Everyone learns about the French resistance but what about the freedom fighters across the Alps?
Powerful waves of nationalist sentiment have endured since the second world war and continue to pose difficulties for the leaders of Japan and China.
EPA/Kim Kyung-Hoon
We are used to thinking of Gaza as a war-torn stretch of ground. A place where life goes grimly on in the face of an intractable conflict. A graveyard not only for civilians caught in the crossfire, but…
The Whitlam government had a reformist vision whose origins lay in the future prime minister’s own wartime experience.
AWM
While serving in the RAAF, future prime minister Gough Whitlam led his first political campaign, agitating among his own squadron in support of the 1944 referendum.
One of the darkest moments of France’s colonial history has never been properly acknowledged. That could be about to change.
Former US Poet Laureate Philip Levine (1928-2015) was down to earth and humble. But he spared no rage towards those he deemed selfish and narcissistic.
Brooklyn Book Festival/Flickr
Kate Daniels, the director of Vanderbilt’s creative writing program, recalls the life and work of her mentor, a man “devoted…to creating gritty and empathetic portraits of American blue collar workers.”
The FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile is the sort of ‘lethal defensive weapon’ the US may consider supplying to Ukraine.
Wikimedia Commons/US Army
Barack Obama is considering supplying “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine. But how meaningful is that description? There are simply “weapons”, all of which can be used for defence or for aggression.
Sicily, 1943: Whose blood was this U.S. soldier getting?
NARA
Until 1950 the Red Cross segregated blood. It was thousands of African-Americans during World War II who forced the Red Cross to include them as donors and helped pave the way for activism of the 1960s.
Why won’t Japan admit to the past?
Pichi Chuang/Reuters
In 1943, during the height of World War II, fifteen-year-old Liu Mianhuan was tied up and taken away by Imperial Japanese troops from her village in Yu County, Shanxi Province, China. She was confined…
Remembering the Red Army soldier.
Jonathan Noden-Wilkinson/Shutterstock
The documentary Night will Fall tells the story of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, a film made by the Allied forces who filmed the scenes of the Nazi concentration camps as they liberated them…
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin.
Victoria Nesfield
In late January 1945, Hungarian teenager Bart Stern hid in a pile of bodies to avoid being killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz. He survived, but not one of his friends escaped. Soon afterwards, the Red Army…
British teenagers visit Auschwitz on a school trip.
Chris Radburn/PA Archive/
As the world pauses to remember the Holocaust, it is important to at what children around the world are learning about the horrific events of 70 years ago and their aftermath. A recent research project…
Preparations at Auschwitz for the 70th anniversary of its liberation.
Jacek Bedinarczyk/EPA
On January 29 1945 Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, recorded in his diary being told by a friend about a speech on the radio given by the émigré writer Thomas Mann: According to it, the…
Pensive: Winston Churchill in 1946, by Douglas Granville Chandor.
Cliff1066
It was 1930. Winston Churchill was a 55-year-old Conservative Party politician who had been a member of parliament for three decades. He had eventually risen to the position of chancellor of the exchequer…
The Imitation Game has scooped up eight Oscar nominations this year, including the coveted Best Picture. Since its release in autumn 2014 the film has attracted widespread positive critical appraisal and…
Otto Dov Kulka in Terezín, 1960s.
Archive of Security Services (ABS), Czech Republic
As we approach the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, the victims of the Holocaust stand, with a good reason, at the centre of our attention. It is survivors’ memoirs that shaped…
Out with the ham and in with the spam.
63056612@N00
Today many people follow vegetarian, vegan and a variety of eclectic diets, but before World War II meals were commonly based on the meat and two veg philosophy. And so food rationing, which began 75 years…