Hitler and hot jazz

“…Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.)…” The Nazis hated a lot of people: Slavs, Jews, the disabled, Jesse Owens. And they [...]

Closing the Pigeon Gap

Military, economic and indeed political history has often been driven by fear that, on the other side of the hill, some perceived enemy is making all-too-rapid progress in developing dangerous new technology. From the Dreadnought race of the early 1900s to the fictitious Missile Gap that so bothered the Americans in the late 1950s – [...]

The mysterious Mr. Zedzed, the wickedest man in the world

Late in November 1927, an elderly Greek man sat in his mansion in Paris and tended a fire. Every time it flickered and threatened to die, he reached to one side and tossed another bundle of papers or a leather-bound book into the grate. For two days the old man fed the flames, at one [...]

Nice things to say about Attila the Hun

He called himself flagellum Dei, the scourge of God, and even today, 1,500 years after his blood-drenched death, his name remains a byword for brutality. Ancient artists placed great stress on his inhumanity, depicting him with goatish beard and devil’s horns. Then as now, he seemed the epitome of an Asian steppe nomad: ugly, squat [...]

The Christmas Truce

Even at the distance of a century, no war seems more terrible than World War I. In the four years between 1914 and 1918, it killed or wounded more than 25 million people–peculiarly horribly, and (in popular opinion, at least) for less apparent purpose than did any other war before or since. Yet there were [...]

History heroes: Marc Bloch

At eight on the evening of June 16, 1944—not long before dusk on the tenth day after the Allied invasion of France–the Gestapo dragged 28 French resistance fighters from the cells where they had been incarcerated, tortured and interrogated at Montluc prison, Lyon. Handcuffed in pairs, the men were thrust onto an open truck and [...]

An ice cream war

The war seemed a very long way away to the citizens of Broken Hill that January 1. It was the height of the southern summer, and the Australian silver-mining town baked in the outback desert heat, 720 miles from Sydney and half a world away from the mud and blood of the Western Front. The [...]

Amazons: inside the King of Dahomey’s all-woman army

It is noon on a humid Saturday in the fall of 1861, and a missionary by the name of Francesco Borghero has been summoned to a parade ground in Abomey, the capital of the small West African state of Dahomey. He is seated on one side of a huge, open square right in the center [...]