Vanderbilt'svision of the trial for 22 of the surviving Nazi leaders-21 were in fact in the dock-by the United Sates, the USSR, Britain, and France telegraphs its anxieties across the 80 years from the trial's opening to today. At Nuremberg's first public session, on November 20, 1945, journalists heralded the opening of "the trial of the century." Nuremberg's message to the law and politics of the previous century was the way claiming to be "just following orders" shouldn't cancel individual responsibility for widespread atrocities.
Betty Reid Soskin was 92 when she first went viral and became, in effect, a rock star of the National Park Service. She was the oldest full-time national park ranger in the US this was back in 2013; she'd become a ranger at 85 but she had been furloughed along with 800,000 other federal employees during the government shutdown. News channels flocked to interview her. She was aggrieved not to be working, she told them; she had a job to do.
Developed in Roxbury, Massachusetts in the early 17th century, the Roxbury Russet is considered the first distinctly American apple variety. Featuring a green skin prone to russets (rough, brown patches), it has a firm flesh with a tart taste and a high sugar content that makes it ideal for cider, in addition to eating and cooking. Harvested in the fall, the Roxbury Russet stores well throughout winter as its flavor continues to develop.
British Asian families are being urged to record the experiences of relatives who fought for Britain for future generations as data reveals half the British public don't know that Indian members of the armed forces served in the second world war. The My Family Legacy project, backed by the Royal British Legion, is building an online archive of Asian veterans' experiences to raise awareness of the shared histories and sacrifices of Britain's diverse communities.
The coin would fall inside and land on a lever. Under the weight of the coin, the lever went down, pulling a string. The string was attached to a plug that opened a valve, allowing the container to dispense holy water. So Hero's invention was not a snack machine - it was designed to prevent people from taking more than their fair share of holy water, which had apparently been a problem in temples up to that point.
CT scans of a 16th century sword from Jena in Germany have revealed a name engraved on the blade, hidden by a thick encrustation of rust. The inscription reads Clemes Stam, the name of the Solingen swordsmith who made it. The blade was one of four surviving swords interred in the graves of the Collegiate Church in Jena where faculty, students and their families were buried in crypts between the late 16th and early 19th centuries.
Abraham Lincoln penned the entreaty on behalf of his young friend, William Johnson, because ironically, his dark complexion caused freed Black White House staffers with lighter skin to shun him. "The difference of color between him and the other servants is the cause of our separation," Lincoln wrote in the March 16, 1861, letter that private collector Peter Tuite donated in August to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, where it is now on public display.
A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years. The question is whether researchers will be able to take this piece of middle-aged media and rewind it back to the 1970s to get the data off. The news was posted to Mastodon by Professor Robert Ricci of the University of Utah's Kahlert School of Computing.
This year, we've spent some good quality time with early medieval queens, digging into their mysterious and spectacular lives and reigns. And when it comes to the spectacular, it's hard to compete with the star of this week's episode, a woman who arrived in Francia a slave, rose to become a queen, and then ascended to the heavens as a saint. This week, Danièle speaks with Isabel Moreira about Queen Balthild of Francia, her influence, and her lasting legacy.
The frescoes had been whitewashed over centuries ago. The first signs that there was surviving painting underneath the whitewash emerged in 1999 restoration. Two years later, the removal of a false ceiling revealed large intact portions of the frescoes, albeit mostly covered in layers of whitewash. It took another 20 years for the complete uncovering and restoration of the surviving frescoes to begin.
To imag­ine our­selves into the time of Leonar­do da Vin­ci, we must first imag­ine a world with­out such things as heli­copters, para­chutes, tanks, div­ing suits, robots. Yet those all exist­ed for Leonar­do him­self - or rather, they exist­ed in his imag­i­na­tion. What he did­n't build in real life, he doc­u­ment­ed in his note­books, leav­ing behind mate­r­i­al for appre­ci­a­tions of his genius that would con­tin­ue half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er.
Then the wind changed and the great pillar of ash and smoke collapsed, unleashing a pyroclastic surge of boiling gases and ash at temperatures exceeding 800F that engulfed the town. Everyone there was killed instantly and wood was carbonized on the spot. Herculaneum was then hit by six floods of volcanic mud, one after the other, burying under 70 feet of sludge. The mud quickly cooled and hardened into solid rock,
The Torre dei Conti once stood as a medieval castle in the centre of Rome throughout the Middle Ages. It was built in the 13th century by the Conti family after a civil conflict broke out between two powerful families at the time-the Conti and the Orsini-over control of the city. Commissioned by Pope Innocent III, who was a member of the Conti family, it was constructed in remembrance of the conflict that had once divided Rome.
Built around 1811 for William Marbury-the Federalist whose Marbury v. Madison case established judicial review-Marbury House is at 3307 N Street in Georgetown. It was home to John and Jacqueline Kennedy from 1957 until they moved into the White House.
He had the journalistic gift of making the strange seem commonplace and the tangential seem relevant. By posing real-life examples of conundrums faced by traders, Fibonacci brought maths to life. Had he written in the language of the academy, the book would have had limited relevance. But because he wrote it for the merchants, Fibonacci revealed the true genius of the great teacher: an ability to escape from the tyranny of his peer group.
The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired a masterpiece of Hellenistic jewelry: an elaborate gold ring with a miniature gold and enamel garden scene in a box-shaped bezel under a domed rock crystal cover. Created around 150 B.C., the ring is in impeccable condition, and one of the finest surviving examples of late Hellenistic box bezel rings. The bezel is oval and outlined around the crystal cabochon with beads of gold granulation.
The first war to use combat tanks was World War I. About 15 Ford 3-Ton M1918 prototypes were built near the end of World War I, but they did not see combat before the Armistice. By WWII the tanks were more versatile and speedier, with weapons upgrades, and were used extensively during the war. Today's modern tanks have changed a lot since the early days. The future of tanks will likely be unmanned vehicles controlled remotely.
One minor but arresting fact of U.S. history is the huge amount of alcohol the average American consumed in 1830: 7.1 undiluted gallons a year, the equivalent of four shots of 80-proof whiskey every day. Assuming some children wimped out after the first drink, this statistic suggests that large numbers of Jacksonian-era adults were rolling eight belts deep seven days a week, with all the attendant implications for social and political life.
The alley is one of the ancient alignments, appearing in the middle of the 1600s, and although the area changed a lot over the centuries, it remained very much a cluster of smaller buildings surrounding the alley. Until WWII, when a bomb flattened the entire site. It turns out that the alley was culverted for a couple of decades as a large 1950s building, known as Oyez House, which housed the printing works, storage, and offices for the Solicitors' Law Stationery Society.
We've only had time to make a rapid assessment of our results, but musket balls fired by Jacobite and government troops, including pistol balls fired by government dragoons, likely relate to one of the last actions in the battle. This fight took place between the initial battle lines, at a location where boggy ground slowed the Highland charge, and this, in combination with heavy fire from Cumberland's line, helped to seal the fate of the Jacobite cause.
The origins of Day of the Dead, or Dia de los Muertos, can be traced back hundreds of years to an Aztec festival that honored the goddess of the dead, Mictecacihuatl. The party lasted a month. With the arrival of European colonists, the Catholic Church shrank it to a couple of days, coinciding with All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, usually the first two days of November. Family and friends decorate altars with offerings such as candles, flowers, photos and meaningful memorabilia.
In 1974, economist and metalworker Harry Braverman wrote Labor and Monopoly Capital, which showed how technology under capitalism shifts knowledge from workers to management-not because automation demands it but because control-seeking managers and capitalists do. Just over a half century later, his insight remains urgent: An invention offers options, but power often determines which are pursued.
Language is always changing - words fall out of use, phrases fade, and new slang takes their place. But every now and then, it's worth looking back at what we've lost. The Middle Ages gave us an extraordinary range of expressions: oaths that could shake heaven, blessings that upheld kings, and sayings so sharp they still ring true today. Some of these phrases have vanished entirely, while others quietly survive in our speech without us even noticing. Here are ten medieval phrases that we think deserve a comeback.
In the mid-thirteenth century, the Dominican preacher Étienne de Bourbon compiled his vast Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus at the convent of Lyon (c. 1250-1261). Structured around the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit-though death prevented him from completing more than five-it was a storehouse of exempla designed to enliven sermons. One of its most striking passages appears in the first book, under the gift of Fear ( de dono timoris), in the seventh section devoted to the fear of particular judgement.
Prior to the siege, Bowie and Travis had agreed to co-command the garrison. A letter alleged to have been jointly issued by them on 23 February 1836 to Colonel James W. Fannin at Goliad is included among the Travis letters, although scholar Bill Groneman notes that the letter first appeared in an 1841 work, Texas and the Texians, by Henry Stuart Foote who provided no information on its origin (3).
