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We offer captivating stories highlighting topics of history, war, science, crime, culture, the Old West, and more. Enjoy our 500 – 1000-word entries for every day of the year.
Guest Post by M. Raoul Boyer Video Description: The machine-gunner/assistant driver of a Sherman tank belonging to the 22nd Armoured Regiment (The Canadian Grenadier Guards) is given a glass of wine to drink by a Frenchwoman during a pause in the advance. FFI volunteers and townspeople gather in small groups in the rain to greet…
Image: A Viet Cong guerrilla stands guard in the Mekong Delta. “You could find women like her almost everywhere during the war,” said the photographer. “She was only 24 years old but had been widowed twice. Both her husbands were soldiers. I saw her as the embodiment of the ideal guerrilla woman, who’d made great sacrifices…
Today’s Photographs – Enjoy!!! Image: An Armenian woman is seen kneeling beside her dead child in a field within sight of help and the safety of Aleppo, Syria, during the Armenian Genocide, 1915. #ArmenianGenocide https://amzn.to/4kZljyT Image: Two students sharing a rocking chair at Macalester College, Minnesota. 1890s. #America1890s https://amzn.to/4lpOZFm Both images: Mata Hari – The…
Jane Fonda’s visit to North Vietnam in July 1972 remains one of the most controversial moments in American history. The trip, intended as a peaceful protest against the Vietnam War, led to intense backlash, earning her the nickname “Hanoi Jane”. This event altered the public’s perception of her Hollywood image in a negative way for…
The haunting photographs of Hans-Georg Henke, a sixteen-year-old German anti-aircraft soldier captured in Hessen, Germany, remain some of the most powerful images from World War II. Taken by American photojournalist John Florea in April 1945, these photos depict Henke in a moment of profound despair, his face contorted in grief and exhaustion. Over the years,…
Left: A Chinese woman is tied to a pole and forcibly kissed by a Japanese soldier. Right: Elsewhere, a man is left blindfolded and tied up. Both images were taken during the Rape of Nanking. “The Forgotten Holocaust”: Horrific Photos From The Rape Of Nanking, 1937-1938. These tragic photos and stories capture the horrors of…
Image: Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard, originally from an engraving by Benjamin Cole in A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates (1724). On December 5, 1717, Notorious Pirate Blackbeard Ransacks the “Margaret.”
Image: Matthew Henson, American explorer. 1910. Matthew Henson – The First Man to the North Pole, 1909. On April 6, 1909, a team of six men on dog sleds, including the first person to stand on top of the world, an African American man named Matthew Henson, travelled 413 nautical miles off the coast of…
Image: Japanese high school girls wave farewell to departing Kamikaze pilots. “There was a hypnotic fascination to the sight so alien to our Western philosophy. We watched each plunging kamikaze with the detached horror of one witnessing a terrible spectacle rather than as the intended victim. We forgot self for the moment as we groped…
Image: Rehearsal landing by US forces at Slapston Sands, Devon, in April 1944. The Catastrophe of Exercise Tiger, April 1944. In the early hours of April 28, 1944, a convoy of eight American LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank), carrying vehicles and combat engineers of the 1st Engineer Special Brigade, took part in Exercise TIGER and were…
Image: Sergeant Pilot Omer Levesque is assisted into his parachute prior to flying a mission while assigned to No. 401 Squadron, RCAF, on July 7, 1941, during World War II. Omer “Trottle” Lévesque served as a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) during the Second World War. He flew many sorties over France and…
Image: Sailors of USS Supply loading a camel aboard. In the 1850s, the U.S. Army conceived a plan to bring several camels from the Middle East into the United States and employ them to travel through large tracts of the American Southwest carrying cargo for the military. As improbable as this seems, it did actually…
·Image: Minnie Ashley 1892 Minnie Ashley, aka Beatrice Chanler, Actress, Society Lady and Humanitarian One of the great beauties of the stage at the end of the 19th century, Minnie Ashley’s talents as a singer and dancer emerged in the madcap musical “1492” in 1892. Ashley was winsome, cheerful, and quick, an actress whose triumphs…
Image: General Hideki Tojo lies semiconscious, limp in a chair with a gaping bullet wound just below the heart after a botched attempt to kill himself as American soldiers surround his house. September 11, 1945. On September 11, 1945, former Japanese Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo attempted suicide as American soldiers arrived at his home…
With Brussels now liberated, we look back at a woman who played a role in resisting the German occupation and helping downed Allied airmen. Andrée was born in 1916 in Schaerbeek, a suburb of Brussels in German occupied Belgium. When Belgium capitulated on 28 May 1940, she volunteered to work in a Bruges hospital where…
https://www.loc.gov/item/2020600751/? The United States Army Signal Corps Special Coverage Unit accompanied the Free French troops as they enter Paris. Crowds of French civilians wave and welcome the troops and military vehicles as they pass. General de Gaulle and General Leclerc meet General von Choltitz for the official surrender of the Germans. Special Coverage Unit members…
Image: Private Harold Pringle. The last Canadian military member to be executed. The Execution of Private Harold Pringle If the Canadian public found out, there would be hell to pay. The war had been over for nearly two months, after all, and during World War II, no other Canadian soldier had been convicted of murder…
Massacre at Buchères. August 24, 1944. With German forces withdrawing in France, and Paris on the cusp of liberation, the Nazis continue their brutal treatment of the civilian population. On August 24, 1944, the village of Buchères (10800) near Troyes was to experience a day of horror. The previous evening, FFI fighters set up a…
Day 5 – Liberation of Paris, Wednesday, 23 August 1944. Parisians listen with stupefaction as the BBC in London prematurely announces that the capital has been liberated by its own population. Heavy fighting is still taking place throughout the capital.
Image: B-24 Classy Chassis II, pictured in March 1944 with its operational crew before being sent to Warton for refurbishment.
Image: American forces in Chambois, France, during the Battle of the Falaise Pocket. August 1944. Photographs from the Battle of the Falaise Pocket – August 1944 The Falaise Pocket or Battle of the Falaise Pocket occurred from August 12-21, 1944. It was the decisive engagement during the Battle of Normandy, during which a “pocket” was…
Image: Staff Sergeant Henry E. Erwin. In the lead B-29 on a mission to Koriyama, north of Tokyo, he was tasked with releasing white phosphorus smoke bombs through a chute to assist with the assembly of 167 bombers from Guam and Tinian. There were initially no issues, but one phosphorous bomb exploded prematurely and ricocheted…
Image: Junkers Ju87 B-1, the variant involved in the Neuhammer accident and the primary equipment of Stuka units for the first year of the war. August 15, 1939. The Junkers 87 Stukas of I/StG 76 were briefed to put on a dive bombing demonstration for a group of generals near Neuhammer in present-day Świętoszów, Poland,.…
Image: Cowra POW Camp, 1 July 1944. Japanese POWs practising baseball near their quarters several weeks before the Cowra Breakout. The photograph was taken for the Allied Far Eastern Liaison Office, with the intention of using it in propaganda leaflets to be dropped over Japanese-held islands and Japan itself. More than 1,000 Japanese men were…
On August 4, 1944, Russian-born Princess Véra Obolensky was guillotined by the Nazis at Ploetzensee prison in Berlin. She began working for the French Resistance in late 1940. Arrested in Paris in late 43, she was sentenced to death in Arras in May 1944 and then deported to Germany.
Image: A destroyed Iraqi tank rests near a series of oil-well fires during the Gulf War, on March 9, 1991, in northern Kuwait. August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces invade Kuwait. 168 days later, a U.S.-led international coalition will launch Operation Desert Storm, the massive military campaign to drive Saddam Hussein’s army out of the tiny…
The early 20th century was a pivotal moment in the history of criminal justice, marked by the widespread adoption of “scientific” methods of identification and documentation. At the heart of this revolution was the mugshot. Far from being mere photographs, these stark, standardized portraits were the culmination of a movement to professionalize policing and create…
This 71-second video offers a visceral look into one of the most monumental days of the 20th century: the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944. Known as D-Day, this operation marked the beginning of the end of Nazi occupation in Western Europe. Over 150,000 troops from Britain, Canada, the…
History Daily With Francis Chappell Black 