Category Archives: HISTORY
On this day – 23rd May
1430 Joan of Arc was captured by Burgundians. She was then sold to the English
When Hollywood destroyed New York
In 1953, the heat generated by an atomic bomb test near the North Pole releases a dinosaur from its Arctic tomb. The frenzied beast promptly heads for New York, where it wreaks havoc on Manhattan, before being killed at Coney Island amusement park. Then, barely half a decade later, a superhumanly strong killer robot goes on the rampage through the Big Apple, causing destruction on an epic scale. Only the presence of mind of an heroic young American saves the city from being wiped from the face of the earth.
Ernst Thälmann – Hitler’s forgotten rival
One man who would have relished today’s crisis, just as he hoped to benefit hugely from the interwar slump, was the German communist leader Ernst Thälman. He is little remembered today but, in his time, was seen as Hitler’s great rival in the battle for power on the streets of Weimar Germany.
On this day – 22nd May
1570 Abraham Ortelius published the first modern atlas in Belgium
Tracing England’s First Castle
A British amateur historian has found what he believes to be England’s oldest castle – built by Norman adventurer 15 years before the battle of Hastings. Ground-breaking research by an expert on Herefordshire castles, Terry Wardle, strongly suggest that a mystery Norman castle mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 1051 was built in Herefordshire at a place now known as Burghill.