Category Archives: History

In 1944 the Imperial Japanese Army startet the largest military operation in it’s entire existence, Operation Ichigo. Yet, very few people know about it or even heard of it. Which is just absurd considering the size of the opeartion, yet even more so, since it changed Post-War Asia in a tremendous way. In this video we will talk about the background of Operation Ichigo (“Number One”), its objectives, course and influence.

The Greek Revolution of the 1820s was the first liberal-national movement to succeed in the Old World of Europe – after the United States, more or less at the same time as the similar liberation movements in South America (between 1811 and 1825), and before every one of the new nation-states that would soon become the norm throughout Europe.

The ideological groundwork had been laid, mostly by thinkers writing in French and German, during the century before. Greeks didn’t invent the nation-state. But it was in Greece and by Greeks that the experiment was first put into practice in Europe. 

The French Revolution, which began in 1789, would more famously transform the political life of the continent, perhaps of the world, in the long run. But after the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, and after the Congress of Vienna had established an international order for the whole European continent in 1815, it looked very much as though the clock had been turned back to before 1789. It was the revolution in Greece, which broke out in the spring of 1821, that began to change all that. The outcome of the Greek Revolution was the pivotal point on which the whole geopolitical map of Europe tilted, away from the 18th-century model of multiethnic, autocratically ruled empires and towards the 20th-century model of the self-determination of nation-states.

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Officials plan to host concerts and theater productions on the new, retractable platform

In ancient Rome, tens of thousands gathered at the Colosseum to watch enslaved men, condemned criminals and wild animals fight to the death. These grisly gladiator clashes required great feats of engineering: To make caged creatures and prize fighters emerge from underground as if by magic, the Romans devised a labyrinth of secret tunnels beneath the arena’s wooden, sand-covered floor.

These underground structures have remained exposed to the elements for more than a century, enabling the millions of tourists who visit the Colosseum each year to see them up close, according to Reuters. Now, the Italian government has pledged €10 million (around $12 million USD) toward the installation of a new, retractable floor that will restore the amphitheater to its gladiator-era glory.

“We want to give an idea of how it was, and we are seeking proposals from around the world,” Alfonsina Russo, director of the Colosseum, tells the Times’ Tom Kington.

Per BBC News, architectural designs for the ambitious renovation are due by February 1. Italian officials say they hope to complete the project by 2023.

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“This was a dynamic and interconnected region of the world,” said Miguel Vilar, a University of Maryland anthropologist. The history of the Caribbean, he said, “is finally being understood through DNA in ways that archaeology alone hasn’t been able to do before.”

Spanning a million square miles and dotted with more than 700 islands, the Caribbean Sea was one of the last places colonized by Native Americans as they explored and settled North and South America. Archaeologists have long struggled to pinpoint the origins and movements of those intrepid seafarers. Now, thanks to genetic material gleaned from the bones of ancient Caribbean residents, the invisible history of this tropical archipelago is coming to light.

Among the surprising findings is that most of the Caribbean’s original inhabitants may have been wiped out by South American newcomers a thousand years before the Spanish invasion that began in 1492. Moreover, indigenous populations of islands like Puerto Rico and Hispaniola were likely far smaller at the time of the Spanish arrival than previously thought.

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