Cool History.

LA streets before they were paved.

History Buff Stuff.

Pictures of Ireland in the 1930s.

History Buff Stuff.

This was news to me, although it was probably in all the papers.

I was just reading Medieval Warfare and learned that in 1216 for 16 months the French held about 1/2 of England and Prince Louis was recognized (by the Scots, at least) as King of England.

Long story short, I had never heard of any invasion of England that landed on English soil after 1066, much less one that captured London.

Japan in the 1950s.


I love looking at old, historic photos.

Cool Secret History Stuff.

Super World War II Japanese Sub Re-discovered.

The Winter War 

Forgotten history - Russia's invasion of Finland in 1939

The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean by Robinson Jeffers

Unhappy about some far off things
That are not my affair, wandering
Along the coast and up the lean ridges,
I saw in the evening
The stars go over the lonely ocean,
And a black-maned wild boar
Plowing with his snout on Mal Paso Mountain.

The old monster snuffled, "Here are sweet roots,
Fat grubs, slick beetles and sprouted acorns.
The best nation in Europe has fallen,
And that is Finland,
But the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
The old black-bristled boar,
Tearing the sod on Mal Paso Mountain.

"The world's in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
Said the old father of wild pigs,
Plowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain.

"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies,"
Said the gamey black-maned boar
Tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.

History Nerd Stuff.

The History of the World on a Single Chart.

History Buff Stuff

San Francisco Chinatown in the 1950s.

History Buff Stuff

Photos from 1865 through 1923.

From the "Print the Legend" file:

I've frequently heard of the Goree Slave House...

...but this is the first time that I've heard that the stories about it are bunk.

The British History Podcast.

FYI - This is an excellent history podcast.

I signed up as a member on his website. I figure kicking in $4 a month is like buying a magazine subscription and helps support something interesting.

I really like the observation that Jamie Jeffers - the BHP guy - makes about being a lawyer and research and doing a podcast:

1) Why did you want to create a podcast on British history and why did you think this would be a medium for you?

Well, that’s a hard question to answer since there was a confluence of events that all lead me to this. Ultimately, I think losing my job in 2010 was a major catalyst. I had spent the better part of a decade either training to become, or practicing as, an attorney. I was accustomed to working ridiculous hours and basically living and breathing the law… and suddenly that was over. I had a tremendous amount of free time to fill, and wasn’t sure what to do with myself.

Something that many people don’t realize is that attorneys don’t really argue for a living. They research, but suddenly I didn’t need to research legal issues for a client, and instead I could research anything I wanted. Being a British Ex-Pat who was raised in the States, I was taught relatively little about my ancestors. As a child I was told stories by my grandfather, who was an incredible storyteller, but for the most part the history I had been exposed to in school focused upon American History. And I missed those stories of Britain. So the choice for me was obvious, I could use the training and experience I had in research to look into those old stories and find new ones. I didn’t even think about running a podcast at first, to be honest. I just was in love with the material and began to pore over any sources I could get my hands on. Just out of sheer enthusiasm for the subject.

Forgotten History.

A major feature of human culture simply vanished ...and no one noticed.

French people walking and doing stuff.

Here is one of the first motion pictures, from 1895, of people doing everyday stuff.

"Every act of historical understanding is an act of empathy."

Dick Morris on a new theory about the inevitability of the Civil War.

From our safe perspective, we often forget that real people were living through real events. I'd known about the Nat Turner Rebellion and the Haitian revolt, but I hadn't thought about how those events could "radicalize" the South and cement a change in its attitude from slavery as an evil that would eventually die to slavery as a noble institution.

The reason it took so long to find is that nobody knew it was lost.

Medieval church found under parking lot.

The hunt for King Richard III's grave is heating up, with archaeologists announcing today (Sept. 5) that they have located the church where the king was buried in 1485.

"The discoveries so far leave us in no doubt that we are on the site of Leicester's Franciscan Friary, meaning we have crossed the first significant hurdle of the investigation," Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist on the dig, said in a statement.

Buckley and his colleagues have been excavating a parking lot in Leicester, England, since Aug. 25. They are searching for Greyfriars church, said to be the final resting place of Richard III, who died in battle during the War of the Roses, an English civil war. A century later, Shakespeare would immortalize Richard III in a play of the same name.

After his death in the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard III was brought to Leicester and buried at Greyfriars. The location of the grave, and the church itself, was eventually lost to history, though University of Leicester archaeologists traced the likely location to beneath the parking lot for the Leicester City Council offices.

The team announced last week that their first two trenches turned up glazed floor-tile fragments, medieval roof tile and other building fragments, suggesting that they were digging in the right place to find Greyfriars. Now, a third trench has revealed the alignment of the building's walls.

"We now think we have evidence for a two-meter-wide [6.5 feet] north-south passageway, which originally had a tile floor — this may be a cloister walk on one side of a cloister garth or courtyard," Buckley said. "At right angles to this is an east-west aligned building some five meters [16 feet] wide, again with evidence for a tiled floor." [Gallery: Digging for Richard III]

North of the building, there is an open space and then another large building with walls nearly 5 feet (1.5 meters) thick, Buckley said. The archaeologists suspected that the thick wall might be the south wall of the church building, and now the third trench suggests that, indeed, the wall continues and meets up with another wall to the north with a mortar floor in between.

"The size of the walls, the orientation of the building, its position and the presence of medieval inlaid floor tiles and architectural fragments make this almost certainly the church of the Greyfriars," Buckley said

Nifty.

Cool!

Medieval well discovered beneath couple’s living room.

History Stuff.

Manhattan circa 1921 with a cyber beat.

They didn't wear horned helmets...

...but they did wear a "reverse mullet."

What did Vikings look like?

Apparently, Vikings were "metrosexual":

The skeletons reveal another difference between us and the Vikings: men’s and women’s faces were more similar in appearance in the Viking Age than they are today.

“It’s actually more difficult to determine the gender of a skeleton from the Viking era,” says Harvig. “The men’s skulls were a little more feminine and the women’s skulls a little more masculine than what we’re seeing today. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all skeletons from the Viking period, but generally it’s quite difficult to determine the gender of a Viking Age skeleton.”

She explains that Viking women often had pronounced jawbones and eyebrows, whereas in the men, these features were more feminine than what archaeologists are accustomed to when trying to determine the gender of ancient skeletons.

Answering to all your Viking needs.

Hindenberg disaster...

...remembered in photographs.

Say it ain't so, Joe.

Another fine myth.

Shoeless Joe Jackson on his involvement in 1919 "Black Sox" scandal.