Daily History Picture: Gas Chambers April 13, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical PicturesPheidippides: The Greek Who Met A God April 13, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : AncientPheidippides enters the history book because he could run fast and far, and because in 490 BC, with angry Persian immortals just outside their walls, the Athenians decided that they needed help. They looked for assistance in the most violent of all Greek polis, the Spartans to the south. Sparta, though, stood 150 miles from Athens […]
Daily History Picture: Sad Burial April 12, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical PicturesDangers of Treasure Hunting in Sixteenth-Century Devon April 12, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernAncient mounds and barrows evoked mixed feelings in your average yokel in the medieval and modern period. On the one hand you, might find treasure: gold, silver and coins from the Empire or even before. On the other, though, you were likely to get flattened by whatever dragon or spirit guarded the hole in question: […]
Espionage Commandments April 11, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBeach ran several years ago a series of spying commandments from the end of the Great War. He thought he would follow this up today with some espionage commandments from the Second World War. These come courtesy of Bernard James Barton or (aka ‘Killer’ Barton or John Barton), a twenty-four year-old British major who, in […]
Daily History Picture: Einstein and the Indians April 10, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical PicturesBook Eating in the Bible April 10, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient***Dedicated to KMH who came up with this link*** A recent post looked at Bible sandwiches, the idea of eating the Bible to cure yourself from ills or poison. The average reader might raise their eyebrows and wonder what the scriptural basis for that is. This was Beach’s residual-protestant reaction but, then, to his shock, […]
Daily History Picture: Goodbye Zanjeer April 9, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical PicturesZanjeer was a detection dog who saved tens of lives at Mumbai in 1993. He is honoured here with a full state funeral at his death in 2000.
Lenin Meets the Bandits April 9, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary19 January 1919, a wonderful moment where Lenin almost got offed by the forces he had created. On this day, Lenin, Chabanov, his bodyguard, and Maria, Lenin’s sister were driving with bourgeos ostentation on the outskirts of Moscow. At a railway bridge they were stopped, however, by three armed men, that Lenin and Chabanov assumed were […]
Daily History Picture: Brit-French Cheers April 8, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical PicturesBible Sandwich April 8, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : MedievalWould you eat a Bible? Unless under duress probably not. However, the Bible has long been resorted to as food particularly in charms. Bede, in the early eighth century, may give us the earliest version of this idea in the first chapter of the first book of the Ecclesiastical History. Noting that snakes cannot dwell […]
Daily History Picture: GIs and Dutch Children April 7, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical PicturesPoxless 1492 April 7, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernA counterfactual that has long fascinated Beach. In 1492 Columbus reaches the Caribbean and within a century Europeans have mapped and visited all coastal regions in the New World. So far so normal. But add a slight adjustment into the mix. The viruses that killed tens of millions of Amerindians have practically no effect: maybe […]
Daily History Picture: A Cuppa for Frankenstein April 6, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical PicturesPiper at the Gates of Dawn: Pan, Kenneth Grahame and Wind in the Willows April 6, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryThe golden age of British children’s literature stretched from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the 1950s: in that period men and women of immense talent wrote for their sons, their daughters and in most cases for their atrophied child-like selves. Among these was the sad and sometimes wretched Kenneth Grahame. Like T.S. […]