General World History

I read something really interesting in the news today that I thought I would share here. According to the British newspaper, Telegraph, the First World War is finally coming to an end today. This past weekend, Germany made it’s final payment for the war and thereby finally cleared the debt given to Germany by the … more →

By midcentury a fairly clear picture was beginning to emerge that unification of the German states was going to be inevitable in one form or another. One of the largest and more pressing hurdles yet to overcome, however, was which state was going to dominate and lead this unified Germany. The key players in this … more →

The other day I stumbled upon a very interesting website put together by the City of Westminster, London. It is a digitalization of the journal of Nathaniel Bryceson, an early Victorian clerk. The journal was written in 1846 when Nathaniel was nineteen years old. The online version as posted on the website for the City … more →

This week I have a new featured book called Europe in the High Middle Ages by William Chester Jordan. It is a very well-written book which details the Europe in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It covers a range of topics from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, the Crusades to monasteries, the Catholic Church … more →

Here are a couple of videos that I found interest to watch. They are videos of people walking about in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

If you cannot view the video above, you need to download a browser which supports the latest HTML 5 standards. Firefox is a good and free choice. You can also download the video here. In continuing with interesting old videos of European monarchs of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, I have posted a video of … more →

If you cannot view this video, you need to download a browser which supports the latest HTML 5 standards. Firefox or Apple Safari are good and free choices. You can also download the video here. This is a very short, but interesting video showing Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria in 1910 or so. It really … more →

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve probably noticed by now that today marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was on this day, November 9th, in 1989 that the Wall was breached and East Germans finally allowed into West Germany. This was the result of a long, complicated … more →

Today I was killing time by browsing Wikipedia and ran across a very interesting photograph. It is a photograph taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 and is considered to be the first permanent photograph ever taken. Although difficult to make out, it is a photograph of buildings taken from a window in his apartment. … more →

I’ve been contacted by the person running the online journal of Dieter Finzen and asked if I would be willing to do translations for the site. The idea behind the site is to post journal entries made by the German World War I solider, Dieter Finzen. Each entry is posted 93 years after it was … more →