history
You are viewing stuff tagged with history.
You are viewing stuff tagged with history.
Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace” speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Whenever I feel optimistic about human nature, I seem to make the mistake of reading more history:
Mao was also frequently compared to China’s First Emperor Qin Shi Huang, notorious for burying alive hundreds of scholars—and liked the comparison. During a speech to party cadre in 1958, Mao said he had far outdone Qin Shi Huang in his policy against intellectuals: “He buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried forty-six thousand scholars alive…You [intellectuals] revile us for being Qin Shi Huangs. You are wrong. We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold.”
— Wikipedia, Mao Zedong
Jason Kottke’s twitter stream:
Seen in a torch protest sign: “Would we have allowed Nazi Germany to host the Olympics?” Ummm….
Terrifying ignorance! Anybody remember 1936? Anyone? Bueller?
I always thought that dead reckoning was a complete guess about distance traveled. Turns out, it is based on an estimation of important factors like speed and time, not just looking back over the distance covered and making a visual guess thereof:
Items like this make history fun:
Gimli Glider is the nickname of an Air Canada aircraft which was involved in an infamous aviation incident. On 23 July 1983, a Boeing 767-200 jet, Air Canada Flight 143, ran completely out of fuel at 41,000 feet (12,000m) altitude, about halfway through its flight from Montreal to Edmonton. The crew was able to glide the aircraft safely to an emergency landing at Gimli Industrial Park Airport, a former airbase at Gimli, Manitoba.
The subsequent investigation revealed corporate failures and a chain of minor human errors which combined to defeat built-in safeguards, deceiving Captain Robert Pearson into accepting an aircraft that should never have been flown. In addition, fuel loading was miscalculated through misunderstanding of the recently adopted metric system.
Conan and 1864 Baseball - Conan’s 1800’s style taunts at the opposing team are hilarious. As is his outrageous mustache. His on location stuff is always great.
When I was in university, there was this major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw, who said, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.’ I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.
14 amazing historical books - View them online. DaVinci’s handwriting.