IT’S HISTORY
Published on 21 Feb 2018On today’s episode we are going to talk about the end of the Templar Order and the famous curse of Jacques de Molay.
February 22, 2018
Curse of the FRIDAY THE 13TH I IT’S HISTORY
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February 18, 2018
Live And Let Live – France’s War Aims – Refugees I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 17 Feb 2018
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February 13, 2018
Feature History – Seven Years’ War
Feature History
Published on 14 Jan 2017Hello and welcome to Feature History, featuring the Seven Years’ War, an overdue video, and the reason you don’t record after just waking up
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February 3, 2018
How and why CASTLES were invented
Shadiversity
Published on 21 Nov 2017The Medieval castle is one of the most iconic fortresses ever built, so how and why were they invented?
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January 23, 2018
Top Gear – lost in translation
Jean Girard
Published on 26 Feb 2009James May and Jeremy Clarkson discover the perils of a literal translation.
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January 19, 2018
What “killed” the most tanks in World War 2?
Military History Visualized
Published on 22 Dec 2017This video discusses what killed the most tanks in World War 2. Was it anti-tank guns, mines, planes, hand-held anti-tank weapons, mechanical breakdowns, etc. Also a short look at the problems of the term “kill”, e.g., mobility, firepower and catastrophic/complete kill.
Original Question by Christopher: “What destroyed the most tanks during WW2: infantry, planes, anti-tank guns, or other tanks (I’m not sure if tank destroyers needs its own category or not).”
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January 9, 2018
The Seven Years War: Crash Course World History #26
CrashCourse
Published on 19 Jul 2012In which John teaches you about the Seven Years War, which may have lasted nine years. Or as many as 23. It was a very confusing war. The Seven Years War was a global war, fought on five continents, which is kind of a lot. John focuses on the war as it happened in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. the “great” European powers were the primary combatants, but they fought just about everywhere. Of course, this being a history course, the outcomes of this war still resonate in our lives today. The Seven Years War determined the direction of the British Empire, and led pretty directly to the subject of Episode 28, the American Revolution.
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January 6, 2018
Caesar in Gaul: REVOLT! (54 to 53 B.C.E.)
Historia Civilis
Published on 21 Jun 2017
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December 25, 2017
WW1 Christmas Truce: Letters from the Trenches – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 24 Dec 2017Sponsored by World of Tanks! New players: Download the game and use the code ARMISTICE for free goodies! http://cpm.wargaming.net/ivmqe6kc/?pu…
PLUS! In the spirit of the Christmas Truce, World of Tanks has prepared a gift box for EVERY PLAYER. Redeem the bonus code: HULSE14
“Yesterday there was a fierce and terrible onslaught… of Christmas packages into our trenches.” So began one soldier’s letter home after the Christmas Truce of WWI. These letters give us a peek at the joys and sorrows experienced by troops on deployment, from the pleasure of a surprise holiday truce to the pain of being too long apart from families.
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December 15, 2017
Josephine Baker
I think I first heard of Josephine Baker in the Al Stewart song from his Last Days of the Century album:
At Open Culture, Josh Jones has a brief biography of Josephine Baker that touches on most of the salient points of her career and life:
There has maybe never been a better time to critically examine the granting of special privileges to people for their talent, personality, or wealth. Yet, for all the harm wrought by fame, there have always been celebrities who use the power for good. The twentieth century is full of such figures, men and women of conscience like Muhammad Ali, Nina Simone, and Paul Robeson — extraordinary people who lived extraordinary lives. Yet no celebrity activist, past or present, has lived a life as extraordinary as Josephine Baker’s.
Born Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906 to parents who worked as entertainers in St. Louis, Baker’s early years were marked by extreme poverty. “By the time young Freda was a teenager,” writes Joanne Griffith at the BBC, “she was living on the streets and surviving on food scraps from bins.” Like every rags-to-riches story, Baker’s turns on a chance discovery. While performing on the streets at 15, she attracted the attention of a touring St. Louis vaudeville company, and soon found enormous success in New York, in the chorus lines of a string of Broadway hits.
Baker became professionally known, her adopted son Jean-Claude Baker writes in his biography, as “the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville.” A great achievement in and of itself, but then she was discovered again at age 19 by a Parisian recruiter who offered her a lucrative spot in a French all-black revue. “Baker headed to France and never looked back,” parlaying her nearly-nude danse sauvage into international fame and fortune. Topless, or nearly so, and wearing a skirt made from fake bananas, Baker used stereotypes to her advantage — by giving audiences what they wanted, she achieved what few other black women of the time ever could: personal autonomy and independent wealth, which she consistently used to aid and empower others.
Throughout the 20s, she remained an archetypal symbol of jazz-age art and entertainment for her Folies Bergère performances (see her dance the Charleston and make comic faces in 1926 in the looped video above). In 1934, Baker made her second film Zouzou (top), and became the first black woman to star in a major motion picture. But her sly performance of a very European idea of African-ness did not go over well in the U.S., and the country she had left to escape racial animus bared its teeth in hostile receptions and nasty reviews of her star Broadway performance in the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies (a critic at Time referred to her as a “Negro wench”). Baker turned away from America and became a French citizen in 1937.
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December 10, 2017
Father Victory – Georges Clemenceau I WHO DID WHAT IN World War 1?
The Great War
Published on 9 Dec 2017Today we look at the life of Georges Clemenceau, otherwise known as the Tiger or Father Victory. Before he went on to become French Prime Minister (twice) and played an important role in the later stage of the First World War, Clemenceau studied medicine, fought in the Franco-Prussian war, travelled to various destinations across the globe and founded two newspapers.
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November 21, 2017
Otto von Bismarck – VI: Germany! – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 18 Nov 2017You would think that capturing the Emperor of France would end the war, but… no. Who could Bismarck negotiate with? Eventually he forced an interim government to cave to his demands, and at the same time convinced the rest of the German states to unite with Prussia.
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November 13, 2017
Otto von Bismarck – V: Prussia Ascendant – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 11 Nov 2017The northern German states now looked to Prussia for leadership, but that power brought increased attention from their enemies. Bismarck engineered a war with France by striking at Napoleon III’s pride and wound up winning a runaway victory to secure Prussia’s diplomatic power.
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November 11, 2017
Vimy Ridge Heaven to Hell – Full Documentary
Bobmarliist
Published on 8 Feb 2013
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November 7, 2017
Le Corbusier
Theodore Dalrymple could never be called a fan of Le Corbusier’s architecture:
The French fascist architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, was another of this charmless ilk, though cleaner than Brecht (a Marxist, the latter’s decision not to wash was his tribute, albeit not a very flattering one, to the proletariat). Jeanneret’s inhumanity, his rage against humans, is evident in his architecture and in his writings. He felt the level of affection and concern for them that most people feel for cockroaches.
Like Hitler, Jeanneret wanted to be an artist, and, as with Hitler, the world would have been a better place if he had achieved his ambition. Had he been merely an artist, one could have avoided his productions if one so wished; but the buildings that he and his myriad acolytes have built unavoidably scour the retina of the viewer and cause a decline in the pleasure of his existence.
One of Jeanneret’s buildings can devastate a landscape or destroy an ancient townscape once and for all, with a finality that is quite without appeal; as for his city planning, it was of a childish inhumanity and rank amateurism that would have been mildly amusing had it remained purely theoretical and had no one taken it seriously.
A book has just been published — Le Corbusier: The Dishonest Architect, by Malcolm Millais — that reads like the indictment of a serial killer who can offer no defense (except, possibly, a psychiatric one). The author shares with me an aesthetic detestation of Jeanneret, and also of his casual but deeply vicious totalitarianism; but, unlike me, the author both has a scholarly knowledge of his subject’s life and writings, of which the perusal of only a few has more than sufficed for me, and is a highly qualified structural engineer. Mr. Millais is able to prove not only that Jeanneret was a liar, cheat, thief, and plagiarist in the most literal sense of the words, a criminal as well as being personally unpleasant on many occasions, but that he was technically grossly ignorant and incompetent, indeed laughably so. His roofs leaked, his materials deteriorated. He never grasped the elementary principles of engineering. All his ideas were gimcrack at best, and often far worse than merely bad. To commission a building from Jeanneret was to tie a ball and chain around one’s own ankle, committing oneself to endless, Sisyphean bills for alteration and maintenance, as well as to a dishonest estimate of what the building would cost to build in the first place. A house by Jeanneret was not so much a machine for living in (to quote the most famous of his many fatuous dicta) as a machine for generating costs and for moving out of. In the name of functionality, Jeanneret built what did not work; in the name of mass production, everything he used had to be individually fashioned. Having no human qualities himself, and lacking all imagination, he did not even understand that shade in a hot climate was desirable, indeed essential.
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