From Ancient History
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Tag Archives: history
A hero of our age
Beheaded Syrian scholar refused to lead Isis to hidden Palmyra antiquities
He was a world-renowned scholar of antiquities, enchanted into his old age by Syria’s fabled city of Palmyra, which he called among the most beautiful in the world.
Not far from the spectacular Roman ruins he had spent decades safeguarding, 82-year-old Khaled Asaad met a brutal end at the hands of the militants of Islamic State, relatives and colleagues said Wednesday.
Asaad, the retired director of Palmyra’s antiquities and museum, was publicly beheaded Tuesday in a main square of the modern-day Syrian city of Tadmur, adjoining the ruins, according to a monitoring group and Syria’s antiquities chief. His executioners publicly displayed the bloodied corpse, they said.
The Shadow of the Past
From the buried bunker, Hitler’s ghost still haunts Berlin’s psyche, 70 years on
There are few surviving buildings or monuments to testify to the period in which Berlin was the Nazi capital, when it was to become Welthauptstadt Germania – an Albert Speer-designed world capital of a massively expanded German nation.
The Olympic stadium, site of the 1936 Games, still exists, the disused Tempelhof airport and, most notably, the forbidding former ministry of aviation from which Hermann Göring boasted of dominating the European skies.
It is now the home of the ministry of finance, which many believe dominates Europe in a far more effective manner than the Luftwaffe could ever have done.
The way the future was
The Quiet German
Fascism and capital punishment
Mussolini’s Secret Weapon: Castor Oil is an interesting sidelight on history. It includes something in particular for modern Americans to think about:
In the years from the March of Rome, 1922 to Italy’s foolish entry into WW2 10 June 1940 sixty five men were executed in Fascist Italy (there were also a dozen or so extra legal killings). In modern Texas (with a population over half the size of 1930s Italy) twenty to thirty individuals are executed a year.
The most useless thing on the planet?
Found on a shelf in my garage:
Picture behind cut
Faking History
The following is a parable about how history is written on the internet. Let’s imagine you have a web page and you want people to visit it. How could you get the history scoop of 2014? Well you could go and bribe some doctorate students, ask for an interview with a wanw professor, research an area to death and pontificate… What you don’t have time? Then why not just make it all up?!
The Meanest Man in Math
The Epic Story of Johann Bernoulli.
No profession is free from the kind of miserable jerks who ruin it for everyone else. No intelligence level is either. When great intelligence, prestige careers, and big egos come together, things get ugly. Johann Bernoulli was, as a person, very ugly.
The Shadow of the Past
Thought WWI was history? In the Middle East, think again
What brought Turkey into World War I was the Escape of the German warships Goeben and Breslau , especially the Goeben, which was the most powerful ship in the Mediterranean at the start of the War. She was The Ship That Changed the World.
According to Winston Churchill the Goeben brought “more slaughter, more misery, and more ruin than has ever before been borne within the compass of a ship.”. He wrote that in 1931.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 