Forum: Pre-Modern & Modern

Here is some Modern History may the bones of the CEO's rest in pieces. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDC0qcf0kzE

" I know what you want," said the mayor of Draguinan. He led the colonel to a beautiful walled garden, quiet and shaded. " You want a cemetery" Every year my wife and I return to the little coastal town of Frejus and a small secluded beach called Dramont, its not much as far as beaches go, several hundred ft wide surrounded by coastal pines and eucalyptus trees, in fact there isn't any sand, its mostly small pebbles and surf worn rocks, like most of the southern coast of France. Most tourists wouldn't give the place a second thought, but if you walk up the slope through the trees you find an odd looking vehicle left behind from some long forgotten era, and one would be hard pressed while standing in the early morning quiet to ever imagine what took place in this otherwise peaceful place. On the early morning of Aug 15 1944 elements of First Bn. of the 141st scrambled ashore on Blue beach ( Dramont) and engaged German forces on the slops above, and thus began the southern most beach head of the...

The endless clan vendettas of the Bronze Age could only be brought to an end and an Iron Age of national unity initiated via the concept of total war. The totemic beliefs that kept clans religiously and superstitiously separate from each other had to be ruthlessly smashed and their beliefs laid bare by profound fear of a force more physically immediate than the spiritual protection of dead ancestors. For this to happen a particular type of ruthless character had to emerge. A Warlord who was not indoctrinated into totemic superstition, and who had the power and will to force mass change. The diaries of three English colonists in South Africa, who visted Zululand in the early year of th 1800's give us a graphuic record of the rise of such a man, and thereby put pen the blank pages of events thast took place in pre-literate Euope and Asia when the Iron Age was intiated over there. Shaka Zulu was a monstrous genocidal messiah of the Iron Age, a pitiless tyrant who put much of what is now South Africa to...

I read a book called Shadow Divers by Rob Kurson about two deep sea explorers from New Jersey named Richie Kohler (no relation....?) and John Chatterton who discovered a German U-Boat which had sunk off of the coast of New Jersey during World War II. I don't want to ruin this story, so dont read this paragraph if you dont want to hear the ending.... It had turned out that the Uboat had been ordered by the Nazi regime to originally go to the US East Coast and deliver any sort of attack it could get off; hours later they told the crew to abort the mission and travel towards the straigt of gibralter (? i believe). Anyway, the message never made it through. The crew, inexperienced Germans, the oldest being in his mid 20's but the rest of the crew 18-20, launched a missile which backfired and turned around right into their sub. They ended up sinking themselves, and both the US and German governments confirmed this ship had sunk nowhere near the East Coast. Well I work night shifts for a beach volleyball...

History Mystery I received this info in an email. Pretty weird eh?! Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846. John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946. Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860.

Most view Lincoln as the great emancipator giving him credit for his Emancipation Proclamation which alone freed no one. Few are aware of Lincoln's Colonization Plan to send freed blacks back to Africa. Check out the link. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/25.1/paludan.html

Biological warfare is not a new development, but has been used for over a thousand years. Assyrians in 6th BC used to poison their enemies' wells with fungi which caused hallucinations. After the Roman Empire fell and Europe was able to grow as independent nations large fortresses were constructed, such as keeps and castles. During times of war an army would lay siege upon such a structure, which was normally walled off. Sieges in medieval times lasted many months, even years. The catapult was a commonly used siege weapon, the first machine to deliver artillery fire. Eventually the catapult evolved into a trebuchet, which acted much like a large wooden sling, firing heavy projectiles at the walls of a fortress. During sieges the besiegers would load their catapults with rotting animal cadavers and launch them over the walls. The carcasses would spread illness to the population walled in and the besiegers' enemies would die. Though uncontrolled, purposely spreading disease during a siege was fairly...

Below is a quote from another forum and my reply to it. What I need to know is there any actual incidence of this that I am not aware of. I just want to make sure Sept 23, 2007, 9:50pm, generalgunz wrote:dont forget that africa provided the slave labour for many of the buildings that yu see in britain. so africa does have a role in the world That is the most pathetic statement I have seen in a long time. At no time in its entire history has Britain had a domestic slave labor force.

Alright, I'd like to ask for your assistance in a little project of mine regarding on of my favorite subjects in history, pirates. So, to get things started..,*ahem* Avast ye bleedin' scoundrels! I be needin' good sources o' piratical information, particularly about wha' life was like aboard ships, any information on ships dealin' wit' how they operated, 'n any other facts ye scurvy dogs can drag up. Th' period I be most interested in be between th' year 1700-1725, in which th' Golden Age o' Piracy loot ship (1715-1725). So what say ye? Can ye help a pirate out?

The Nazi Regime would not have been able to coordinate and perpetrate the Holocaust as efficiently without advanced data collecting technology sold to them by International Business Machines (IBM). Adolph Hitler had come to power in a devastated country. Its military had been weakened by World War I; its population divided over war issues and suffering from extreme hyperinflation of their currency. Their life savings had become useless—a wheelbarrow of money barely able to afford a loaf of bread. Germans had been humiliated at the hands of the allied forces during the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, to them, becoming the laughing stock of the world. The Germans had lost strategic plots of land and all of their colonies to the United States and Britain. Their navy was restricted to a mere six battleships and its army a measly 100,000 men. A large fifty mile chunk of land between France and Germany named the Rhineland had been demilitarized to ensure a French safety cushion. As a...

*note: At the request of Demonskates these posts where moved from "Politics and Currents" This is for Ningshitdizza. Heres a list of camps. I even know the sub camps names, but Im not going to do your home work for you. GERMANY: Bergen-Belen- 2 sub camps. Borgermoor Buchenwald-174 sub camps. Dachau-134 sub camps. Dieburg

The United States Military and Government have this practice of masking any military faux pas with heroism. If you look at the ratio of medals to successful military executions, you’ll see that whenever there’s a military disaster those that suffer receive medals; the Medal of Honor being the number one medal. When the U.S. military fails, they hand out a bunch of medals and then call it heroism, thus never actually admitting to their incompetence in those situations. This is not to say that any of those medals are undeserved, but it does shine a spotlight on how the military handles major mistakes. MacArthur has been classified as one of American history’s greatest war heroes due to this scandalous use of propaganda. Was General Douglas MacArthur the Pacific Theater’s great leader and hero like the history books claim? http://www.historyanimated.com/PhilippinesPage.html - This linkis a flash animation that will help guide you through what happened in the Philippines under MacArthur, and especially...

The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland was an adaptation from an original children's book written by L. Frank Baum, published in 1900. The original book was entitled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. While the book was targeted at children, Baum's work was politically influenced and metaphorically represented a very important movement in U.S. history. Each fantastical character in the story represented a different laboring group struggling to get the United States government to step in and help their cause. It's important to understand the consequences of the Industrial Revolution in America before any of this will hold significant value. The Industrial Revolution in the United States made many a men rich (Rockefeller and Edison) while belittling and destroying the blue collar laborer. With the introduction of machine manufacturing the United States laborer became nothing more than a commodity. The mortality rate during the peak of the Industrial Revolution in the U.S. created a morbid...

Ok...this may sound strange to quite a few people, but one of my favourite pass times is to wander through cemetaries looking for graves with the same dates/years, most specifically the graves of children. Well...since I have recently moved to Hamilton, Ontario and have not done this since I moved, I decided to walk through the cemetary close to my house. I found a number of tombstones grouped together, all children ranging in age from 6 months to 10 years. The majority of the graves (maybe about 20-30) were for the years 1931-1936. So, as always, I return home and begin digging around on the internet. They don't seem to be caused by polio because the epidemics of polio in Ontario were '29 and '37. It doesn't appear to be diphtheria because I found a few sources that state "In the wake of these trials diphtheria incidence declined sharply in such cites as Toronto and Hamilton, dropping effectively to zero cases and zero deaths by the early 1930s" I tried looking for cholera outbreaks, and came up with...

In the politics forum I have seen a lot of posts about the conflicts between Israel and the other Arab nations, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a look at some of the history in this long conflict. The first real conflict between the Jewish and Arabs was in 1920 where an Arab mob just started beating Jews. This is known as the Nabi Musa riots. So what caused these riots though? Well it started in 1919 when Emir Faisal expressed support for a Jewish national home because he signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement. When the agreement broke down, the relations between the Jews and Arabs worsened and in March 1920 there where massive riots. The worsening relations between that Arabs and Jews was concerning Zionist leaders who made numerous requests to the Mandate administration to address the Yishuv's security but there fears where discounted. In April 1920 during the Muslim festival Nebi Musa there was a lot of anti-Zionist talk going round and this lead to more riots between the Jews and...

This Week we were cleaning up around the compound where we keep our supplies and vehicles, and as we were shuffling things about, someone kicked at what looked like a round rock, as I picked it up I realized it was iron, and man made. The only visible mark was a small flat spot where it had obviously struck something solid, and after washing away the rust and dirt you could see it was cannon ball. My curiosity was aroused, so I carted it home and placed it on the coffee table ( to the dismay of my wife) and went on line to see if any historical connection could be made. As I live on one of the outer islands of the eastern Swedish archipelago I knew there had been some early conflicts with Russia off and on over a period of years, and local history showed that Russian Galley's had indeed burned Swedish coastal areas during the Great Northern war period of 1719, leaving vary little left standing in the area I now lived in. After going through some pages of early field cannons, I found its origin. It...

I thought this might make for some interesting reading. Americanization is what American Protestants called it when they would take Native American children from their homes and aggressively pour American culture down their throats. Native Americans in the later part of the 19th century were not assimilated into American culture, but "Americanized." Zitkala-Sa, also known as Red Bird, was an eight year old Sioux girl that was removed from her reservation in South Dakota in 1884. She was sent to a midwestern missionary school, a place where she experienced the "iron routine" of the "civilizing machine." What follows is some of what she recalled from her first day there. ------------------------------------------------------------- Soon we were being drawn rapidly away by the white man's horses. When I saw the lonely figure of my mother vanish in the distance, a sense of regret settled heavily upon me....I no longer felt free to be myself, or to voice my own feelings. The tears trickled down my cheeks,...