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Get PocketTwenty-five years ago this fall, a crowd of thousands gathered along the east side of the Berlin Wall and demanded, with the urgency of people who had spent decades under an authoritarian communist regime, that the border guards let them pass to the other side.
Most people think of castles as representative of conflict. However, they should be seen as bastions of peace as much as war. In 1000 there were very few castles in Europe – and none in England.
ZONNEBEKE, Belgium — To walk the orderly rows of headstones in the elegant graveyards that hold the dead of World War I is to feel both awe and distance. With the death of the last veterans, World War I, which began 100 years ago, has moved from memory to history.
SUDDENLY the specter of the Cold War is back. Prompted by the political crisis in Ukraine, some conservatives have called for President Obama to stand up to Vladimir V.
About a year ago, I wrote about some attempts to explain why anyone would, or ought to, study English in college.
It’s mid-October, and we’re strolling near the central borough of Mitte, along the yellow painted line that runs where the Berlin Wall once stood. There’s a distinct elegance to Sauerteig’s movements.
WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The opening of the Berlin Wall, 25 years ago this Sunday, marked a surprisingly joyous end to a conflict that could have erupted into thermonuclear combat.
Peter Macdiarmid has taken photographs of locations in France and England to match with archive images taken before, during and after the D-day landings. The Allied invasion to liberate mainland Europe from Nazi occupation during the second world war took place on 6 June 1944.
FOR over 25 years, Archduke Franz Ferdinand paced up and down in his palaces and castles waiting impatiently for the death of the ever more ancient emperor, his hated uncle Franz Joseph I. As we all know, his wait was in vain.
Seventy years ago, the great war photographer joined the first slaughterhouse wave of D-day, recording W.W. II’s pivotal battle in 11 historic images of blur and grit. But that is only a fraction compared with what he shot—and lost.
As everyone knows, the supreme court ruled six–three for Al Gore in the great dispute over the Florida recount in 2000. As everyone also knows, Gore emerged as the ultimate victor in that recount, and with his poetic and moving inauguration address he managed to unify a badly divided nation.
It was the greatest coffee run in American history. The Ohio boys had been fighting since morning, trapped in the raging battle of Antietam, in September 1862. Suddenly, a 19-year-old William McKinley appeared, under heavy fire, hauling vats of hot coffee.
On a Saturday last March, my Berlin neighbors had a plant funeral. They set up three-meter-high wood crosses on our street corner and placed funeral candles all along the street, and the children drew posters of crying trees and flowers. There was live music, and everyone got quite drunk.
It has long been fashionable to say that the globe is shrinking. In the wake of the telegraph, the steamship and the railway, thinkers from the late 19th century onwards often wrote of space and time being annihilated by new technologies.