The history of the Second World War is full of heroic actions carried out by men and women, often little known but whose work was indispensable in the discourse of war. Women were actively involved in virtually every aspect of the conflict, both military and civilian. For example, the British intelligence service (SOE) had 55 […]
Modern Era
Posted inModern Era
How many times has the Vatican’s Swiss Guard come into combat?
If anyone thinks that the Vatican’s Swiss Guard has a mere representative function and that its members are only there to adorn the corners or take pictures with tourists, they are totally wrong. It is a military corps that really has the mission of looking after the Pope’s safety and guarding that small state. And […]
Posted inModern Era
Agotes, the mysterious cursed race of the Basque-Navarrese Pyrenees
The marginalization and/or persecution of ethnic or social minorities in Spain is not limited to Jews and Moors. Those are the tip of the iceberg and, for very complex reasons to detail here, those that have focused historical attention. But there have been others that may not have been so numerous or so tragic: the […]
Posted inModern Era
The embarrassing human zoos of the colonial era
In 2012, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, an institution dedicated to ethnology and anthropology, organized an exhibition entitled Exhibitions. L’invention du sauvage, which, through photos, posters, films and postcards, and driven by French ex-footballer Lilian Thuram, reminded the public of the embarrassing existence until very shortly before unusual zoos that exhibited human beings […]
Posted inModern Era
The true story of the Illuminati
When Adam Weishaupt founded the Association of Perfectibilists in 1776, he surely did not imagine that he was adding fuel to the feverish imagination of all those who, in desperation, were looking for an explanation for a world that ended up giving way to another and only found it in the old resource of the […]
Posted inModern Era
How the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars were cleaned up
Year 1807, at the end of the bloody battle of Eylau: the French soldier Jean Baptiste de Marbot wakes up, after several hours unconscious, covered in blood and on a cart, surrounded by corpses. He is completely naked and only keeps his hat because all his clothes and belongings have been taken away because he […]
Posted inSecond World War
Martha Ellis Gellhorn, the only woman to land in Normandy on D-Day
Many readers will probably know who Martha Ellis Gellhorn was, but for those who don’t, they just need to know that she’s not one of those characters who sometimes force their way into war movies. She was the only woman, as far as is known, who landed in Normandy on D-Day covering World War II […]
Posted inHistory, Modern Era
Thurn und Taxis, the family that controlled Europe’s postal mail until the 18th century
When we call a taxi we are not only asking for a transport service; implicitly, we evoke the surname of an illustrious aristocratic family of German origin that received the privilege of exploiting in monopoly the postal services of the Holy Roman Empire at the end of 1489. At least that is what the popular […]
Posted inSecond World War
Kohima, the fiery battle that prevented the Japanese from invading India
“Walker, go and tell Sparta that their children lie here for obeying their laws.” That splendid phrase of Simonides, which, in its multiple translations, constitutes the epigraph of the monument to Leonidas in the Thermopylae, is too juicy not to take advantage of it in other war memorials with the corresponding changes. It is what […]
Posted inSecond World War
The World War II airmen who survived falls from thousands of feet high.
In 1972 a Serbian hostess named Vesna Vulović became famous and is registered in the Guinness Book of Records for having survived the fall of her plane from over 32,000 feet in altitude. But this is not a unique case; several more are known, one of them just a year earlier, the German teenager Juliane […]
