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“The actual camp appeared like an untidy slaughterhouse. A pungent smell hung heavily in the air… The further we walked into the site, the stronger the smell of burnt flesh became, and dirty-black ash rained down on us from the heavens, darkening the snow… Innumerable exhausted, wretched figures with shrunken faces and bald heads were…
The Day the War Shifted Its Weight On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker beneath the crumbling Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The war did not end that day — but something else did. A grip loosened. A breath held too long was finally released. And across Europe, in whispered rumors and…
There was a time when we thought the future would be flying cars… But what we really miss are drive-ins, jukeboxes, and backseats without seatbelts. When the world felt big, but our neighborhoods felt safe. When Saturday mornings smelled like pancakes and sounded like cartoons. We grew up believing that by the year 2000, we’d…
Long ago and far away, in a land that time forgot,Before the days of Dylan , or the dawn of Camelot.There lived a race of innocents, and they were you and me.For Ike was in the White House in that land where we were born,Where navels were for oranges, and Peyton Place was porn. We…
A War Comedy That Was Never Just a Comedy When M*A*S*H first aired in 1972, most Americans had never seen anything like it. A sitcom set during a war? With doctors cracking jokes in the middle of surgeries, cross-dressing to get discharged, and playing poker as helicopters arrived with casualties? It could’ve failed. It almost…
On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler died in his Berlin bunker. The war in Europe would officially end within days. But long before the surrender documents were signed, something else happened—something quieter. In rooms dimly lit by candles or low lamps, in safehouses and crowded tenements, on battered radios with shaky signals, people across Europe…
It usually started with headlights lining up at dusk. Engines idling softly. Families in station wagons, teenagers in hand-me-down sedans, young couples with blankets folded in the backseat. The sun would lower behind the trees, and soon enough, the lot was a patchwork of chrome and painted steel — all pointed toward the giant outdoor…
It was August 1955 when Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, stepped off a train in Mississippi for what was supposed to be a summer visit with family. The South he entered was not the America he knew. It was the Jim Crow South — where segregation was law, and Black lives were disposable…
Sometimes, a video opens a door. A few days ago, Jerry Maune , one of the followers on my history page, tagged me in a comment. It was on a short clip from @firstcastcabin — what seemed to be a wise man, talking calmly beside some quiet water, pointing out a spillway. At first glance,…
There was a certain hum to recess in the 1980s — the squeak of sneakers on cracked pavement, the thud of rubber balls, the whistle of a teacher breaking up a too-rough game of Red Rover. No screens, no supervision within an inch of our lives. Just a patch of concrete, maybe a patch of…