Tag Archives: history

Murdered Author’s Notebook on Russian Invasion Now Made Public

Ukrainian father and children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenko took notes as Russian forces rolled into his Kapytolivka village in eastern Ukraine. When he knew they would take him away, he buried his journal in his backyard.

Charlotte Higgins, writing for The Guardian, put together as much of the story as can be known, working with another Ukranian author, Victoria Amelina.

“I never thought that my home village would become the epicentre of the rashist occupation,” wrote Vakulenko in the opening paragraphs of his diary. The word “rashist” is a now widespread Ukrainian portmanteau, a combination of “Russian” and “fascist”, not to be given the dignity of an initial capital. “For me, with my patriotic, pro-Ukrainian views, it was extremely dangerous to find myself surrounded by the enemy.” But, he wrote, he had little choice: moving his son seemed impossible. He added: “You can get used to anything; what matters is what sort of person you are left at the end of it.”

“The manuscript is now in the Kharkiv Literary Museum, and the text of the diary has been recently published in Ukraine, with a foreword by Amelina.”

The Halifax Diasaster of 1917

The city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, settled by Britons in 1749, has always held an important role in maritime trade. The video above describes the remarkable story of the horrific disaster that destroyed one square mile of the port city and damaged other communities miles away. Thousands were killed and injured by the results of the largest man-made explosion prior to December 6, 1917, when the Mont-Blanc destroyed Halifax.

Trojan War Mosaic Found

A 1,300 sq. foot mosaic floor has been uncovered in Syria, depicting figures from the Trojan War–“Remarkably intact artwork that was created 1,600 years ago shows colorful images of Ancient Greek soldiers and Amazons who fought in the epic battle.” They’ve only uncovered 65 feet of it so far.

A Grand and Splendid Feast from History

And now for something completely different, “grand and splendid entertainment in two courses” from a 200-year-old cookbook.

Food scientist Anne Reardon worked through the recipes recommended a couple centuries ago for an entertaining meal and shares her family’s opinions on them. It’s impressive, historical, and sometimes gross.

Reardon’s YouTube channel is excellent for exposing silly or dangerous food hacks in other videos and explaining how to bake things well.

David McCullough: ‘Things Didn’t Have to Turn Out as Well as They Did’

The engagingly readable historian David McCullough, 89, died this week. In 1992, he said he wanted readers to know “that things didn’t have to turn out as well as they did. I want them to know that life felt every bit as uncertain to people back then as it does to us today.”

McCullough was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for two books, Truman and John Adams. He also received two National Book Awards for The Path Between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback. He wrote many other books, those most recently published being The Wright Brothers, The American Spirit, and The Pioneers.

He made the case for reading history much like we’ve made a case for reading literature.

History isn’t just something that ought to be taught or ought to be read or ought to be encouraged because it’s going to make us a better citizen. It will make us a better citizen; or because it will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which it will; or because it will cause us to behave better, which it will. It should be taught for pleasure: The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about.

“Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are,” Imprimis, April 2005

Escape from Auschwitz

Walter Rosenberg knew that escaping from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp was a crazy idea and probably impossible, but when he turned 18, he knew he should be the one to attempt it. Others had tried and failed. Even attempting to warn someone before their deaths resulted in one’s own death for breaking the deception the Nazi’s employed to efficiently usher their prisoners into the gas chambers.

“The factory of murder that the Nazis had constructed in this accursed place depended on one cardinal principle: that the people who came to Auschwitz did not know where they were going, or for what purpose. . . . The Nazis had devised a method that would operate like a well-run slaughterhouse rather than a shooting party.”

On April 7, 1944, he and Fred Wetzler acted on all of their preparations. The UK Guardian has their story.

“Walter understood that the Nazis wanted him and every other prisoner to conclude that escape was futile, that any attempt was doomed. But Walter drew a very different lesson. The danger came not from trying to escape, but from trying and failing.”

A Comic Explains an Important History Principle

It’s good to see C.S. Lewis’s influence out in the wild.

Karolina Żebrowska is a comic YouTuber who focuses on historic fashion, how some of ye olden times come through in movies, and poking fun at various historic facts. One of her hobby horses is the fact women did wear corsets and it wasn’t an oppression they tolerated because they could handle the pain (she touches on that here). She’s smart and amusing.

I share the video below because she mentions C.S. Lewis’s common-sense notion of chronological snobbery, which she may have gotten off of Wikipedia, but it still counts.

A funny look at wrong history beliefs by Karolina Żebrowska

And just a little more on chronological snobbery from Karl Barth:

But what else can this mean but that it was in the eighteenth century that man began to axiomatically to credit himself with being superior to the past, and assumed a standpoint in relation to it whence he found it possible to set himself up as a judge over past events according to fixed principles, as well as to describe its deeds and to substantiate history’s own report? And the yardstick of these principles, at least as applied by the typical observer of history living at that age, has the inevitable effect of turning that judgment of the past into an extremely radical one. For the yardstick is quite simply the man of the present with his complete trust in his own powers of discernment and judgment, with his feeling for freedom, his desire for intellectual conquest, his urge to form and his supreme moral self-confidence.

The Endurance Has Been Found

Marine Archaeologist Mensun Bound led a team on a search of Antartica’s Weddell Sea to find the famous vessel of explorer Ernest Shackleton, who lost the ship in 1915.

Endurance, a 144-foot, three-masted wooden ship, holds a revered place in polar history because it spawned one of the greatest survival stories in the annals of exploration. Its location, nearly 10,000 feet down in waters that are among the iciest on Earth, placed it among the most celebrated shipwrecks that had not been found.”

What they found was “in a brilliant state of preservation,” Bound said.

Boom in Antiquity discoveries during 2020

Detectorists for the win!

In England, people had more time to putter around the garden in the last couple years, and guess what? They uncovered old stuff. For example, Bob Greenaway from Oswestry in Shropshire found the Bulla sun pendant. “The retired engineer found the intricate piece while metal detecting in the Marches, unearthing one of the most significant pieces of metalwork ever discovered in Britain – around 3,000 years old.”

Loads and loads of stuff–one might even say hoards–have been found over the last few years.

But wait, there’s more. Two shipwrecks were uncovered off the coast of Israel and many coins, figurines, and other antiquities were recovered, including a gemstone with an image of the Good Shepherd on it.

A Christmas Truce of 1914

Not long after WWI began, there was Christmas. Military units ran out of munitions and soldiers, and perhaps the will to fight over the holidays wasn’t quite there.

Merry Christmas, everyone.