Posts Tagged ‘History’
Mussolini’s Brain “Stolen for Sale on eBay”
From the Telegraph:
Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter demanded a police investigation on Friday after the late Italian dictator’s blood and brain were reportedly offered for sale on eBay, the online auction website.
Alessandra Mussolini, a right-wing MP, said she was outraged and upset when she heard reports that the remains of her grandfather were being sold online.
The initial asking price was 15,000 euros, or £13,000, but nobody had had a chance to bid, eBay said.
The online auctioneer does not permit the sale of body parts on its website and removed the listing hours after it was posted.
Miss Mussolini said the remains, which were reportedly contained in three glass vials, could have been stolen from a hospital in Milan where an autopsy was carried out on the dictator’s body after he was killed and…
Museum Finds Astronomer Galileo’s Lost Body Parts
From BBC News
Two fingers and a tooth belonging to famed astronomer Galileo Galilei have been found more than 100 years after going missing, a museum in Italy says.
A collector bought the items, lost since 1905, at auction and gave them to Florence’s History of Science Museum.
The museum said it had no doubt about the authenticity of the items.
Scientists cut the parts – plus another finger and a vertebrae – from Galileo’s body in 1737, almost 100 years after he died.
Galileo, who lived from 1564 to 1642, was a hugely influential physicist and astronomer who helped develop the telescope.
He was branded a heretic by Italian authorities for supporting Copernicus’s discovery that the Earth rotated around the Sun.
The body parts were removed from him 95 years after his death, when Church authorities…
Digital Forensics Expert: Controversial Lee Harvey Oswald Photo is Not A Fake
MELANIE PLENDA writes in the Union Leader:
Kennedy conspiracy theorists appear to have one less bullet in their arsenal. Hany Farid, a computer science professor and expert in digital forensics at Dartmouth College, spent two months evaluating a photograph of John F. Kennedy shooter Lee Harvey Oswald.
“You can’t really authenticate a photo in all honesty,” Farid said of the image, which shows Oswald holding a Marxist newspaper and a rifle. “But I can say pretty definitively that the things that people thought made the photo a fake, well, those people are wrong. And it doesn’t make them stupid. I was wrong too. But that photo is not the proof they think it is.”
It’s long been the contention of conspiracy theorists that photos of Oswald were doctored as part of an elaborate…
Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five
On the fascinating site Letters of Note:
In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops and subsequently became a prisoner of war. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs reached a Dresden work camp where they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). The next month — February — the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives during the highly controversial and devastating bombing of Dresden, the aftermath of which Vonnegut and the remaining survivors helped to clear up.
Vonnegut released the book Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.
Below is a letter he wrote to his family that May from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival:
How Hitler and the Nazis Tried to Steal Christmas
From the Telegraph:
The Nazi Party tried their best to remove Christ from Christmas by paganising carols, producing glittering swastika, iron cross and toy grenade baubles for the fir tree, research for a new exhibition has found.
Many of the changes made under Hitler, put in place to remove the influence of the Jewish-born baby Jesus, are still in use today, much to the alarm of modern Germans.
The swastika-shaped baking trays and wrapping paper adorned with Nazi symbols have long gone, but traces of the Third Reich Christmas can still be found in the subtly rewritten lyrics of favourite carols.
The discoveries have been highlighted by a new exhibition at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne.
[Read more at the Telegraph]
NZ Crew to Drill for Whisky in Antarctic
From MSN News:
A team of New Zealanders is preparing to drill in Antarctica in the New Year, and they hope to strike – whisky.
Among the supplies British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton abandoned on his unsuccessful 1909 expedition to the pole were two crates of the now extinct rare old brand of McKinlay and Co whisky.
Now Whyte & Mackay, the drinks giant that owns McKinlay and Co, has asked for a sample of the drink for a series of experiments, the Telegraph newspaper reported in London.
The New Zealanders will use special drills to free the trapped crates and rescue a bottle from the crates, discarded near the Cape Royds hut used by the Nimrod expedition, or at least draw off a sample using a syringe.
[Read more at MSN News]
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Hitler’s Hidden Underground City Found In Berlin (Video)
Interesting documentary about a group working deep beneath modern Berlin to discover and preserve complex tunnels of bunkers, even as the city is destroyed. Here’s the official program description from National Geographic Channel:
Hitler’s Hidden City is a subterranean adventure under the streets of Berlin, following the work of a team of German archaeologists and historians exposing and exploring the last remaining structures of the Third Reich. We gain rare access to an underground city ordered and — in part — designed by Hitler himself, part of a vast network of over 1000 bunkers and many miles of tunnels, much of which has remained sealed since the war. Eyewitnesses and historians add colorful stories to cutting edge CGI that bring to life this network of bunkers, how they were built and how they were used in the dark days of the downfall of Berlin.
Five Great Things You Didn’t Know Came from Horrific Tragedies
Henry Stennett writes on Cracked.com:
In Japan they have an ancient saying: “The most beautiful flowers grow only in the shit of Godzilla.”
And you know what? They’re right. Great things not only happen despite horrible disasters, but often because of them. We’re not saying that we’re glad these horrible things happened, or that it was even worth it. But a lot of what’s great about the world today is a result of history’s darkest hours. Like…
#5. The Black Death: We know this statement is going to be pretty controversial down in the comments section, but we’re going to say it and stand by it: the Black Death was bad. We want to make it clear right off the bat that when we talk about a silver lining, we are not advocating that the Black Death be brought back. We would not support any such proposal.
The Black Death, a.k.a. The Plague, utterly ravaged humanity, killing between 30 and 60 percent of Europeans, and dropping the population of the entire world by 20 percent by some estimates…
Britain’s Last WWI Veteran Shuns Remembrance Day
From Yahoo News:
Britain’s last surviving World War I veteran shunned Remembrance Day commemorations Wednesday because he was against the glorification of war, his family was reported as saying.Claude Choules, 108, lives in a nursing home in Perth, Australia and in July became Britain’s sole survivor from the 1914-1918 war, following the death of fellow veteran Harry Patch, aged 111.
Choules served on HMS Revenge during a 41-year naval career that spanned both world wars, witnessing the surrender of the German Imperial Navy in 1918 and the scuttling of the fleet in Scapa Flow.
But his daughter Daphne Edinger said Choules had been scarred by his experiences and chose not to celebrate the Armistice or other veterans’ days.
[Read more at Yahoo News]
If Germany had Won the First World War…
From FirstWorldWar.com:
In a way, this is a more interesting hypothesis than the more commonly asked question about what the world would be like if the Germans had won World War II. Several historians have noted that both world wars should really be considered a single conflict with a long armistice in the middle. If this viewpoint is valid, then the official outcome of the first phase of this conflict may have been important for reasons other than those usually cited.As a preliminary matter, we should note that the actual outcome of the First World War was a near thing, a far nearer thing than was the outcome of World War II after 1941. While it is true that the United States entered the war on the allied side in 1917,…
Did David Hasselhoff End the Cold War?
With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall today, I found this story from the BBC in 2004 kinda funny. This headline also seemed to inspire the title of a book from a great publisher in the UK, Icon Books. If you don’t take Icon’s or the BBC’s word for it, watch the Hoff in action at the wall below (or better yet, the music video for “Looking for Freedom”):
Barely a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the city that had been divided by politics for more than 40 years was united in song. And leading the chorus of several hundred thousand voices was a man hitherto known to the rest of the world for driving a talking car.
David Hasselhoff, star of the hit 80s TV series Knight Rider, is renowned in celebrity-obsessed circles for being Big In Germany; not only as an actor, but as a purveyor of soft rock anthems. For that seminal concert, on New Year’s Eve 1989, Hasselhoff stood atop of the partly-demolished wall and belted out a tune called “Looking for Freedom.” (Continued on BBC News)
U.S. Military Listened for Messages from Mars
On the fascinating site Letters of Note:
Here’s a 1924 telegram from then Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, Edward W. Eberle, instructing all Naval stations to monitor the airwaves for any unusual transmissions due to anticipated contact from Martians. August 22nd of that year was witness to the closest Mars opposition since 1804 (a mere 55,777,566 km), and as such provided desirable conditions in which to receive radio signals from the Red Planet. The man tasked with clearing the airwaves — a Professor David Todd — somehow managed to persuade both the Army and Navy to report any findings for a three day period, but failed to silence the country’s private radio broadcasters for even two days. Needless to say, the three day exercise produced nothing but static.
The 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
A Denver Post News Photo Blog:
Monday, November 9th, 2009 will mark the 20th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall came down. Built with barbed wire and concrete in August of 1961 by the Communist East, The Berlin Wall, stretching for about 30 miles, was a Cold War symbol which separated East and West Berlin, preventing people from leaving East Germany. According to the “August 13 Association” which specialises in the history of the Berlin Wall, at least 938 people — 255 in Berlin alone — died, shot by East German border guards, attempting to flee to West Berlin or West Germany. It stood for 28 years as a division between the Soviets and the Allies. The wall was torn down after Communism collapsed in 1989. During the summer of…
