Geschiedenis Sites Buitenland

Determined to Remember: Harriet Jacobs and Slavery's Descendants by Koritha Mitchell Public history sites have the potential to spark intellectual engagement because when they make embodied connections between people and the sites they visit—even when those connections evoke the cruelty of the past.  Commemoration of the Tulsa Massacre Has Put... Read more »

James Peale, "The Artist and His Family," 1795 Historians have spent decades investigating whether the American Revolution benefited women or provoked changes in women’s status. By and large, white women’s traditional political rights and legal status remained relatively stagnant in the wake of the American Revolution. In some ways, women’s... Read more »

Striding masterfully through St. George’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, Vlad the Conqueror pondered his role as a Man of Destiny. “It’s not easy to measure up to the past leaders of Russia,” he brooded.  “Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great slaughtered enormous numbers of people at home... Read more »

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Members of the Combahee River Collective, 1974. Included are (back row, l-r) Margo Okazawa-Rey, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Chirlane McCray, and Mercedes Tompkins; (front row, l-r) Demita Frazier and Helen Stewart.  The Combahee River Collective “We were asserting that we exist, our concerns and our experiences matter,” said Black feminist activist Barbara... Read more »

"American Army Entering the City of Mexico" by Filippo Constaggini, 1885. Architect of the Capitol.  In April 1846, the United States invaded Mexico after a highly disputed incident at the border. Freshman Congressman Abraham Lincoln challenged President James Polk’s account of Mexican provocations as misleading and demanded to know the... Read more »

Some of the 800 members of Women Strike for Peace who marched at United Nations headquarters in Manhattan to demand UN mediation of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis   It should come as no surprise that the world is currently facing an existential nuclear danger.  In fact, it has been caught up... Read more »

Desertification, village of Telly, Mali. Photo Ferdinand Reus, CC BY-SA 2.0   The 24 main chapters of The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by British historian Peter Frankopan cover a longer period of history--from “the creation of our planet around 4.6 billion years ago” until late 2022--than any book I’ve read... Read more »

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The latest twist in America’s culture wars saw crowds at the capitol in Salt Lake City this summer, protesting a book ban from the elementary and middle school libraries of Davis County, Utah. Such bans are increasingly prevalent in American public life, with issues of race and sexuality proving especially... Read more »

An 1880 Puck Cartoon depicts Ulysses Grant surrendering his sword to James Garfield after being defeated for the Republican nomination. The candidate, at first glance, seemed to have no business being his party’s nominee for the White House. In an era seething with political strife, he had long been viewed by peers... Read more »

On March 25, 1945, the United States Army issued “Fact Sheet #64: Fascism!” to promote discussions amongst American troops about fascism as the war in Europe wound down to a close. Discussion leaders were alerted “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze; nor, once in power, is... Read more »

Matthew Hawn, a high school teacher for sixteen years in conservative Sullivan County, Tennessee, opened the 2020-21 year in his Contemporary Issues class with a discussion of police shootings.  White privilege is a fact, he told the students.  He had a history of challenging his classes, which led to lively... Read more »

Blaine Harden (Photo by Jessica Kowal) "The Whitman lie is a timeless reminder that in America a good story has an insidious way of trumping a true one, especially if that story confirms our virtue, congratulates our pluck, and enshrines our status as God’s chosen people."—Blaine Harden, Murder at the... Read more »

The Cape Cod house, once confined to southeastern Massachusetts, has spread to every corner of the United States. You can find a three-bedroom, four-bath Cape Cod style house listed for… The post The History of the Cape Cod House, America’s Favorite Dwelling appeared first on New England Historical Society.... Read more »

There are a multitude of small historical events and locations that are largely forgotten. One such is Fort Massachusetts, a wooden stockade built in 1745. What’s left is a small… The post The Fort in the Parking Lot: The Forgotten Siege of Fort Massachusetts appeared first on New England Historical... Read more »

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln sent a most curious message to Sen. Hannibal Hamlin of Maine.  It was a letter of introduction.   Lincoln, the Republican nominee for president, was reaching out… The post The Vice President History Forgot: Hannibal Hamlin and the Road Not Taken appeared first on New England Historical... Read more »

WBZ-AM became the first commercial radio station in New England in 1921.  Since its on-air debut, its formats have featured original programming, news, weather, music, sports presentations and talk shows.… The post WBZ: New England’s First Commercial Radio Station appeared first on New England Historical Society.... Read more »

In 1838, a handful of immigrant families stepped off the Boston docks onto a steamboat bound for a new Irish utopia in Aroostook County, Maine. They hoped the County’s rich… The post An Irish Utopia in the Maine Woods: The Rise and Fall of Benedicta appeared first on New England... Read more »

On the Feast of St. Sebastian, in foul weather or fair, an outdoor spectacle takes place in the streets of two places: Middletown, Conn., and Melilli, Sicily. Hundreds of the… The post From Melilli to Middletown: St. Sebastian, the I Nuri Run and a 1912 Strike Forge an Italian American... Read more »

South Hadley, Mass., about 90 miles west of Boston on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River, was once the site of the first commercially navigable canal in the United… The post How the South Hadley Canal Launched America’s Commercial Waterway Era appeared first on New England Historical Society.... Read more »

For generations, the accepted history of colonial New England celebrated the Turner’s Falls Massacre as a daring military victory. But people called it the Battle of Turner’s Falls. Today, the… The post The Turner’s Falls Massacre: History’s Ugly Truth Emerges appeared first on New England Historical Society.... Read more »

Colonial Boston had a sweet tooth, and sugar played an important part of the local economy during that time. Dozens if not hundreds of Boston artisans worked as independent sugar… The post From Sugar Houses to the Sugar Trust: Boston’s Candy-Colored History appeared first on New England Historical Society.... Read more »

On September 19, 1738 a four foot tall man strode into the Burlington, New Jersey Quaker meeting house with a purpose.  The Quaker meeting house in Burlington was the largest building between there and Philadelphia, and on this day when the little man with the big ambition walked in, the... Read more »

Indiana’s Dunes National Park sits on the shores of Lake Michigan.  It is really nothing more than a large, desolate, sandy beach composed of over fifteen thousand square acres of constantly shifting sand dunes.  In 1876 well over one hundred years before this landscape became part of the National Park... Read more »

During 1916, at the height of the First World War, it seemed to most observers as if death and dying itself had become the permanent state of humanity. In February of that year French and German armies fought at the fortress city of Verdun in what, to this very day,... Read more »

A Watchmaker, a drifter, an injured man or a person with a cognitive disability--it didn’t matter.  No matter what Robert Hubert was--or may have been--in September of 1666 in the days just after the Great Fire of London had left most of England’s largest city a smoldering ruin, Robert Hubert... Read more »

From time immemorial the site at Clonmacnoise in central Ireland on the banks of the storied River Shannon has been considered a mystical and spiritual place.  Clonmacnoise, literally translates from ancient Gaelic as, “Meadow of the Sons of Nois” , named in honor of the offspring of a mythical figure... Read more »

Still called the Old Stone Mill by many locals to this day, the Newport Tower--a famed landmark in Newport, Rhode Island--sits just off the coast of Narragansett Bay in Touro Park.  It rises to a height of twenty-eight feet and is roughly circular in nature, though contrary to popular belief,... Read more »

With the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620 reports began to reach King James I of England regarding the state of the inhabitants on the coast of New England.  These reports pointed out the desolate nature of the landscape and related tales from the native inhabitants that spoke... Read more »

By July 4, 1857 New York City had been in a nearly perpetual state of civil unrest for over a month, but on that night, as fireworks exploded overhead and thousands gathered in the city’s densely packed dusty and narrow streets to celebrate America’s independence in the midst of the... Read more »

There are purported to be miles of tunnels, and even an unused burial crypt, deep beneath the United States Capitol Building in Washington D.C..  After Congress passed something called the Residence Act in July of 1790, which decreed that an inauspicious sixty square miles, or so, of swampland on the... Read more »

 It was a bitterly cold winter’s night in February of 1698.  The wind howled and the ground was frozen solid as she stumbled over tree roots unable to see at all in the dense underbrush; injured and scorned, lost and banished to the woodlands outside of town.  There was no one... Read more »

 February 15, 1894 was a brisk winter’s day in late-Victorian Era London. At around 5 o'clock in the afternoon a cold hazy setting sun still hung in the sky and glowed--a dull orange orb suspended in air--like the light of a flickering candle about to be extinguished over Greenwich Park... Read more »

 On the night of August 31, 1944 in the town of Mattoon, Illinois, Urban Reef, a sheet metal worker, who has lived most of his adult life in the same small ranch-style house located at 1817 Grant Avenue is awakened by a strange and pungent odor. He rises out of... Read more »

 J. Robert Oppenheimer the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project codenamed the test “Trinity” after a sonnet by Elizabethan poet John Donne--Holy Sonnet 14--famed for these lines:Batter my heart, three personed God, for youAs yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mendThat I may rise, and stand o’erthrow... Read more »

 It is a movie that is aptly titled Roundhay Garden Scene because that is exactly what it is.  That is exactly ALL that it is--simply a movie of people walking in a garden that lasts for a whopping three seconds.  But what makes this mundane few seconds of grainy black... Read more »

In 1908 an unidentified drifter reportedly died after eating bookbinding paste in Goldfield Nevada. Buried with a blunt epitaph his grave remains one of the town’s strangest and most debated stories.... Read more »

Where do today’s mixologists really get their ideas. From 1920s hangover cures to swinging sixties Pernod obsessions, these digitised cocktail books reveal that modern bar culture has very deep roots indeed.... Read more »

Otto Rahn believed medieval myth could reveal hidden history. Funded by Heinrich Himmler, he searched for the Holy Grail, served the SS, and died frozen in the Alps on 13th March, 1939. A disturbing story of myth, power, and compromise.... Read more »

Bettie Page was the most photographed woman of the 1950s and a reluctant symbol of sexual freedom. Behind the iconic fringe was a life shaped by censorship, faith, mental illness and a fame she never fully controlled.... Read more »

Exploding cigars, poisoned wetsuits, Mafia hitmen and secret memos. Declassified records reveal how the CIA repeatedly tried and failed to kill Fidel Castro, exposing a strange Cold War world where obsession often replaced strategy.... Read more »

Born into empire and raised in a palace, Sophia Duleep Singh chose protest over privilege. From Black Friday to selling suffragette papers outside Hampton Court, her life reshaped what rebellion could look like.... Read more »

He carried amps, secrets and emotional weight for the Beatles for over a decade. Mal Evans was far more than a roadie. His story reveals what happens to those who build greatness but never claim the spotlight.... Read more »

In the summer of 1937, John F Kennedy crossed Europe with his closest friend Lem Billings. Their diaries reveal castles, car trouble, propaganda, bullfights, a lost dachshund, and a continent quietly edging toward war.... Read more »

Go behind the scenes of Return of the jedi and ask the question, how do you end a cultural phenomenon.? Return of the Jedi closed the original Star Wars trilogy with myth spectacle and compromise. From Ewoks to the Emperor and the birth of THX this is how George Lucas... Read more »

After slavery ended, forced labour did not. Convict leasing allowed Southern states to rent incarcerated people to private companies, recreating slavery through law, prisons, and profit.... Read more »

On 13th, May, 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a residential street. Eleven people died, sixty one homes burned, and a city changed forever. This is the full story of the MOVE bombing.... Read more »

During Prohibition, most bootleggers were women. Mothers, homesteaders and entrepreneurs brewed, smuggled and sold alcohol across America. From Birdie Brown’s Montana parlour to Cleo Lythgoe’s global operation, this is the forgotten backbone of the liquor trade.... Read more »

A factual, deeply researched account of Ronald Gene Simmons and the Christmas 1987 killings in Arkansas, tracing years of control, isolation, institutional failure, and a crime with no final explanation.... Read more »

On 1 March 1954, gunfire erupted inside the US House of Representatives. Led by Lolita Lebrón, four Puerto Rican nationalists forced the world to confront the island’s unresolved political status. A detailed look at the story behind the shots.... Read more »