History Guild publishes articles that provide interesting insights into history. We cover all aspects of history, from around the world and across time.
IBM and Auschwitz: New Evidence
Reading time: 13 minutes
In August 1943, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz. He was among a group of 400 inmates, mostly Jews. First, a doctor examined him briefly to determine his fitness for work. His physical information was noted on a medical record. Second, his full prisoner registration was completed with all personal details. Third, his name was checked against the indices of the Political Section to see if he would be subjected to special punishment. Finally, he was registered in the Labor Assignment Office and assigned a characteristic five-digit IBM Hollerith number, 44673.
D-Day succeeded thanks to an ingenious design called the Mulberry Harbours
Reading time: 4 minutes
When Allied troops stormed the beaches at Normandy, France on June 6, 1944 – a bold invasion of Nazi-held territory that helped tip the balance of World War II – they were using a remarkable and entirely untested technology: artificial ports.
To stage what was then the largest seaborne assault in history, the American, British and Canadian armies needed to get at least 150,000 soldiers, military personnel and all their equipment ashore on day one of the invasion.
The changing lessons of Vietnam
Reading time: 5 minutes
The national effort at remembering should also revisit a series of 50-year anniversaries for Australia’s entry and enmeshment in the Vietnam War.
How World War II spurred vaccine innovation
Reading time: 7 minutes
Before World War II, soldiers died more often of disease than of battle injuries. The ratio of disease-to-battle casualties was approximately 5-to-1 in the Spanish-American War and 2-to-1 in the Civil War. Improved sanitation reduced disease casualties in World War I, but it could not protect troops from the 1918 influenza pandemic. During the outbreak, flu accounted for roughly half of US military casualties in Europe.
America Fought Its Own Battle Over Books Before it Fought the Nazis
Reading time: 7 minutes
When United States servicemen stormed the beaches in Normandy, most of them had an essential item tucked into their breast pocket—not a weapon or food or other gear, but a lightweight paperback novel. These weren’t just any books. These were Armed Services Editions, softcover versions of popular novels, classics, Westerns, mysteries and everything in between. Their dimensions were such that they fit perfectly in the soldiers’ uniform pockets and, while sturdy enough to withstand weather and repeated readings, could be ripped apart and shared between the men.
The other assassination of November 1963
Reading time: 5 minutes
On the night of 1 November 1963, President Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vietnam (commonly known as South Vietnam), and his brother and chief political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were assassinated during a coup executed by a military junta, acting with the knowledge and support of the United States.
‘Excessive severity’: Treason and the Grenadian Rebellion of 1795
Reading time: 9 minutes
Late in the night of 2 March 1795, a rebellion broke out on the Caribbean island of Grenada. Grenada was a British colony, taken from the French in the mid-18th century. It still had a substantial francophone population. They had restricted political, religious and civil rights, particularly for those considered mixed race. The island also had a massive population of enslaved people ( around 30,000).
A love story that threatened the Commonwealth: Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams
Reading time: 7 minutes
A relatively unknown name in contemporary Britain, Sir Seretse Khama left an indelible mark on southern African politics. From 1966, he served four terms as the first president of newly independent Botswana. Under Khama, Botswana took immense economic and socio-political strides, leaving a multiracial, democratic, and prosperous nation behind him. He provided a real-world example of how racial equality could function in a part of the world that saw apartheid South Africa just beyond its southern border.
WHY IS CHARLES CURTIS’S LEGACY SO COMPLICATED?
Reading time: 6 minutes
Since the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, journalists, scholars, and activists have celebrated Harris as the first vice president who is a woman and of Asian American and African American heritage. She is not, however, the first person of color to hold the office. For many people, this comes as a surprise. However, for scholars of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), as well as many US historians whose work focuses on the executive branch of the federal government, Charles Curtis’s name is already well-known. Curtis, a member of the Kaw Nation and the first person of color to serve as vice president, is suddenly a figure of popular interest.
A cave site in Kenya’s forests reveals the oldest human burial in Africa
Reading time: 7 minutes
Africa is often referred to as the cradle of humankind – the birthplace of our species, Homo sapiens. There is evidence of the development of early symbolic behaviours such as pigment use and perforated shell ornaments in Africa, but so far most of what we know about the development of complex social behaviours such as burial and mourning has come from Eurasia.
However, the remains of a child buried almost 80,000 years ago under an overhang at Panga ya Saidi cave in Kenya is providing important new details.
Cave of Horror: fresh fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls echo dramatic human stories
Reading time: 6 minutes
In March 2021 news broke of the discovery of fresh fragments of a nearly 2,000-year-old scroll in Israel. The fragments were said to come from the evocatively named Cave of Horror, near the western shore of the Dead Sea.
The finds were announced with attention-grabbing headlines that these were new fragments of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls and some of our earliest evidence for the biblical books of Zechariah and Nahum.
Sheepskin was used as an anti-fraud device in British legal documents for hundreds of years
Reading time: 4 minutes
The 16th and 17th centuries were a notably litigious period in British history. New rights, wealth and obligations had to be protected through legal transactions – and that needed documentation.
Such was the importance of deeds – legal documents concerning the ownership of property – that lawyers chose to write on parchment, made from animal skin, despite the widespread use of paper. This continued a tradition that stretched back to at least the 13th century.
Historians are Being Asked to Spin Simple Stories of Nationalism; The Past Won’t Cooperate
Reading time: 7 minutes
North Macedonia, an EU candidate since 2005, and Bulgaria, an EU member since 2007, are neighbors that have several commonalities in terms of history and culture. Despite the commonalities, in recent years commemorations and public memory have increasingly led to bitterness between the two nations, including political threats and even physical altercations at various sites of memory. Bulgarian perspectives over North Macedonia’s history and culture present a major roadblock for the latter’s EU membership, as well as general stability in the Balkan region, which was once considered to be a European powder keg. This is all because of attempts to simplify and revise a very complex history that requires patience, open-ended questions, deconstruction of well-established national myths, and careful conclusions.
New archaeology finding shows how Muslim cuisine endured in secret despite policing by the Spanish Catholic regime
Reading time: 5 minutes
Granada, in southern Spain’s Andalusia region, was the final remnant of Islamic Iberia known as al-Andalus – a territory that once stretched across most of Spain and Portugal. In 1492, the city fell to the Catholic conquest.
In the aftermath, native Andalusians, who were Muslims, were permitted to continue practising their religion. But after a decade of increasingly hostile religious policing from the new Catholic regime, practising Islamic traditions and rituals was outlawed. Recent archaeological excavations in Granada, however, have uncovered evidence of Muslim food practices continuing in secret for decades after the conquest.
90 years ago, Yorta Yorta leader William Cooper petitioned the king for Aboriginal representation in parliament
Reading time: 4 minutes
Ninety years ago, Yorta Yorta leader William Cooper dreamed of Aboriginal people being represented in the Commonwealth parliament. In August 1933, he set about petitioning the British king, George V. The key demand was for: a member of parliament, of our own blood or white men known to have studied our needs and to be in sympathy with our race, to represent us in the Federal Parliament.
Australia and the Vietnam War: Looking Back
Reading time: 10 minutes
This is an appropriate time to reflect on what we have learned from 50 years of political argument and scholarly study about the war. How has a half-century of controversy, reflection and research affected presentations of the war for general audiences, such as the 18-hour documentary series The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and the British historian Max Hastings’s book Vietnam: An epic tragedy, 1945–1975?
Reappraising The Passion of the Christ
Reading time: 5 minutes
Looking back at director Mel Gibson’s controversial depiction of Christianity’s central event.
On the screen: Cold warriors
Reading time: 4 minutes
The Courier, directed by Dominic Cooke, is a film of the Cold War with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as backdrop. The central characters, British salesman Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) Colonel Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), are centre stage, but the real dynamic is the challenge issued by the Soviet Union and its empire to the United States and its Western allies. Infamously, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had boasted that the USSR would bury the West and this claim features in the opening of the movie. A nuclear war between the two superpowers of the time emerges as possible as the Soviet presence in Cuba is revealed to be more threatening than originally thought.
PUTIN’S PAST: The Return of Ideological History and the Strongman
Reading time: 8 minutes
From Russian Constitutional Court chairman Valery Zorkin, to former Russian culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, to presidential adviser Yuri Kovlachuk, amateur history is everywhere in the Russian government today. This is not an accident but a deliberate way to build official state ideology in Russia. For instance, in a recent interview discussing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, Oleg Khramov, said that the West is trying “to stop the course of history” by “blinding” many Ukrainians to the historical truth of their shared civilizational identity with Russia.
Uncovering the roots of racist ideas in America
Reading time: 5 minutes
Donald Trump proclaimed during his inaugural address, “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.”
Opening our hearts to patriotism will not solve the problem of racist ideas. Some of the nation’s proudest patriots have also been the nation’s most virulent racists. The organizing principle of the Ku Klux Klan has always been allegiance to the red, white and blue flag.
How Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda machine changed American journalism
Reading time: 8 minutes
When the United States declared war on Germany 100 years ago, the impact on the news business was swift and dramatic.
In its crusade to “make the world safe for democracy,” the Wilson administration took immediate steps at home to curtail one of the pillars of democracy – press freedom – by implementing a plan to control, manipulate and censor all news coverage, on a scale never seen in U.S. history.
German spies in South Africa during WWII – The enemy within
Reading time: 5 minutes
The story of the intelligence war in South Africa during the Second World War is one of suspense, drama and dogged persistence. South Africa officially joined the war on 6 September 1939 by siding with Britain and the Allies and declaring war on Nazi Germany.
South African historians have largely overlooked the intelligence war, partly because of the apparent paucity of reference sources on it. This lack of attention prompted me to investigate the matter further. The result was my book Hitler’s Spies: Secret Agents and the Intelligence War in South Africa.
The absurd irony of Putin’s invocation of Stalingrad
Reading time: 5 minutes
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address in Volgograd on 2 February, in which he sought to draw moral parallels between the heroic Soviet defence of Stalingrad in World War II and the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, represents a new low for Kremlin propaganda.
Ammonite: the remarkable real science of Mary Anning and her fossils
Reading time: 6 minutes
Palaeontologist Mary Anning is known for discovering a multitude of Jurassic fossils from Lyme Regis on England’s Dorset Coast from the age of ten in 1809.
Her discoveries included the first complete Icthyosaurus (although it was her little brother who first stumbled across the skull, Anning spent the next year excavating and preparing the rest of the fossil), the first complete Plesiosaurus and subsequent plesiosaur species, a perfectly preserved belemnite complete with anterior sheath and inkbag, and the first pterodactyl Dimorphodon.