Prisoners are forced to play music as they lead a fellow prisoner to his execution at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
Votava/Imagno via Getty Images
Music is supposed to transcend the mundane and horrific. Yet it has also served as an accompaniment to torture and punishment.
A bottle of Windhoek Lager beer stands on the terrace of Hotel Thule in Windhoek.
Oliver Berg/picture alliance via Getty Images
The escalation of the liberation wars across the subcontinent had an important impact on the beer industry.
Shutterstock
Their crucial contribution to anti-appeasement remains unrecognised, but LGBT+ History Month provides an ideal opportunity to acknowledge this brave group of MPs.
Public housing tower in Flemington, Melbourne.
DAVID CROSLING/AAP
What might the past offer us at this moment, and how will future generations reflect on this year? How will this present become the future’s past?
The former Nazi concentration (and extermination) camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland.
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The study of the Holocaust, as the ultimate example of genocide, allows teachers to raise the universal message of human rights abuses and mass violence.
Capture of William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) in Germany in 1945.
Bert Hardy, No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit/IWM
In the early days of the second world war, a Nazi propagandist broadcasting to England built up a large following.
The liberation of Yugoslavs and Jews from an Italian concentration camp on the Adriatic island of Rab, 8 Sept 1943.
Elvira Kohn/Croatian History Museum
Good Europeans are not always where you expect to find them.
Fort Drummond at Mount Saint Thomas, NSW.
Alexander Lee
Some of our coastal defences are in desperate need of preservation and could be transformed into tourist attractions.
Still image from the 1940 propaganda film ‘Christmas Under Fire’ produced by the Crown Film Unit.
BFI Archive
Despite rationing and the Blitz, Christmas on the domestic front in 1940 was cheerful and optimistic.
Retired Gen. Lloyd Austin has been confirmed by the Senate as the next secretary of defense.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
President Joe Biden’s nomination of a recently retired general to lead the Pentagon required an exception to federal law.
Australian soldiers in the trenches at Anzac Cove on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey in 1915.
State Library of Victoria/Wikimedia Commons
When the honour of Australia’s revered soldiers is questioned, so, too, is the national self-image. But war is an ugly business, and we pay a price for tethering it so tightly to our identity.
Sorrow and Song by Edmund Blair Leighton.
Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives
During the second world war, people found solace in the formulaic narratives of historical romances and during the pandemic they could once again provide readers comfort.
Neville Chamberlain wanted to avoid war at all costs. Adolf Hitler felt differently.
German Federal Archives
Press secretary George Steward had clandestine meetings with Nazi officials as he worked for appeasement with Germany before the second world war.
Joe Castro/AAP
It’s time for a new accord, with a summit led by First Nations people, bringing disparate groups together to help heal the nation and the land.
Trump campaigning for votes in Pittsburgh in late September 2020.
Evan Vucci/AP
There are 45 million Americans of German ancestry. They gave Donald Trump his winning margin in 2016. Will they do it again?
Churchill’s brainchild.
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Likely survival rates for these men were judged to be as low as 12 days, which may be why OBs were sometimes referred to as ‘Suicide Bunkers’.
Women get shut down when bringing up the still-taboo subject of sexual assault.
markgoddard/Getty
A scholar who studies Holocaust survivors sees an explanation for why women change their stories of sexual assault, even now in the
MeToo era.
After the end of the war, millions of servicemen and women needed a job.
Coxy58/Shutterstock
Demobilisation of millions after an abrupt end to war led to a political crisis 75 years ago.
The Christie Mountain wildfire along Skaha Lake near Penticton, B.C., on August 19, 2020.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward
Canada retooled its economy during the Second World War. We must do so again to confront the climate emergency.
Ioat/Shutterstock
Sound and its subtle, malleable possibilities for interpretation can be a valuable tool for those trying to capture pasts that have been erased, marginalised or forgotten.