Category: News
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Why corporal punishment on schools was invented
Until recently, it was common practice on schools to conduct corporal punishment on unruly students. Medievalist Dr. Ben Parsons researched the origins of this violent teaching method. He found out that medieval philosophers thought there were many benefits to these methods. For instance, it was believed that pain helped students to remember their wrongdoing. A…
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Polish hero Witold Pilecki went to Auschwitz in 1940 – voluntarily
It is hard to imagine how a 39-year old father of two deliberately walked into a razzia of the SS on the 19th of September, 1940. As a Polish army officer he couldn’t expect a gentle treatment, but Witold Pilecki wanted personally to find out want happened to all the Jews who were captured and transported to concentration camps. Although Pilecki expected harsh…
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Edited version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf is still to be published
Despite the cancellation of the Bavarian state government to fund a scientifically annotated edition of Adolf Hitlers’s ‘Mein Kampf’, the Institute of Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) continues to work on this edition. They state that ‘Mein Kampf’ is an important source to historical research on the Third Reich, and should therefore be publicly available. The…
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Bones of diseased medieval Britons digitized and exhibited online
A new website was launched yesterday with photo’s of bones of 1,600 medieval Britons. They deceased from a range of terrifying diseases, such as syphilis and leprosy. Some diseases are uncommon today. The gruesome bones shows the importance of keeping these diseases at bay. Their deformed remains are exhibited online as study-material, but f you are…
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Archaeological proof: Cyprus has been inhabited for 10.000 years
An archaeological find at the Ayia Varvara-Asprokremnos-site on Cyprus suggests that the Mediterranean island has been inhabited since the Late Stone Age, at around 8800 B.C. This is about 1000 years earlier than thought before. The Late Stone Age was marked by the transformation from a hunter-gather society to an agricultural one. The archaeological findings…
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Gun-ownership wouldn’t have prevented the Holocaust
American historian Stephen Halbrook states on the History News Network that Jewish gun-ownership could have prevented the violent outburst against Jews during the Kristallnacht. He states that a gun law facilitated the unprecedented violence of the nazi’s – a law that was created in the last year of the democratic Weimar-Republic in 1932. According to…
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17th-century Puritans wrote world’s most expensive book
World’s most expensive book was sold on Tuesday for a whopping $14 million at an auction of Sotheby’s, New York.It is a translation of Biblical Psalms, printed by settlers who came to America around 1640. It is the oldest book ever printed in the USA, but the true value lies in its historical background. The…