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On its most basic level, “This Land Is Your Land” is a song about inclusion and equality—the American ideal broken down into simple, eloquent language and set to a melody you memorize on first listen. But there’s more to “This Land Is Your Land” than many people realize.
After the Germans consolidated in northwestern Yugoslavia, I left New York for London, crushed by the news of what was going on. I told my parents I was returning to Yugoslavia to become a freedom fighter.
One of the most important events in the decline and fall of the USSR was the August Coup of 1991 which saw its Vice President attempt to overthrow its president, Mikhail Gorbachev. It didn’t go too well and was hastily planned but the fact that it ended peacefully is frankly nothing short of miraculous.
The fascists came for Eva Szekely in the winter of 1944, when she was 17. She escaped and became swimming royalty, breaking six world records, winning 44 national titles, a gold in the 200m breaststroke at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952 and a silver in the same event at Melbourne in 1956.
From eco-friendly boutique hotels to green and cool accommodations, check sustays.com for the best sustainable hotels around the world.
Friedrich Nietzsche considered the journey of self-discovery one of the greatest and most fertile existential difficulties. “Any human being who does not wish to be part of the masses need only stop making things easy for himself. “Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, all that is not you.”
The first thing that strikes anyone who regularly rides on the London Underground is how clean it looks in Mike Goldwater’s photographs. Homeward bound tourists keen to recapture the thrill of minding the gap and cooling their heels on overcrowded platforms are not offered a range of signature scents.
Muslims came to America more than a century before Protestants, and in great numbers. How was their history forgotten? Not just the language of Islam, but the religion itself likely arrived in America in 1492, more than 20 years before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door, igniting the Protestant reformation.
Rare is it to find a photograph showing a relaxed, almost spirited look at the Vietnam War. Yet, here are photographs of men, taken in the quiet, downtime of war. Many of these photographs, originally from old photo slides, were digitized by Kendra Rennick.
Thirty years ago, the world wide web was a way for scientists to share data. Since then, it’s become a critical force for industry, and how the world connects. But this didn’t happen all at once. The web’s evolution has been shaped by the geography of its creators and users.
In 1971, Iran threw an extravagant and exclusive party to commemorate the 2500th anniversary of the Persian empire. The party had a grandeur never seen before in the world’s recorded history. It proved to be a stepping stone for the rise of the Iranian revolution and the fall of the Iranian Monarchy that changed the country forever.
In the water park business, Jeff Hendry was considered a genius of sorts. He often said that his goal in life was to make customers of his family’s legendary water parks happy—“to put a smile on their faces, to give them a thrill or two.” It was a beautiful vision. Until it went horribly wrong.
In the summer of 1965, the Olivetti P101 made it to the New York World’s Fair but only just. It was hidden away in a small room behind the main stand. If anyone found it, it was supposed to be an accident. But a few people did. Soon more and more began to squeeze their way in.
Illinois-born Young Chun thought a stint teaching English in Korea would be a quick and easy way to pay off his mounting post-college debt. He could not have been more wrong. Chun became a victim of a collision between unforgiving bureaucracy and the meddling of an unknown family member thousands of miles away.
The “Poet of Radical Photography”, Miron Zownir, captures the provocative energy and aggressive hedonism of New York City in the 80s.
There are few symbols of Modernist design and architecture more iconic than the Bauhaus building in Dessau. The art school’s brief run in Germany shows not a simple dichotomy, but rather how, to varying degrees of bravery, individuals tried to survive under tyranny.
Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001. But for a tiny handful of people, those memories touch American presidential history. Where was the president in the eight hours after the Sept. 11 attacks? The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by the people who were on board.
John Ray barely remembered the details of that day—May 18, 1978—when a friend at his Austin junior high school walked into class and, in front of Ray and twenty other eighth graders, shot and killed their teacher, Wilbur “Rod” Grayson. Ray and his classmates still wonder: What really happened?
The US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the Japanese finally succumbed to the threat of further nuclear bombardment and surrendered. The support for this narrative runs deep. But there are three major problems with it, and, taken together, they significantly undermine the traditional interpretation of the Japanese surrender.
Reading classic literature is like going for a 6am jog. It has its loyal fans but few enjoy it. Curious to learn about what classics people actually enjoy, Daniel Frank delved into the Goodreads data to find what classics users love and hate the most.
In 1969, at the height of the First Nuclear Era, an engineer at New Jersey’s PSE&G utility company named Richard Eckert wondered, what if huge nuclear plants could be built in serial at a production facility, put on a barge, and floated to sites out at sea?
Create a social network or risk everything. That was the original pitch for Google’s Facebook rival, Google+, a refrain hammered over and over by the social network’s chief architect, Vic Gundotra, in meetings with the company’s top brass.
Phil Johnson was groomed and abused by members of the clergy as a schoolboy in Eastbourne, UK, during the 70s and 80s. This is the story of a cover-up that went to the highest levels of the Church of England and how the determination of a survivor helped convict the man who abused him.
When the Venetian merchant Marco Polo got to China, he saw many wonders. One of the things that astonished him most, however, was a new invention, implemented by Kublai Khan, a grandson of the great conqueror Genghis. It was paper money, introduced by Kublai in 1260.
If there’s traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there’s a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green. Fail to do so, and you’re committing a crime: jaywalking. It’s the result of an aggressive, forgotten 1920s campaign led by auto groups and manufacturers.
The legend of Gus Weiss, hero of the Cold War, ends 11 stories below the balcony of his condo at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, on November 25, 2003. A broken corpse on the sidewalk. He was a shrewd intelligence insider, pulled off an audacious tech hack against the Soviets in the last century. Or did he?
Over seven terrible years in the 1690s, crops failed, farming villages emptied, and severe famine killed up to 15% of the entire population of Scotland. Soon after, the formerly independent nation joined Great Britain. Now, researchers suggest volcanic eruptions thousands of kilometers away may have helped spark this political transformation.
St Petersburg is situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. It is Russia’s second-largest city after Moscow. These fascinating color photos captured street scenes of Leningrad (St Petersburg) in 1961.
When French President Mitterrand tells President Reagan in July 1981 that the KGB has been stealing Western technology, it confirms Reagan’s distrust of the Soviet Union. Reagan fears that stolen technology will help the Soviet Union complete a giant engineering project, the Trans-Siberian pipeline.
In May 1969, a controversial election for student body president at Dudley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, turned into an open revolt against police repression and racial segregation.
For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company, Crypto AG, to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA.
The Areni-1 complex, uncovered in 2007, contains a 6,100-year-old winery replete with fermenting vats, a grape press, and subterranean clay storage vessels. Altogether, it’s the best-preserved archeological site in the ongoing search for winemaking’s birthplace.
It’s practically an American pastime to blame cellphones for all sorts of societal problems, from distracted parents to faltering democracies. But the devices might have also delivered a social silver lining: a de-escalation of the gang turf wars that tore up cities in the 1980s.
Wasim Razzouk is a tattoo artist in Jerusalem’s Old City. Ink runs deep in his family. The Razzouks have been tattooing visitors to the Holy Land for 500 years (and in Egypt for 200 years before that). Christian pilgrims flock to Razzouk Tattoo to get a cross tattoo based on one of the designs on wooden stamps that have been in the Razzouk family for generations.
East Berliners get helping hands from West Berliners as they climb the Berlin Wall, which had divided the city since the end of World War II, near the Brandenburg Gate, early morning, Nov. 10, 1989. Germans celebrated the opening order that was announced by the East German Communist government hours before.
In 1981, a young Swede called Owe Bergsten strolled through Singapore to pass the time before his flight home. Passing a camera shop, he spotted a two-button LCD game called ‘Fire RC-04’ in the window. The story of a man, a lie, a video game handheld, and a business empire.
A former Titan II missile complex, the complex is a fixer upper and ready to become one of the few homes that once stood ready to pummel America’s enemies with the destructive force of 9,000,000 tons of TNT. The realtor posted a listing price of just $395,000.
A jaw-dropping example of Ice Age architecture has been unearthed on Russia’s forest steppe. But exactly why hunter-gatherers enduring the frigid realities of life 25,000 years ago would construct the 40-foot diameter building is a fascinating question.
Back in 1989, a guy by the name of Igor Dmitrovsky filed the paperwork to incorporate a small little business in the state of New York. This company would enter the metal cylinder organism transport business under the name Baltia Airlines. The airline was to fly from New York, US to St Petersburg, USSR.
