune for the first time. He recorded it as a ‘fixed star,’ not realising that it was a planet.
…in 1520, Martin Luther publicly burned the papal edict demanding he recant his 95 Theses and other public grievances against the Catholic Church.
This year marks the centennial of the First World War: an epic, transformative global conflict that lasted just over four years and claimed the lives of seventeen million soldiers and civilians. Today, there are no living survivors of the Great War; we must rely solely on collective memory to understand what happened amid the blood and the mud, the writing and the waiting, one hundred years ago.
There is, of course, an inherent problem with this. The British remember the war in a particular way; as, indeed, every country involved does. For us, the war was futile, horrific, catastrophic – a war of ‘lions led by donkeys’ – that stripped our country of its bravest and brightest. Interestingly, this was not the common belief in the immediate aftermath of the war; this idea only really gained traction during the economic slump of the 1920s. But despite this fact, and even in the face of a recent boom in scholarship around the First World War, there has been little impact on popular remembrance. The war is still understood in Britain as the ‘bad war’ – especially in contrast to its successor – and this over-arching narrative is emphasised and promulgated by popular culture.
… in 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy conducted a surprise military strike against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. This attack provoked the US into entering the Second World War.
… in 1887 Sherlock Holmes appeared in print for the first time, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Study In Scarlet’.
My History Cafe 