Long before the open warfare of recent months, the US and Iran have been locked into decades of low-level conflict. Since the revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has considered the US the “Great Satan” (Israel is dubbed the “Little Satan”). The leaders of the new Shia Muslim theocracy thought of America as an intruder in the Middle East, and an obstacle to the mullahs' goal of spreading their Islamic revolution. For decades, their political speeches and sermons have ended with the chant, Marg bar Amrika, “Death to America”. The US, for its part, has seen Iran as a fanatical and implacable foe.

What are the roots of the animosity?

Iran's antipathy towards the US is rooted in the events of 1953, when the CIA – together with Britain's MI6 – orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Considered a hero by many Iranians, Mossadegh had nationalised the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The US, fearing communist expansion into Iran, joined the UK in funding regime opponents, ensuring that their ally the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – previously a constitutional monarch – was installed as head of state. British and US access to oil was restored. But as a result, the Shah was considered a puppet of the West by many Iranians; he used an often brutal secret police force to keep Leftist and religious opposition groups in check.

How did the Iranian revolution come about?

The Shah's regime was corrupt and dysfunctional. And amid a sharp economic contraction in the late 1970s, protests paralysed the country. The protesters included secular left-wingers and nationalists as well as Islamists, but Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a fundamentalist cleric at that time exiled in France, emerged as the movement's undisputed figurehead.

The unrest forced the Shah to flee in January 1979; within weeks, Khomeini had returned. On 11 February, Khomeini assumed leadership and established the theocratic government that still rules. President Jimmy Carter gave the Shah permission to enter the US for cancer treatment, and resisted the new regime's demands for his return to stand trial. On 4 November 1979, enraged Iranian students broke into the US embassy in Tehran, taking 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days.

How did the US react?

The hostage crisis set the tone for post-revolution relations. President Carter ordered a rescue mission, which went wrong, resulting in a mid-air crash in Iran that killed eight US servicemen. Carter severed diplomatic relations, and although the hostages were released in 1981, relations have remained frozen ever since.

In the 1980s, a series of proxy struggles began. During the Iran-Iraq War, the US actively supported Iraq as the lesser of two evils, fearing Iranian victory and hegemony in the Gulf. In 1983, after a US peacekeeping mission in Lebanon turned into an intervention backing the country's Christian government, two truck bombs killed 241 American service personnel. A Shia militia mentored by Iran, Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility, and the US designated Iran a “state sponsor of terror”. In 1988, the US navy mistakenly shot down an Iranian passenger jet in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. It was during this period that Iran decided to develop nuclear weapons, which the US regarded as a grave threat to its main regional ally, Israel.

Have relations always been bad?

After 9/11, more moderate elements in Iran's government tried to advance dialogue, hoping to make common cause against al-Qa'eda and the Taliban. But in early 2002, President George W. Bush labelled Iran as part of the “axis of evil”, and began plans for regime change in Iraq; Iran, US officials suggested, would be next. In response, Iran formed an alliance that it called the “axis of resistance”, comprising Syria's government, the Shia militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in the Palestinian Territories (which it had funded since the 1990s).

The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 initially alarmed Iran's leaders, but as the occupation fell into disarray, it became clear that it was a great opportunity for them. Iranian-aligned Shia militias and politicians soon became a leading power in Iraq – their fighters killed hundreds of US soldiers with improvised bombs. When President Obama took office in 2009, he sought to calm tensions.

In 2015, US-led negotiators and Iran's President Rouhani reached a deal to curtail Iran's nuclear programme. Iran agreed to slash the number of its uranium centrifuges (which turn uranium into a form usable in nuclear bombs) and submit to inspections. In return, sanctions would be lifted and more than $50 billion in frozen Iranian assets held abroad would be released. The deal was designed to prevent Iran from enriching large amounts of uranium until at least 2031. But it was dumped in 2018 by President Trump, who complained that it only limited Iran's nuclear activities until 2031 and didn't address the country's support for terrorism abroad. Instead, sanctions were tightened.

Why has the US attacked now?

The White House perceives Iran to be weak. US-led sanctions have helped to create the deepest economic crisis in its recent history. Major popular unrest flared up late last year and was put down with massive loss of life (perhaps as many as 30,000 killed). The 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel are also a crucial factor. Though Iran is not thought to have orchestrated them, its role as a patron of Hamas convinced many in the US and Israel of the need for military action; and the great damage done to Hamas and Hezbollah by Israel since has removed a deterrent to attacking Iran. The 12-day war on Iran in June last year, successfully prosecuted by Israel and the US, suggested that it could be attacked with relative impunity.

What about relations with Israel?

Before the 1979 revolution, Iran mostly maintained good relations with Israel. It was the second Muslim-majority country after Turkey to recognise the Jewish state, became its major oil supplier and cooperated on weapons programmes. Even so, anti-Zionist sentiment was widespread in Iran, stoked by its Shia clerics. And after the revolution, hostility to Israel became central to the ideology of the new Islamic Republic: Ayatollah Khomeini severed diplomatic ties, portrayed Israel as a Western colonial outpost and illegitimate occupier of Muslim land, and called for its elimination. (When Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979, Iran cut off diplomatic relations with Cairo.)

Ideological opposition turned to proxy confrontation through Iran's support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, and for Hezbollah, which fought Israel during its long occupation of southern Lebanon. Israel, in turn, has opposed Western rapprochement with Iran and carried out covert operations against its nuclear programme, including assassinations of scientists. Although no evidence shows Iranian involvement in planning the 7 October attacks, its leadership praised Hamas's fighters and confirmed Tehran's support “until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem”.

‘Historic sites are where Americans learn who we are’

Carol Quillen at Time

It is “not enough to analyze the dead. Even as you respect the chasm between their time and now, you need to see through their eyes,” says Carol Quillen. National Historic Sites “can offer this experience to every American, but these places are now at risk.” They are “America’s open classrooms — places where people from every zip code stand on ground that holds stories.” Independence Park visitors were “cheated when they were cut off from facts.”

Read more

‘End the policies that protect hospital monopolies’

Ashish K. Jha and Thomas C. Tsai at The Boston Globe

Preventing “consolidation that does not provide benefits, or even breaking up consolidated systems that behave badly, is likely not enough,” say Ashish K. Jha and Thomas C. Tsai. If Americans “want health care markets to work — if we want prices to fall without sacrificing quality — the policies that shield established health care systems and stymie innovation must be removed.” The “path forward will need to restore the patient-doctor relationship and allow delivery models that place doctors and patients back at the center.”

Read more

‘Are dating apps giving people the ick?’

Dave Schilling at The Guardian

Technology is “supposed to solve all of our problems, but it seems like it just creates more of them,” says Dave Schilling. Dating apps “offer all the shiny optimization and algorithmic simplicity of modern tech, but also the anonymous, flat and impersonal drudgery.” Maybe dating apps are “struggling because their dating pools are fetid and teeming with malicious bacteria,” and “maybe there is no math equation in the world to guarantee romantic success, even if venture capitalists might dream of one.”

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‘Porn is making Gen Z anxious, lonely and insecure’

Debra Soh at The Globe and Mail

Most “would agree that exposure to adult content at a young age is not healthy. But what are the consequences, and how harmful are they?” says Debra Soh. If a child “regularly watches porn prior to their first sexual experience, this can shape their sexual preferences and behavior.” Porn “sedates men and further disincentivizes them from working up the courage to meet women in real life,” which “further perpetuates their belief that sex with an imaginary partner on a screen is equivalent.”

Read more

In December 1823, President James Monroe declared in his State of the Union address that “the American continents... are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonisation by any European powers”, setting out a vision of US dominance over the New World.

Now, President Trump has revived the so-called Monroe Doctrine to justify his aggressive foreign policy in the Americas

Why was the Monroe Doctrine established?

In the years before Monroe’s address, Spain’s vast empire in the Americas had collapsed. Venezuela, Mexico and around a dozen other former colonies had won independence and opened their once-closed ports to American and British trade.

Rumours were circulating that Spain might try to reconquer its New World possessions, while Russia claimed control of the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Oregon. Monroe’s statement was, at the time, quite limited: he said that the US would “not interfere” with existing colonies (Britain and Spain’s Caribbean territories; and Russia’s in Alaska, which lasted until 1867).

Did other countries take Monroe’s warning seriously?

Not initially. The young US was not yet a major military power, making the policy more of an aspiration than a declaration of intent; it was not known as the “Monroe Doctrine” until the 1850s. And it did not, for instance, stop the French from invading Mexico and installing a puppet monarch, the Austria-born Maximilian I, in 1864, while the US was distracted by the American Civil War. It was only as the century came to an end that America started to meaningfully enforce and broaden the doctrine, during what became the nation’s only period of out-and-out imperial expansion beyond the continental United States.

How did US policy change?

The Monroe Doctrine was invoked during the 1898 Spanish-American War, when the US helped liberate Cuba from Spanish rule – and also took direct control of Madrid’s former possessions of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines (which the US held until 1946). In that year, the US also annexed Hawaii.

Emboldened, President Theodore Roosevelt would radically expand the doctrine after taking office in 1901. When British, German and Italian gunboats blockaded Venezuelan ports in 1902 to collect debts, he told the Europeans to strike a deal quickly with the dictatorship in Caracas or see a US fleet dispatched against their ships. The Europeans complied. In 1904, he laid out what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The US, he said, must act as “an international police power” to keep America’s backyard “stable, orderly, and prosperous”. A period of extensive interventionism followed.

What did that entail?

Between 1903 and 1934, US marines were deployed to half a dozen countries in the Western hemisphere. These included Honduras, where troops were sent seven times to quell revolutions; Nicaragua, which was occupied near-continuously from 1912 to 1933; the Dominican Republic, which US forces occupied in 1916; and Haiti, which the US controlled between 1915 and 1934.

Nicolás Maduro joins a long list of Latin American and Caribbean leaders who have been dislodged by the US, from Nicaraguan president José Santos Zelaya, in 1909, to Hudson Austin, who led a Soviet-backed coup in Grenada in 1983. The great exception, of course, is Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who resisted not only the Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961) but a series of attempts on his life.

Why did such interventions happen?

Their goals were to protect sea routes – including the new US-owned Panama Canal, completed in 1914 – and the interests of US companies such as United Fruit, which controlled the trade in bananas and other tropical fruits. A powerhouse in Washington, the company backed coups against elected leaders and the installation of accommodating puppet governments (hence “banana republics”).

These occupations became military quagmires, in which hundreds of US soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians were killed. The “Banana Wars” became very unpopular in the US; and in 1933, the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, put an end to them with his Good Neighbour Policy, which stressed regional cooperation over military force.

Did FDR’s policy last?

It did in the sense that the US became, in theory, anti-imperialist again. But in the Cold War, the Monroe Doctrine was invoked to combat the spread of Soviet-style communism across Latin America. In 1954, shortly after CIA-backed insurgents toppled a Leftist government in Guatemala, the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, said the “intrusion of Soviet despotism” there was “a direct challenge to our Monroe Doctrine, the first and most fundamental of our foreign policies”.

Over the following decades, the US covertly supported the overthrow of left-wing governments in Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1971), Chile (1973) and Nicaragua (the 1980s), among others. The historian John Coatsworth has detailed 41 interventions between 1898 and 1994, 17 direct and 24 indirect. In many of these cases (notably Guatemala and Chile), the US was implicated in atrocities: mass extrajudicial killings and forced “disappearances”.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, such interventions fell out of favour; in 2013, the then-secretary of state, John Kerry, won applause when he told an audience of Latin American officials, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”

How has President Trump resurrected the doctrine?

Trump keeps a portrait of Monroe in the Oval Office, and his administration’s recent National Security Strategy laid out a “Trump Corollary” to the doctrine, known as the “Donroe Doctrine”. The US, it states, will keep the Western hemisphere “reasonably stable and well-governed”, and will insist that governments cooperate to combat mass migration, drug trafficking and “hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets”.

It soon followed through with the removal of Maduro – whom it accused of drug trafficking and hosting “foreign adversaries”. Trump later asserted that the US would “run” Venezuela. He has also threatened to use military force in Mexico and Colombia, to “take back” control of the Panama Canal, and to annex Greenland. The Monroe Doctrine “was very important, but we forgot about it”, Trump said last month. “We don’t forget about it any more.”

On 2 March 1955, Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old African- American high-school student, boarded a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, taking a window seat. “When the driver ordered her to give up her seat so a white woman could be more comfortable, Ms. Colvin – who had been studying black history in class, learning about abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth – did not budge,” said The Washington Post.

History would record that it was Rosa Parks who helped kickstart the Civil Rights Movement by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Yet Colvin, who has died aged 86, did so nine months before Parks, refusing to move until police dragged her off. The episode galvanised the city’s black community.

‘Slight and bookish’

Claudette Austin was born in 1939 and raised in rural Alabama. Her mother, Mary Jane Gadson, abandoned by her husband, was unable to support Claudette and her sister; they were adopted by an aunt and uncle, whose name they took. Claudette attended the all-black Booker T. Washington High School, said The Daily Telegraph. She and many others were politicised by the case of a schoolmate, Jeremiah Reeves, “who in 1952, aged 16, was sentenced to death for raping a white woman, by an all-white jury who deliberated for less than half an hour”.

In 1955, as a “slight and bookish” teenager, she took her stand against the Jim Crow bus laws, telling the driver: “It is my constitutional right to sit here.” She was found guilty of assaulting a police officer, disturbing the peace and violating a city race ordinance.

‘Troublemaker’

The latter charge was ripe for challenge. But the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) felt Claudette was too immature to become a constitutional test case. “Others believed her dark skin and poverty also played against her.” Matters were further complicated when she became pregnant after her trial. Instead, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and secretary of the local NAACP, was chosen as the “unthreatening, middle-class standard-bearer” for the Montgomery bus boycott that began that year. Even so, in 1956, Colvin was chosen as one of four plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit brought by the civil rights lawyer Fred Gray; it established that the city’s bus laws were indeed unconstitutional.

“All the attention made life difficult for Ms. Colvin,” said The New York Times. “Whites shunned her, but so did many black residents, who she said considered her a troublemaker.” In 1958, with her young son she moved north, to join her sister in New York’s Bronx. She worked as a maid and as a nurse, and spoke little about her past until her story was rediscovered in the 1990s. In 2021, Colvin successfully petitioned to have her juvenile arrest record expunged. “I guess you can say that now I am no longer a juvenile delinquent,” she said.

“We have entered the era of the Donroe Doctrine,” said CNN’s Jake Tapper in the aftermath of the US abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The term, referencing Donald Trump’s upgrade of a foreign policy doctrine of old, signals this US president’s clear intent to enforce US interests in the Western Hemisphere – a strategy that could have significant implications around the world.

What is the Donroe Doctrine?

It’s a Trumpian twist on the Monroe Doctrine, a US foreign policy principle established in 1823 during the presidency of James Monroe. It warned that “the American continents” must not be “considered as subjects for colonisation” and European powers must not interfere in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere that America now designated as a US sphere of interest.

The Monroe Doctrine was broadened in 1904 by Theodore Roosevelt to sanction US interference in any Latin American country “plagued by wrongdoing or impotence”. Frequently criticised as a form of imperialism, the doctrine was nonetheless invoked by a number of subsequent US presidents to justify intervention in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Nicaragua. It lay behind Washington’s efforts to oust Fidel Castro in Cuba, and its role in the coups that overthrew Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 and Chilean leader Salvador Allende in 1973. It was also invoked during the Second World War to make Greenland a de facto US protectorate after Denmark was invaded by Nazi Germany.

In 2013, Barack Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, declared that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over”, signalling a more collaborative relationship with other nations in the Western Hemisphere.

What’s new about the Donroe Doctrine?

In its new national security strategy, published in November 2025, the Trump administration plainly declared an intention “to reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine and restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere”. But it also added a "Trump Corollary” to the doctrine, describing US aims to “expand our network in the region” and roll back “foreign influence”.

Recent months have seen US strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean, tighter control of migration flows, and the seizure of strategic assets. “The parameters of US national security” now appear “effectively inseparable from advancing US economic interests globally”, said Pablo Uchoa, an international politics expert at the UCL Institute of the Americas, on The Conversation. This “vision of geopolitics” justifies the aggressive pursuit of any resources the US thinks are “beneficial to its interests, from Greenland’s minerals and strategic position to the Panama canal and Venezuelan oil”.

“Donroe Doctrine” is not an official White House term (it seems to have been coined by the New York Post) but Trump “appears to have taken a liking” to it, “as with most things that bear his name”. There is no proper detail behind the idea, John Bolton, Trump’s first-term security adviser and now a harsh foreign policy critic, told The Atlantic. “No matter what he does, there is no grand conceptual framework; it’s whatever suits him at the moment.”

What does it mean for world politics?

With the US “dominating the Western Hemisphere” and China “asserting primacy across the Asia-Pacific”, a world “carved into spheres of influence” could “benefit Beijing”, said The New York Times. It could keep US military forces away from Asia and would certainly “undercut Washington’s criticism of Beijing” when China elbows its way across the South China Sea to menace Taiwan.

“The absence of conspicuous military support for Maduro” from either Moscow or Beijing suggests that neither object to a doctrine “that appears to entitle powerful countries with the right of having spheres of influence”, said Uchoa on The Conversation.

What does that means for the non-superpowers in the Western Hemisphere? Six key areas have already been identified as potential targets for “further American expansion, intervention or annexation”, said CBS News: Greenland, Iran, Cuba, Colombia, Canada and the Panama Canal.

This article appeared in History of War magazine issue 146.

In May 1939, the US Senate debated a proposal to purchase the territory of Greenland from Denmark. The War Department was consulted, but ultimately vetoed the project based on its conclusion that the territory lacked suitable locations to build facilities for aviation and naval forces.

This event was one of a series of historical attempts to purchase the island stretching back to 1867.

Within the first week of his second term as President of the United States, Donald Trump was energising the mainstream media by declaring his intention to buy Greenland, a scheme that was met with hostility from the Danes.

While the Senate of 1939 debated from a viewpoint of political expediency, the Trump administration’s perspective was apparently more about economic than political benefit. Yet this search for economic gain has a historical precedent rooted in the United States’ wartime requirement for aluminium to feed its burgeoning aircraft industry.

By 1943 America was the world’s largest producer of aluminium with an output of 43 percent of global production. Aluminium is manufactured by refining bauxite ore into alumina, which is then smelted into pure aluminium through an electrolytic process that requires large quantities of the mineral cryolite.

Cryolite is a rare mineral of the sodium group with small deposits found in Spain, the United States and Canada; however, until the late 1980s the largest seams of cryolite anywhere in the world were located in western Greenland.

Greenland is situated in the Western Hemisphere which under the terms of President Franklin D Roosevelt’s Neutrality Act of November 1939 was protected by the policy of “joint defence of the Western Hemisphere”.

On 9 April 1940, the day that Denmark fell to the Nazi war machine, the Danish envoy to the United States, Henrik Kauffmann, in violation of his diplomatic status, signed an agreement authorising the US to act as defenders of Greenland and build military installations there.

American military investment in the autonomous Danish territory was not entirely based on altruism as they eyed the seemingly endless source of cryolite being excavated from the mine at Ivigtut on Greenland’s southwest coast.

A formal request for US assistance endorsed the political agreement on 3 May and an invitation to establish a consulate was accepted, and the United States Coast Guard (USCG) vessel Comanche sailed for Ivigtut with the newly minted US consul and staff onboard.

In June 1940 the USCG icebreaker Northland was also ordered to Greenland under the command of Edward ‘Iceberg’ Smith and continued sailing to and from Greenland in support of the US mission there.

In May 1940 en route to the island, Northland found itself caught up in the death ride of the German battleship Bismarck as it was attacked by aircraft from the British carrier HMS Victorious. Smith reported with typical understatement: “It is fortunate that there were no accidents and mistaken identities when all parties were more or less on a hair trigger.”

Much of Western Europe’s weather originates in Greenland, drifting east on Katabatic winds, and Danish and Norwegian meteorologists had built weather stations on Greenland’s mainly uninhabited east coast to monitor and forecast conditions, transmitting the resulting data.

After occupying Norway and Denmark, the Nazi authorities saw an opportunity to infiltrate the territory. As a result, German and Quisling personnel entered into the weather stations during the traditional summer rotation of staff, simultaneously establishing a small military presence.

The first US air base, designated Bluie West One, was under construction in July 1941, becoming Greenland Bases Command and the HQ of the US Army Air Corps and the USCG Greenland Patrol.

However, the facilities were rapidly relocated to the more suitable airstrip and weather station 30 miles (48km) north of the Arctic Circle at Sondre Stromfjord.

US personnel lived a monotonous existence, contact with the islands’ population being strictly forbidden, exemplified by reassurances to the American public by US Consul James Penfield: “Our Arctic soldiers live in model camps in a womanless world,” going on to proudly extol the available facilities: “Like other American camps, this one boasts a motion picture theatre, barber shop and an excellent library.”

There had been some sporadic military activity, with the British-controlled free Norwegian gunboat Fridthof Nansen boarding and capturing the German-controlled trawler Vesle Kari and taking prisoner the men at the weather station at Myggbukta, but there appears to have been an element of ‘live and let live’ between the opposing forces.

The harsh weather conditions of Greenland’s northeast coast enabled naval access for three summer months of the year, prompting Smith to create the Sledge Patrol in August 1941 to observe German weather stations and their personnel. Sledge Patrol was crewed by Danish meteorologists, hunters and trappers operating along a 400-mile (645km) stretch of the northeast coast.

Greenland’s southwest was surveyed by teams from the USCG cutter Cayuga, supported by Northland’s seaplane, and suitable air base sites at Narsarsuak and Kipisako were chosen for expansion.

On 9 April 1941 the US Secretary of State and Kauffmann signed an agreement conferring American protectorate status on Greenland and the US Navy took over operational control of the area from the coastguard.

After American (and therefore Greenland’s) entry into the war in December 1941, German military personnel were sent to the northeast coast to reestablish weather stations and provide protection for them. Yet they were confined to the east by rapid US expansion which brought storage depots, artillery positions and further ports and air bases.

During the early years of the conflict, German U-boat operations had wrought havoc with Allied shipping. The convoys plying their way across the Atlantic supplying Britain and the Soviet Union suffered grievous losses to the Kriegsmarine’s wolf packs, losses which were mitigated to an extent by Royal Air Force Coastal Command patrols.

The lack of range of Coastal Command aircraft left an undefended area known as the Mid-Atlantic Gap, rendering merchant shipping and their escorts without air cover and vulnerable to attack. Greenland’s air bases plugged this gap by mid-1943 and Allied shipping losses decreased correspondingly.

Cryolite exports to Canada, USA and Portugal reinvigorated the national economy and assured the success of the US military aviation industry which produced over 50,000 aluminium-skinned aircraft annually throughout the Second World War.

The cryolite mine at Ivigtut ceased operations in 1987, but the fact that Greenland continues to be rich in mineral deposits, including the largest sources of rare earth elements outside China, will continue to make it an attractive proposition for the US.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 146. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

As the mercury plummets and back-to-work blues set in for much of humankind in the UK, many other creatures are cosily spending winter in a blissfully dormant state of hibernation.

It would be easy to envy bats, bears and hedgehogs their seasonal torpor, but research has suggested that humans once hibernated, too – and scientists believe we may one day do so again.

Why don’t humans hibernate?

It’s mostly a question of time and geography. Our evolutionary ancestors were “tropical animals with no history of hibernating”, said BBC Science Focus. There is evidence of various migrations out of Africa but modern humans, homo sapiens, only migrated into the cooler “temperate and sub-Arctic latitudes” (where hibernation in winter is more common among other species) “in the last 100,000 years or so”. In evolutionary terms, that isn’t “quite long enough” to develop “all the metabolic adaptations we would need to be able to hibernate” for lengthy periods of time.

Have humans ever hibernated?

It‘s long been assumed not. After all, humans “discovered fire, clothes, shelter, hunting and agriculture”, and these are “much more effective ways of surviving the cold” than hibernating for months on end. It’s been taken as read that any “ancient tribes that tried to sleep their way through the winter” would have been swiftly “ousted” by “the guys with the fur clothes sitting around the camp fire in the next cave along”.

But this may not be the complete picture, scientists suggested in a 2020 study, published in the journal L'Anthropologie. They analysed more than 1,600 fossilised bones of hominins (extinct ancestors of modern humans), found in Spain and dating back around 500,000 years. They looked at factors “like bone structure and growth over time to backform” what these people “were eating and doing during the seasonal cycle”, said Popular Mechanics.

Their conclusions pointed to this extinct human species spending a lot of time inside caves, particularly “through the cold and difficult winter months”. Evidence of recurrent nutritional disease and bone weakening indicate that these human ancestors “sacrificed nutrition and vitamin D from the sun” in order to “spend the worst part of the year trying to sleep through it inside relatively safe caves”. Not exactly hibernation – but close.

Will humans ever hibernate in the future?

The possibility of modern-day human hibernation straddles the realm of “both science and science fiction”, said Aeon. The prospect has “always captivated us” but we haven’t yet had an “immediate or urgent need to do so”.

That could be about to change. “Putting people into sleep mode is a sci-fi concept that’s a lot closer to becoming real than you might think,” said National Geographic.

Nasa and the European Space Agency are supporting research into trials that use carefully dosed sedatives to put participants into “a state that mimics some of the key features of hibernation”, including a drastically slowed metabolism and a “twilight” state of consciousness that still allows for biological functions like eating, drinking and using the toilet. Being in a “bearlike state of hibernation” could help astronauts on future deep space missions, alleviating “the tedium of extended space travel”, reducing cargo requirements and limiting “crewmate conflict”.

It could have far-reaching effects in medical settings, too. “Controlled hypothermia and metabolism are already widely used in clinical practice” to reduce damage to the body and provide optimal conditions for complex medical interventions, said neuroscientist Vladyslav Vyazovskiy on The Conversation. The difference is that, for now, a hibernation-like state can only be achieved in humans with “the aggressive use of drugs”.

How much do we spend on decorations? 

Americans splash some $6 billion a year on festive decor. We buy 30 million real Christmas trees and 20 million artificial ones, 150 million sets of Christmas lights, 70 million pots of poinsettia, and millions more ornaments, yard decorations, and window decals. Some “extreme” decorators pay big to transform their homes into elaborate Christmas villages with brilliant light displays and animatronic characters. Mike Bagwell of Springfield, Mo., estimates he’s spent more than $130,000 on holiday decorations over the years, including on the 270,000 LED lights that adorn his home. “When you see the [community’s] laughter and the joy, it just makes it all worthwhile,” he said. All that sparkle adds to utility bills: Americans’ holiday lights collectively use 3.5 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each December—enough to power more than 350,000 homes for a year—at a cost of about $645 million. Then there are the seasonal medical bills, because 18,400 of us end up in the ER with decorating injuries having, for instance, fallen from a ladder while hanging lights. Still, the emotional dividends of decorating can be profound. “If you haven’t had a great year,” says psychologist Pauline Wallin, “it can put you back in touch with pleasant memories.” 

What’s the history of decorating? 

Some Yuletide adornments go back to pagan times: Pliny the Elder wrote of Celtic druids’ reverence for mistletoe. But modern holiday decor really took shape in the 19th century. Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, came home in 1828 with a shrub that bloomed red in winter. Called flor de Nochebuena (flower of Christmas Eve) in Mexico, it’s now known across much of the world as poinsettia. In 1856, following a craze sparked in the English-speaking world by Queen Victoria, President Franklin Pierce unveiled the first Christmas tree at the White House. Around the same time, a craftsman in the German town of Lauscha began blowing glass tree ornaments in the shape of spheres and fruit and nuts, then silvering them inside and painting the outside. In 1880, retailer F.W. Woolworth reluctantly agreed to buy a box of the ornaments from a German salesman. Woolworth thought the “useless” decorations wouldn’t sell, but customers at his Great Five Cent Store in Lancaster, Pa., snapped up all 144 in a matter of hours. Woolworth quickly placed a new order; over the next 60 years, his retail empire would sell 500 million baubles. 

What about Christmas lights? 

They were a homegrown invention. After Thomas Edison patented the first practical incandescent light bulb, he strung a few together outside his Menlo Park, N.J., laboratory for the 1880 Christmas season. Two years later, Edward Hibberd Johnson— Edison’s business partner—wrapped a string of 80 red, white, and blue bulbs around his Christmas tree. Placed on a rotating platform in the parlor of his Manhattan home,  the tree mesmerized passersby. “One can hardly imagine anything prettier,” said one reporter. Those early illuminations were pricey: It cost the equivalent of $10,000 today to have electricians install tree lights and be on call if a bulb burned out. But in 1903, Edison’s General Electric debuted the first mass-market string of Christmas lights, which cost $12 (more than $400 today) and was marketed as a safe alternative to the candles traditionally placed in trees. In the 1960s, plastic “blow mold” lawn ornaments shaped like reindeer and Santa Claus exploded in popularity, but sales sank in the 2000s as inflatable decorations took over yards. 

Where did they come from? 

They were dreamed up by same firm behind Big Mouth Billy Bass, the animatronic singing fish. Texas-based Gemmy Industries was looking for a follow-up hit when co-owner Dan Flaherty wondered if he could make a consumer version of the inflatable animals often seen outside car dealerships. Early prototypes used hair dryers, which overheated and burned out, but Gemmy eventually devised a fan that could blow for months on end. In 2001, it launched its first inflatable—an 8-foot Santa—and now sells scores of seasonal specials, including a 7-foot shotgun-wielding Santa in a deer stand. In 2014, American entrepreneur Lou Lentine introduced another holiday innovation: a laser projector that speckles homes with festive lights. He devised the Star Shower as a safe, ladder-free way to illuminate a home, but the Federal Aviation Administration has warned that the lasers can pose “a serious safety risk to pilots” when misaimed. Americans who shopped for such gizmos and other holiday decorations this year likely noticed many prices were up from 2024. 

Why is that?

Because of President Trump’s tariffs on China, the source of 87% of all Christmas decorations. Import duties on Chinese goods skyrocketed to 145% this spring, before dropping to about 40%. Despite that fall, industry leaders warned that Americans would have to pay 18% more for decorations. Small businesses that import holiday decor have so far spent over $400 million on tariff fees, up 1,438% from last year. “We went from working toward a profit to working for tariffs,” said Jared Hendricks, who runs Village Lighting in West Valley City, Utah. 

Are Americans cutting back?

They say they are. In an October poll, only 39% of respondents said they’d buy new decorations this year, down from 56% in 2024. Still, the National Retail Foundation reports a record 202.9 million Americans shopped for Christmas items during Thanksgiving Week, and it expects overall holiday spending to top $1 trillion for the first time this year. Matthew Shay, the trade group’s CEO, suspects Americans won’t let economic gloom ruin the holiday. “Somehow,” he said, “Santa Claus always comes.”

The ancient funeral tradition of “hanging coffins” in southern China was carried out by ancestors of a minority ethnic group still living in the region today, a new study has found.

The report findings “provide valuable insights into the genetic, cultural, and historical roots of this burial custom”, say the authors of the study, published in the Nature Communications journal.

Auspicious and propitious

For millennia, inhabitants of modern-day Yunnan and Fujian provinces carried their dead high into the mountains and “pegged” wooden coffins into crevices in “exposed cliffs”, said Live Science. It is thought they used wooden scaffolding, rope pulleys or man-made trails to ascend the rocky cliffs.

Hanging coffins are “considered auspicious”, wrote a Yuan dynasty chronicler some time between 1279 and 1368. “The higher they are, the more propitious they are for the dead.” Curiously, “those whose coffins fell to the ground were considered more fortunate”.

The new study examined 11 bodies dating back as far as 2,000 years ago and used genome sequencing to confirm them as ancestors of the Bo people, several thousand of whom are still living in Yunnan province. A branch of the ancient Tai-Kadai-speaking people, who occupied much of southern China before the Han ethnic group became dominant, they were nicknamed “Subjugators of the Sky” and “Sons of the Cliffs” in regional folklore.

Coffin culture

Other specimens gathered for the study suggest that the ancestors of the Bo people once inhabited much of the land that makes up modern-day Myanmar, Laos and Thailand. Genetic analysis of remains from hanging log coffins found at sites in Thailand suggests that the tradition “was spread by men who migrated from southern China into Southeast Asia”, said Phys.org.

But the practice of suspending remains in a cliff face can also be found in other cultures. Hanging coffins are also one of the burial customs of the Kankanaey people of Sagada, on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. The coffins are smaller than standard caskets, because the corpses are placed in a foetal position, due to a belief that people should leave the world in the same position as they entered it.

In Indonesia, shaped coffins known as erong, guarded by carved wooden representations of the dead, were placed in high caves and cliffside niches by the Toraja people until the 1960s.

This article appeared in History of War magazine issue 153.

In September 2025 President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense to the 'Department of War', reverting to the original name established during the Revolutionary War. While such a change would officially require Congressional approval, the president cited a tradition of military strength and preparedness as essential to US national security.

"The Founders chose this name to signal our strength and resolve to the world," the order declared. "The name 'Department of War', more than the current 'Department of Defense', ensures peace through strength as it demonstrates our ability and willingness to fight and win wars on behalf of our nation at a moment's notice, not just to defend."

The department originally underwent a rebrand during a radical reorganisation of the US military after the end of the Second World War.

As the free world continued to count the cost the war, the most devastating armed conflict in human history, and the early vestiges of the Cold War loomed, President Harry Truman told the American people of his intent to reshape the US military establishment.

In the autumn of 1945 he declared: "I stated that I would communicate with Congress from time to time during the current session with respect to a comprehensive and continuous program of national security. I pointed out the necessity of making timely preparation for the nation's long-range security now – while we are still mindful of what it has cost us in this war to be unprepared."

Among Truman's priorities were a reorganisation of the American armed forces hierarchy to achieve efficiency, co-ordination and unity of command while reinforcing the venerable concept of civilian control of the military.

In December 1945, Truman added: "I recommend that the Congress adopt legislation combining the War and Navy Departments into one single Department of National Defense. Such unification is another essential step – along with universal training – in the development of a comprehensive and continuous program for our future safety and for the peace and security of the world."

The National Security Act of 1947 did in fact create the National Military Establishment (NME) with a framework that separated the US Air Force from control of the US Army and established the position of Secretary of Defense.

This new cabinet post would ostensibly supervise the subordinate offices of the individual branch secretaries. The incumbent was required to be a civilian or to have been retired from the military for at least ten years. This second proviso was later modified to seven years.

Another significant component of the 1947 act was the establishment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, composed of high-ranking military officers, the Central Intelligence Agency (preceded by the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS) and the National Security Council, an advisory body for the president in consideration of domestic, foreign and military policy.

Two years later the NME was formally renamed the Department of Defense. The entire executive initiative had been prompted not only by the command challenges of the Second World War but also in preparation for a potential war with the Soviet Union. Truman's perspective demanded an enhanced national military preparedness and response capability.

While the change of designation from War Department to National Military Establishment and then Department of Defense might be construed at first glance as an effort to quell the connotation of belligerence held with the word 'war', it was in fact necessary to differentiate the new structure from the previous alignment that had endured in various iterations since the 18th century.

Some sources claim that the change from NME to Department of Defense was necessary to eliminate the negative sound when the acronym was pronounced aloud. It simply sounded too much like 'enemy'.

The War Department had been created on 7 August 1789 during the first session of the Congress in the administration of President George Washington. Its purpose was clear: replacing the Board of War and Ordnance that had been created in the midst of the American Revolution in 1776.

The War Department was initially also known as the War Office in a nod to the British influence in North America. The fledgling US Navy was given a separate cabinet post in 1798 and encompassed the command of the US Marine Corps.

Therefore the National Security Act of 1947 effectively separated the Department of the Army from the Department of War and created the Department of the Air Force as a separate branch of the military.

The amended National Security Act, which Truman signed on 10 August 1949, brought the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force directly under the Secretary of Defense and established the post of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The president explained that the revisions constituted a "unification… increased efficiency and economy and greater coordination of our military forces".

In fact, some observers conclude that the comprehensive restructuring fostered an unprecedented era of inter-service rivalry as exemplified in the competition between the Air Force and Navy as the primary custodian and potential deliverer of the American nuclear weapons arsenal during the burgeoning years of the Cold War.

However, such a rivalry may well have been unavoidable and the effectiveness of the realignment remains the subject of debate as it continues to function today.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 153. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

“Experts have long debated the date that humans arrived in Australia,” said LiveScience. Now a study using DNA from both ancient and modern Aboriginal people across Oceania may have finally “settled the debate”.

The study, published last week in Science Advances, looked at an “unprecedentedly large” dataset of nearly 2,500 genomes to determine that humans began to settle northern Australia about 60,000 years ago.

But “even more interestingly”, the study also added to growing evidence that along the way these “early human pioneers likely interbred with archaic humans”, including the species known as “the hobbit”, Homo floresiensis.

Human hobbits

Homo floresiensis “might have been slight in stature”, at just over a metre tall, but its origins have “attracted lengthy debate”, said the Natural History Museum.

At the start of the millennium, most paleoanthropologists believed Homo sapiens was the only human species that had managed to reach Sahul, an ancient landmass that includes modern-day Australia. “It seemed very unlikely that archaic humans had watercraft capable of crossing the ocean.”

But the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003 “changed things dramatically”. A team uncovered more than 100 fossils in a cave on “a remote Indonesian island” called Flores, including the partial skeleton of a female: still the most complete Homo floresiensis fossil to date. The adult female was just 1.05 metres tall, earning the species its nickname: the hobbit.

Before the discovery, anthropologists had “assumed that the evolution of the human lineage was defined by bigger and bigger brains”, said anthropology professors Tesla Monson and Andrew Weitz on The Conversation. This, they believed, enabled early modern humans to perform “more complex tasks such as using fire, forging and wielding tools”. The discovery of the hobbits, with their “chimp-sized brain”, forced scientists to throw these theories “out the window”.

So how did they get to Flores?

Stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi were recently dated between 1.04 million and 1.48 million years old. That makes them “the earliest evidence ever discovered of ancient humans making a sea crossing”, said New Scientist. These could “provide clues” as to how the tiny hobbits made it to nearby Flores.

At least one of the artefacts was a flake that was struck off a larger flake and then trimmed. “This is a very early kind of human intelligence from a species that no longer exists,” said team member Adam Brumm, from Griffith University in Brisbane. “We don’t know what species it was, but this is a human intelligence behind these stone artefacts at the site of Calio.”

Both Flores and Sulawesi were separated from the mainland by “large expanses of sea”, and it is “almost certain that these early hominins weren’t capable of building ocean-going vessels”. The original population might have been washed out to sea by “some sort of freak geological event” such as a tsunami.

But the late archaeologist Mike Morwood, who led the team that originally identified Homo floresiensis, suggested that Sulawesi was “an important place to search for potential ancestors of the hobbits”.

This article appeared in History of War magazine issue 152.

CIA analysts gathered around U-2 spy plane photographs taken of Cuban military facilities. With horror, they realised they had just discovered Soviet medium-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles – weapons that were capable of targeting most of the continental US.

The next morning, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy briefed President John F Kennedy. A naval quarantine of Cuba, and the closest the world has ever come to all-out nuclear conflict, followed.

The Cold War pivoted on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The USA and the Soviet Union looked into the terrifying void and decided to collaborate on limiting horizontal (the number of nations with access to nuclear weapons) and vertical (the size of nuclear powers’ arsenals) proliferation.

International agreements followed, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, gradually bringing the world closer to safety. However, Serhii Plokhy, Cold War historian and author of The Nuclear Age, told History of War that our contemporary nuclear age has become significantly more dangerous.

“None of these treaties have continued. We are back to where we were before the Cuban Missile Crisis.” he explains. “We have entered the second nuclear arms race, and it’s more dangerous than the 1950s, because there are more players and no regulations in place.”

In the past, nuclear powers have pondered using force to limit proliferation. Advisers in Kennedy’s administration considered using covert special operations deployments to stop China from acquiring nuclear weapons.

This planning has escalated to deadly action in the post-Cold War nuclear age, including the invasion of Iraq and US strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2025.

Yet the main danger may not lie in the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other nations. “Today, we think that the world will end if Iran acquires nuclear weapons,” says Plokhy.

“We have been in Iran-type moments in history many times, and the world didn’t come to an end because there was no monopoly on the use of nuclear weapons. Whatever country acquires them exists in a world with other players that are much more powerful.”

The proliferation of nuclear weapons to other nations has diluted the nuclear monopoly, an essential condition for mutually assured destruction, but that alone has not made the world safer.

Plokhy explains: “The balance of nuclear weapons continues between the U.S. and Russia, who are the nuclear superpowers more than three decades after the Cold War, but the balance of fear has disappeared.

During the Cold War, countries that had nuclear weapons were equally as concerned about the dangers of nuclear conflict. However, “Russia behaves as if it’s the only country with nuclear weapons,” Plokhy explains.

Vladimir Putin appears to have lost his fear of nuclear destruction because economic weakness has backed him into a corner; Russia has not yet fully recovered economically from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“There is an enormous imbalance between the economic and nuclear power of Russia,” says Plokhy. “Nuclear power has become the only card they can play in the global arena and during the Russo-Ukrainian war.” Other nuclear powers have recently taken actions to assert their nuclear readiness, which could lead to a resurgence of Russian fears.

Plokhy indicates that the West also needs to show conventional military readiness: “If Russian drones attack NATO countries and NATO countries don’t send their drones into Russia, that causes a problem with the balance of fear. Russia is not the only country that can send drones into the territory of other states.”

As nuclear powers seek to return to a safe world, Plokhy positions the Cold War not as a “horribly dangerous period in international relations”, but as a “success story” from which “new generations can relearn the lessons that helped their grandparents to survive”.

He explains: “If we look at the Cold War through that perspective, we can ask questions like: ‘Was it just luck that we survived, or did we do something right?’ One of the things that was done right was the balance of fear necessary for equilibrium in international relations.”

Plokhy makes it clear that regenerating the right kind of nuclear terror can make the world a safer place. Whether that will happen before another event like the Cuban Missile Crisis brings the world back to the brink remains to be seen.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 152. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

The 12,000-year-old Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey is often called the “zero point of history”, said The Archaeologist. But recent excavations at the nearby Mendik Tepe site suggest it dates back even further, and could offer “newer insights into humanity’s earliest steps toward settled life”.

‘Earliest stages’ of human settlement

Mendik Tepe (Mendik Hill or Peak) is in a rural area of southeastern Anatolia, about 130 miles east of the city of Şanlıurfa. It’s in this region that the first permanent human settlements are thought to have been established in the early Neolithic period. A Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry project called Taş Tepeler (Stone Hills) is overseeing architectural digs in the area.

Excavation at Mendik Tepe got under way last year, led by University of Liverpool archaeology professor Douglas Baird, working with the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum and the British Institute of Archaeology. According to the experts, said The Archaeologist, the site dates to “the earliest stages of the Neolithic Era”, when humans began to abandon “mobile foraging” for a more “sedentary lifestyle, possibly experimenting with plant cultivation”. The “site seems to capture the very beginnings of that transformation”, dating it to as much as 2,000 years before Göbekli Tepe, Baird told the magazine.

‘Exciting’ look at Neolithic life

The excavations have already unearthed several buildings of various sizes, raising questions about their function and significance.

While structures excavated at Göbekli Tepe have massive T-shaped stone pillars, decorated with carvings of people and animals, the pillars on buildings at Mendik Tepe are smaller and not T-shaped. This suggests that the two communities “possessed a different ideology” or that Mendik Tepe “was constructed for different purposes”, said The Debrief.

The whole Taş Tepeler region is “particularly exciting” for archaeologists, Baird told the Turkish Anadolu Agency, because it allows for the study of “a network” of Neolithic settlements and their development “on a larger, regional scale”.

“I remember singing it in the playground in the late 1970s,” said Guy Walters in The Independent: “Hitler has only got one ball / The other is in the Albert Hall.” We all assumed the ditty was just a morale-boosting marching song. Now it turns out Hitler really might have been “one nut short of a lunchbox”.

‘Startling’ discovery

For a new Channel 4 documentary, genetics experts analysed Hitler’s DNA, extracted from a bloodied swatch of fabric that a US soldier had cut from the sofa in the Berlin bunker on which the dictator “blew his brains out” – and found that he had Kallmann syndrome. This genetic disorder hinders puberty, often resulting in undescended testicles and, in one in ten cases, a “micropenis”.

The “startling” discovery correlates with notes made by a doctor who had examined Hitler in 1923, and found that he had “right-sided cryptorchidism” (an undescended testicle). There are also stories of Hitler being mocked by his First World War comrades for his “inadequacy”. If his genitals were severely undeveloped, it could go some way to explaining the psychology of one of history’s most evil men.

Dubious claims

It certainly raises some fascinating psychoanalytic questions, said Philip Oltermann in The Guardian. Did the Führer “transform a sense of personal deficit” into an ideological cause? Had the documentary, “Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator”, stopped there, it would have been “sensational but also credible”. Instead, it makes a series of more dubious claims. Based on a polygenic risk score (PRS) test, to assess Hitler’s genetic “propensity” for mental health conditions, its makers blithely assert, for instance, that he had a “high probability” of displaying autistic traits and developing schizophrenia.

Not only does this risk stigmatising those with these conditions – will they be cast as “Little Hitlers”? – it’s misleading. PRS tests are not diagnostic tools, said Tiffany Wertheimer on BBC News, and their use to assess people’s susceptibility to complex neurological conditions is controversial.

Hitler’s mental and physical health has been the source of endless fascination, said Ben Macintyre in The Times. Over the years, he has been variously diagnosed with syphilis, rotting teeth, Parkinson’s and flatulence – as if the insanity of the Third Reich could be “reduced to one man’s apparent symptoms”. It’s “tempting fodder”, but in reality, genetics cannot explain Hitler or Nazism; neither could have emerged without the social, economic and political conditions of interwar Germany. Hitler’s genes “may have contributed to creating a singular monster. But German society was already fatally sick.”

Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco – and, as revisionist takes on his regime proliferate on social media, the Spanish government is making a concerted effort to remind the country’s young people of the reality of fascism.

Nearly one in four Spaniards between the ages of 18 and 26 would prefer an authoritarian government to a democratic one, according to an El Pais/Cadena SER poll. And 21.3% of Spaniards of all ages surveyed by state pollster CIS said they saw the Franco era as “good” or “very good” for their country – a big jump from 11.2% in 2000.

Scant knowledge

Franco, an ally of Hitler and Mussolini, died on 20 November 1975, ending 39 years of dictatorship and opening the door to a new era of democracy. For most Spaniards, it was a moment of liberation and celebration but the dictator was mourned by ultra-nationalists.

Fifty years on, the “deeds and legacy of the man whose military coup ushered in” a regime “built around the authoritarian ideology of National Catholicism”, still “haunt, divide and confuse” Spain, said The Guardian.

With the far-right “once more on the march”, the country's left-wing government is “using the 50th anniversary” of Franco’s death to “trumpet Spain’s transformation into a progressive modern European democracy” and remind its people of “the potency of fascism”. A year-long series of events are particularly targeted at younger voters with “no memory – and scant knowledge – of the dictatorship”.

In recent years, “historical revisionism and justification” of Franco’s regime have “crept into the generation that has grown up in freedom”, said El Pais. There is a growing and vocal cohort of youthful Franco apologists on social media. “Some people only see the bad things about Franco but they forget everything we have thanks to him,” one admirer posted on TikTok.

Pseudo-nostalgia

False narratives about, for example, life being more affordable under Franco are gaining traction with young people whose parents didn’t experience the dictatorship – and that’s partly the result of the way Spain patched up “its open wounds” in the late 1970s, said The Guardian. A “tacit social contract”, known as the “pact of forgetting”, left “the past in the past”, so the nation could “move on as quickly as possible”. And into the void stepped the revisionists.

Teachers talk of students who “embrace the macho, misogynistic tropes of the ‘manosphere’” also expressing “pseudo-nostalgic admiration” for a dictatorship “about whose realities they know next to nothing”. “AI-generated clips” of Franco “railing against modern ills” circulate on social media, said Reuters, while nightclubs play “techno remixes of Spain’s fascist-era anthem”.

The 2022 Historical Memory Law does make it mandatory for Spanish schools to teach students about the “fight for democratic values and freedoms”, said El País. But how they do so “often depends on the will of the educational centres, and the teachers themselves, to compete with” what’s posted on social media. Education is devolved to the country’s 17 autonomous regions “of which 11 are currently governed by the main opposition Popular Party”, which believes this teaching is “indoctrination”.

Stone is “making a comeback” in the building industry after years of being “forgotten”, said the BBC. With clear benefits to the environment, such as a lower carbon footprint than other traditional materials, the substance’s popularity is growing as a more sustainable, and nostalgic, alternative.

In warmer climates, stone is valued for its cooling properties, but the benefits of stone in the UK could be much more varied.

‘Tangible link’ to the past

The rise in demand seems to be particularly welcome north of the border. Scotland’s identity is “closely linked to its stone-built heritage”, said Historic Environment Scotland. Stone infrastructure is not only a “tangible link” to the country’s past, but it also stimulates financial opportunities. Millions of tourists see stonework, and the traditional aesthetic of stone walls and buildings as a “huge draw”, and their arrival provides a “vital source of income” for local economies.

In rural areas, stone walling and stone building have long histories, dating as far back as 5,000 years, said Jennie Rothenberg Gritz in Smithsonian. Stonewalling uses stones, “carefully fitted together in such a way that the wall won’t fall down” without any mortar or cement. This means that if you have to fix one section, the whole wall remains secure, whereas “when a mortared wall cracks, the entire wall is in peril”.

“What price do you put on forever?”, stone wall expert Kristie de Garis told the magazine. “Mortared walls need to be redone roughly every 15 to 30 years. But there are dry stone walls still standing after thousands of years.”

‘Renaissance’ fuelled by sustainability

The most important aspect of stone is probably its “ecological value”, said Christiane Fath in World-Architects.com. Though it has always been popular and used in some of the most famous buildings in the world – think Cologne Cathedral, the Colosseum, or Notre Dame – in the era of climate change, stone is heading for a “renaissance” after major developments in Germany, specifically Cologne, Leipzig and Berlin.

Its benefits are manifold, wrote Fath. Created by natural processes, its production “consumes little energy”, and its “buildings can be recycled” if approached intelligently. Stone building’s human input should not be overlooked: despite the use of machinery in its production, the creation of stone elements is still an “artisan process” providing “additional cultural value”, and is a celebration of timeless craftsmanship.

“Building in brick is increasingly unsustainable”, said Amy Frearson in the FT. Processing bricks involves additional ingredients like lime, sand, and cement, even before the “energy cost of firing and shipping”. Sustainability aside, stone is a way of “delivering the very local character that the government wants” when developing houses, something which is important to local councils.

One major drawback of turning to stone as a material is the problem of “perception”, said the broadsheet. Added to the higher cost, and despite its strong load-bearing capacity, stone has cultivated a “luxury surface finish” image. This drives stringent demand for “uniform varieties”, “leaving anything short of perfect to be rejected and creating a lot of surplus”.

From violence and explosions to “loads and loads of swearing”, “there are some things you expect from a historical drama written by Steven Knight”, said Pat Stacey in The Irish Independent. The creator of “Peaky Blinders” is known for his dark, gritty shows with glossy production values. “One thing you never expect, and never get, is fidelity to the historical facts.”

Knight’s latest “rip-roaring” show, “House of Guinness”, about the family behind the world-famous stout, is “hurling around falsities like barley grains in a brewery”, said James Jackson in The Times. “Or is it?”

Male lovers and sexy Irish revolutionaries

The series begins with a “full-blown riot” breaking out between nationalist Fenians and Guinness brewery workers in the streets at Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness’ funeral, said The Times. But “this never happened”, Adrian Tinniswood, author of “The Houses of Guinness”, told the paper. While it was an enormous affair with “something like a thousand people lining the streets” to pay their respects, the “burning effigy” of Sir Benjamin and “baying mob” have been added for dramatic effect. And though the family’s “ruthless fixer” and “attack dog” Sean Rafferty (James Norton) is certainly a “compelling character”, he is an invented one.

As for Arthur Guinness being stuck in a “sexless transactional” marriage and cheating on his wife, Lady Olivia Hedges-White, with “several male lovers” including the godson of William Gladstone, there is “no evidence” to suggest he was gay, said Harry Howard in the Daily Mail. In fact, “Arthur and his wife are known to have been a happy couple”.

There is also no record of Arthur’s younger brother Edward falling in love with a Fenian activist, as he does in the series. “Steven Knight seems to have a thing for fictional sexy female Irish revolutionaries”, said The Irish Independent. In “Peaky Blinders” Charlotte McKenna played “manic pixie IRA dream girl Captain Swing”, this time Niamh McCormack was brought in as the “flame-haired IRB babe Ellen Cochrane” who “lures Edward into bed”.

Edward didn’t come up with the harp symbol for the Guinness brand, either. The truth is, while it was a “savvy” move to use the Irish heraldic symbol to market the stout, Edward was just 15 at the time it began appearing on bottles in 1862 and “it is not known whose idea it was”, said Alexander Larman in The Telegraph. The (spoiler alert!) “suitably tense” ending involving an assassination attempt on a key member of the Guinness family also never happened.

Philanthropy and electoral fraud

It is largely true, though, that Benjamin Guinness’ will divided his fortune between his oldest and youngest sons, stating that they must run the brewery together or forfeit their inheritance. The brewery mogul was “trying to preserve the business” for his family, Tinniswood told The Times. Still, it was more “complicated” than its portrayal in the show and, “much later”, Arthur was able to sell his half-share of the business to Edward.

Much to Rafferty’s alarm, in the show Edward creates a pension scheme for his workers in the show. This is “rooted in truth”, said The Times. Although it isn’t clear whether he actually set up a scheme, the businessman did treat his workers in an “uncharacteristically generous” way, giving £500,000 to build employee housing in London and Dublin, Tinniswood said. He may have had “mixed” motives, though, as he was trying to “climb the social ladder” and secure a peerage at the time.

It’s also true that Arthur was tried for electoral fraud. The businessman found himself at the heart of a “sensational” trial in 1869, when a “packed-out courtroom” heard how he paid a team of campaigners to “swing the election in his favour”, said Matt Blake in Empire.

And the Guinness family really were “staunchly pro-union”, supporting British rule. Britain was a huge market for the brewery so this made “financial sense”, and the Irish independence movement threatened the social order that protected their wealth. “But it was more than just business.” Benjamin Lee “longed” to be accepted by the English aristocracy and Arthur would later go on to become the first member of the Guinness family to sit in the House of Lords and was made a Knight of the British Empire: “the ultimate status symbol of the Victorian elite”.

In 2018, the Paris-based British historian Andrew Hussey was caught up in a riot while cycling in Paris, said Kim Willsher in The Observer. As he dodged chunks of paving stone and other missiles, and felt tear gas scorching his eyes, Hussey – “in his early 60s with a heart condition” – became fearful for his life.

Yet he was struck by something else: the protesters were mostly “respectable looking” and middle-aged. How could it be that such “outwardly ordinary” people had such visceral hatred of the police? And what did it say about France? To find out, Hussey set out on a journey across the country, from the “working-class post-industrial” towns of the north to the Mediterranean port of Marseille, where around a third of the population are of Muslim origin.

The result, “Fractured France”, is a “readable” and timely blend of “memoir, travelogue and personal confession”, punctuated by interviews with writers and intellectuals. If it ends up being “less about the French and France and more about Hussey and France”, then it’s “all the better for it” – since the author’s “meanderings” are what “brings it alive”.

Hussey takes the “terms” of his enquiry from the “innovative geographer Christophe Guilluy, his first interviewee”, said David Sexton in The Times. Guilluy claims France is bitterly riven between a périphérique who live in the countryside, suburbs and small towns, and an elite who inhabit 15 or so vibrant “citadels”. This concept has “largely replaced” the notion that it’s only the banlieues, or immigrant-heavy suburbs, which are “seriously disaffected”.

Given how “compelling” Guilluy’s theory is, it’s a shame Hussey didn’t spend more time talking to the “struggling and increasingly estranged men and women” who are the subjects of his analysis, said Robert Zaretsky in The New Statesman. He spends too much of the book conversing with fellow intellectuals – or on “picturesque” detours into food and culture, which are of only dubious relevance.

The idea that France is “fractured” is of course nothing new, said Graham Robb in The Spectator. The discontents Hussey highlights – whether gilets jaunes protests by disgruntled motorists or the rise of far-right extremists – don’t seem “particularly unusual” to any “veteran historian of the fractious Fifth Republic”. Still, as an “on-the-ground” journey through the often “crazed landscape” of contemporary France, his book is “poignant, shocking, informative and funny”. It could even be used as a kind of anti-guidebook: “Where Not to Go in France”.

This article appeared in History of War magazine issue 151.

On 2 September 1945, Japanese forces officially surrendered to the Republic of China, ending the brutal occupation which began in 1937. Since the end of the subsequent Chinese Civil War, this victory has been marked separately by the People's Republic of China, and the Republic of China (Taiwan).

In mainland China, the communist government's role in the victory over Japan has been largely overemphasised over the decades, while the nationalist contribution has been downplayed or even extinguished from commemorations.

However, it was the nationalist government, the Kuo-min-tang (KMT), under Chiang Kai-shek, that led the main military campaigns of resistance against the Japanese and formally accepted their surrender in 1945.

Dissonance over who fought the Japanese harder, the KMT or the communists, or who is properly honoured in war memorials, now extends to the Taiwan question. Since the 1990s the island nation's politics has drifted away from the militaristic KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party now sees Japan as a diplomatic ally.

Meanwhile, China's state-owned media and its adjacent entertainment industry have fused the historical narrative of the war into a unified struggle that echoes the brief accommodation the communists and nationalists reached by 1938.

This has resulted in modern China marking the beginning of the war from 1931, when Japan seized Manchuria, until 1945 – labelling this a 'Chinese people's war of resistance' greater in scope than the previous 1937-1945 framing.

As far as the mainland is concerned, all of China was swept by the terrible ordeal and Japan's crimes are a timeless evil that sullied the course of Chinese history – never mind who was in charge of the government at this time.

The end of Japanese occupation

It took three weeks for the KMT to formalise the total surrender of all Japanese forces and civilians in 1945. Although Tokyo announced its decision to the allies on August 10 it was not until September 3 that Japanese soldiers in China were ordered to lay down their arms and a few more days passed until a formal agreement was smoothed out.

To mark the occasion a nationalist general with a sizeable retinue was sent to the former capital Nanking, still occupied by 70,000 Japanese soldiers. The venue itself was emblematic of modern China's statehood, being a war college for nationalist officers.

The once unrepentant General Yasutsugu Okamura and his staff were seated along a table and signed the act of surrender that was delivered to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek on the same day: September 9, 1945.

Japan's capitulation in China was far from straightforward. By Chiang Kai-shek's reckoning there were 1.3 million enemy soldiers left in the mainland. When the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria in early August it quashed and captured the million-strong Kwantung Army.

An estimated one million Japanese civilians were scattered among China's ravaged cities and 170,000 more soldiers were garrisoned in Formosa. Annexed by Japan in 1895 and subjected to a brutal ethnic cleansing, the fate of this island known today as Taiwan was decided at the Cairo Conference in 1943 when Chiang himself agreed on post-war territorial arrangements with Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt.

The calamity of the war against Japanese aggression, which is how China recognises the conflict from 1937 until 1945, took such a severe toll on the country's population, that there was little to no relief once the Japanese left.

Impact of WWII on China

China began sliding toward a new crisis soon after the KMT finalised a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union, while allowing 50,000 U.S. marines to land in the north and help repatriate Japanese POWs home.

The economic and humanitarian cost to China during WWII was immense, with 2 million soldiers perishing along with 14 million civilians. Contemporary historians now revise the death toll as high as 18 to 20 million (according to the Library of Congress Asian Reading Room), on par with the Soviet Union's losses during the war. Nonetheless, as soon as the mutual enemy was defeated, the civil war between the communists and nationalists simmered anew.

The communist leader and firebrand Mao Zedong shredded the KMT's tepid announcement of Japan's defeat in mid-August. Rather than the generous reassurance that China would not seek revenge on Japan, as uttered by Chiang himself, Mao blamed the KMT for their lack of co-operation and constant intrigues.

According to Mao, it was the communist forces who kept the Japanese divisions away from southern China's 'free' heartland where 200 million Chinese were spared the horrors of conquest.

This was a bizarre claim to make. In fact, the communists had fought short-lived campaigns against the Japanese in the early 1940s, which mostly took place in central China and the northeast.

Furthermore, the Imperial Japanese Army had reached the southern coast of China by late 1944 and even Hong Kong and Hainan island were seized as early as 1941 and 1939, respectively.

By 1947 the civil war was once again in full swing, despite heroic attempts by the U.S. envoy Gen. George C. Marshall to organise a coalition government.

In circumstances that echo current world politics, the United States was trying to solve the China question by bringing together two irreconcilable factions. Once the communists triumphed, and Mao Zedong and his circle were ensconced in Peking (Beijing) by October 1949, the entire fabric of China's national politics was in tatters.

The reeling nationalists of the KMT rebuilt their state on Formosa and organised a string of small garrisons on outer islands facing the Chinese coast as a primary line of defence for a coming invasion.

In supreme irony, by the early 1950s as the U.S. was extending support for the KMT in Taiwan, retired Japanese army generals were visiting Taipei incognito for briefings with their temporary secret allies.

The coming decades made the Peking-Taipei-Tokyo axis a complicated one. In his final years even Mao Zedong revised his views on Japan and welcomed a restoration of diplomacy. So did his successors, despite constant efforts in China to memorialise Japanese atrocities during the war of aggression, including the controversy surrounding 'comfort women' or the enslavement of women in Japanese-occupied areas.

Since the 1990s, immense monuments and exhibitions have emerged chronicling this painful and dark history, while at the same time Japan became the most reliable foreign investor in the mainland.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 151. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 131.
Mark Galeotti is the author of Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, published by Osprey and out in paperback now

For all that he can scarcely walk past a tank or a fighter jet without a photo opportunity of him peering out of the cupola or ensconced in the cockpit, Vladimir Putin is no soldier.

He did his bare minimum reserve officer training at university, being assigned a technical rank of lieutenant, but abandoned it as soon as he could. He shows little sign of understanding the realities of warfare, from strategy and tactics to the unavoidable necessities of logistics.

This is something even Russian soldiers – even before the current war in Ukraine – uncomfortably acknowledge. Once, I was talking to a couple of officers, and when we had got past their inevitable wariness at talking to a Westerner (some drinks helped) it became clear that they had a complex attitude towards their commander-in-chief: at once respecting him as a strong and capable national leader, but at the same time unconvinced he truly understood warfare.

The irony is that, for all but three of the 25 years Putin has now directly and indirectly ruled Russia, he has been at war, declared or undeclared, domestic or foreign. Most of these wars were, in one way or another, victories, especially because they were limited in scale and objectives.

Nonetheless, it seems clear that the lessons Putin derived from them, sometimes accurate but often deeply mistaken, led him to his fateful decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022, and shaped his thinking as to how that should best be done.

The Second Chechen War: 1999 – 2009

When Putin first came to power, the challenge was to fight a domestic war with what he had at his disposal, after at least 20 years of catastrophic military decline. The rebellious Chechen people of southern Russia had in essence fought Moscow to a draw in the First Chechen War (1994-96), and even while still prime minister and president-in-waiting in 1999, Putin was determined to address this challenge.

In September 1999, a series of explosions in apartment buildings across Russia killed more than 300 people. The Chechens were blamed, and this was used to justify a renewed campaign. In October, Russian troops crossed the Chechen border, in a war that would be the making of Putin's reputation as a tough, ruthless and indomitable leader.

Unlike the previous war, the Second Chechen War was backed by massive force, supported by a comprehensive information campaign to justify its brutal methods, and also drew on Chechens willing to fight for Moscow.

This was an ugly conflict, even by the standards of civil wars. The Chechen capital, Grozny, was flattened. Chechen men were rounded up for infamous 'filtration camps', The official death toll was 5,200 Russian soldiers and police and over 16,000 rebels, but estimates of the civilian casualties range from 30,000-80,000.

Nonetheless, Moscow had demonstrated that it had the will and ability to keep its provinces in line. Most importantly, Putin felt he had proven not just that the Russian bear still had its claws, but that the ruthless use of force worked.

So long as he kept hostile journalists out and pitched this as simply a policing action against terrorists and jihadists, then his people would be happy and the West would do little but complain, and wring its hands when Russia presented it with a fait accompli.

The Georgian War: 2008

Chechnya, though, was at least legally part of the Russian Federation. What would happen when Moscow launched an operation abroad? Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili had long been a thorn in Putin's side, with his vehement anti-Russian rhetoric and his eager courtship of NATO.

To Putin – at the time technically just the prime minister, not the president, but still the undisputed master of Russia – Georgia needed to be reminded that it was part of Moscow's sphere of interest, not least to provide a warning to other neighbouring states thinking of challenging the self-proclaimed regional hegemon.

Two break-away regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, would be the pretext. Saakashvili was provoked into attacking South Ossetia, Moscow denounced this as an act of aggression and invaded, pushing government forces out of the break-away regions.

From Putin's point of view, this was another triumph. His personal bête noire Saakashvili was humbled and Georgia's drift towards the West halted. He seemed less than concerned with the details, which were rather more mixed.

Of course, Russia was always going to be able to beat tiny Georgia, whose total military amounted to just 30,000 troops, of whom many of the best were serving in the multinational force in Iraq.

However, it turned out not to have been as easy as anticipated, with the Russian offensive dogged by blunders. Half its aircraft losses were to friendly fire incidents, for example, and generals found themselves having to borrow journalists' satellite phones to give orders.

That said, this gave then-Defence Minister Serdyukov and his Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Makarov the opportunity finally to force serious reform on the conservative generals. It was seriously overdue: only 17 percent of the Ground Forces and 3 percent of the Air Force's regiments were combat ready and half the Navy's ships were not seaworthy.

The so-called 'New Look' reforms were meant to create more capable, mobile, flexible and professional forces based on smaller brigades and battalion tactical groups rather than the old divisions. This entailed shrinking the total armed forces by 130,000 men, especially by pruning the top-heavy officer corps (one in three were dismissed), while increasing the proportion of volunteer kontraktniki to conscripts.

These reforms, ironically, possibly even undermined Russia’s capacity to fight a mass war, geared as they were to generating forces able to deploy in small-scale interventions. Many of the reforms have been subsequently reversed since the invasion of Ukraine.

Crimea and Syria: 2014-15

Under Serdyukov and his successor, Sergei Shoigu, real progress was made. However, it was at best partial. In effect, by 2014 Russia had two armies: one which had been quite successfully reformed, largely comprising the special forces and other elite units, and a rump that was still quite some way from the 'New Look' ideal.

Nonetheless, this was enough for the seizure of Crimea following Ukraine's 'Revolution of Dignity' at the start of 2014.

The Crimean Peninsula was strategically and politically crucial to Putin: home of the Black Sea Fleet and something almost every one of his subjects considered rightly theirs (it had been Russian until 1954).

When Kyiv was taken over by a new government keen on getting closer to the West, Putin decided that Crimea ought to be 'returned' and what followed was a textbook military operation. The so-called 'little green men' – Russian special forces – took over the peninsula almost without a shot being fired and it was then annexed.

One would have been hard-pressed to imagine more propitious conditions for such a coup de main: the Ukrainian military was in disarray, the new government was weak, the West did not want a confrontation, and thousands of Russian troops were already present on the peninsula.

It was a genuine triumph, but it was not a true test of the whole Russian military machine. Nonetheless, Putin was to gain an exaggerated sense of Russia's military capabilities, not fully appreciating just how unusual the circumstances were and how far its small scope required the deployment of just the best of the best.

Much the same could be said of the military deployment in Syria from 2015. Faced with the risk that Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime could fall to popular revolt, and also eager to hit back against a West that was trying politically to isolate Russia since its Crimean annexation, Moscow decided on a limited intervention.

In September 2015, Russian combat aircraft flew to their new base at Khmeimim in Syria, in the start of an operation that would see the ruthless use of air power, mercenaries and special forces to secure the regime.

While Syria was the most asymmetric of conflicts, where Russian air power was virtually unchallenged and where the enemy was divided, a militarily prepared and unified Ukraine was able to deny air superiority to its enemy.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 131. Subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

Forged In War by Mark Galeotti, published by Osprey, is on sale now

Archaeologists have been excavating Israel's Tinshemet Cave for nearly a decade, but a recent discovery in the cave is getting attention for what it reveals about human behavior. Experts hope the uncovering of a primitive burial ground will shed new light on how early humans honored their dead and how those rituals persist today.

What did archaeologists find in the cave?

The discovery was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior in March but only gained traction in the news several months later. At the cave, located in the hills of central Israel, archaeologists found what is believed to be "one of the oldest burial sites in the world," where the "well-preserved remains of early humans dating back some 100,000 years were carefully arranged in pits," said The Associated Press.

Archaeologists have found human remains at the cave before, some even older than 100,000 years. But this latest discovery is notable because of "objects found beside the remains that may have been used during ceremonies to honor the dead," said the AP, which could illuminate "how our ancient ancestors thought about spirituality and the afterlife."

Objects found at the burial grounds include "basalt pebbles, animal remains or fragments of ochre, a reddish pigment made from iron-rich rocks," said The Jerusalem Post. Many of these objects had "no known practical use for daily life, suggesting they were part of rituals meant to honor the dead." The remains themselves were also well-preserved, and one was in "such good condition that archaeologists could observe how the fingers were interwoven."

Why is this important?

The discovery is "reshaping our understanding of human interactions during the Middle Paleolithic period," said the American Friends of the Hebrew University in a press release. It can "suggest the presence of shared rituals and strong communal bonds," which could share direct links to the funerary practices of today.

Leaders of the excavation have underscored the importance of the find. It is an "amazing revolutionary innovation for our species," said Yossi Zaidner, a professor of archaeology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one of the excavation directors, to the AP. While early humans were known to bury their dead, this burial ground is evidence of the "first time we are starting to use this behavior."

The burial findings are also "bolstering earlier discoveries from two similar burial sites dating to the same period in northern Israel," said Christian Tryon, a professor at the University of Connecticut, to the AP. These caves were excavated 100 years ago and 50 years ago, respectively, so there are "many uncertainties with those sites, but this is confirming it's a pattern we know, and they're really nailing down the dates."

Mysteries still remain, however, and it will "take many more years to fully excavate the site," said Newsweek. This is because archaeologists must use "hand chisels and pen-sized pneumatic drills resembling dental tools" to preserve the cave. But as more of the cave is excavated, researchers "hope to deepen their understanding of how and when early humans began treating death with ritual, symbolism and meaning."

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 149.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, shocked the world. It marked the dangerous new dawn of nuclear weapons, and foreshadowed the horrific potential of World War Three should it ever break out.

The atomic bomb was a catastrophic escalation that preceded the end of the Second World War; however it followed years of escalating conventional aerial bombardment of Japan by the Allies. "If they were prepared to firebomb the country to its knees, why wouldn't they drop an atomic bomb?" historian Iain MacGregor told History of War magazine.

He adds that the firebombing of Japanese cities was the point of no return that made atomic bombing acceptable to the American leadership. "It was just another piece of ordnance."

During the Spanish Civil War, Hitler's Condor Legion devastated Guernica with high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne, Coventry and other European cities followed in the Second World War.

In the Pacific Theatre, hundreds of thousands died in Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe and more when incendiary bombs ignited wooden homes into unstoppable firestorms. The crescendo of this devastating strategy came when the atomic bombs Little Boy and Fat Man were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At the outset of the Second World War President Franklin D. Roosevelt implored the belligerents to avoid civilian casualties when bombing. Yet even as he made this plea, one of the USA's greatest aviation achievements and the eventual bearer of weapons of mass destruction, the B-29 Superfortress, was already in development.

The B-29 strategic bomber

"The strategy would be that machines do the fighting to save a hell of a lot of casualties. That doctrine dominated American policy even before Pearl Harbor," says MacGregor, whose book The Hiroshima Men chronicles the stories of the key figures involved in the atomic bomb.

He also notes the economic significance of an aircraft programme that cost more than the Manhattan Project: "Investing that kind of money meant rejuvenating America's economy.

"The aircraft industry had taken a pounding during the Great Depression. They deliberately made sure to build the plane in middle America, partly for security — no saboteur could get near it — but also because it revived entire regions of the Midwest."

It was two-and-a-half years after the attack on Pearl Harbor that the U.S. unleashed the destructive capabilities the B-29, forced by the blood-soaked Asia-Pacific campaign. During the war, Japan's military culture was ruled by a "suicidal urge", as co-author of Victory '45 Al Murray puts it. This meant any advances towards the Home Islands had a staggering cost.

"The Japanese also believed that the American psyche wouldn't have the stomach for the brutal, attritional warfare needed to get to the Home Islands. The next three years proved them wrong," says MacGregor, noting that the U.S. took more casualties in the first six months of 1945 than in the previous three years combined.

U.S. commanders looked to the B-29 as the weapon that could crush Japanese resistance and minimise Allied casualties. The Americans had outfought Japanese expectations, but U.S. deaths in the Asia-Pacific, rapidly approaching their final total of over 100,000, were making people back home queasy.

"The next jump-off point was an amphibious assault on the Japanese mainland. Military reports suggested that in the first few months there could easily have been a million Allied and four million civilian casualties," says MacGregor. In New Mexico, the world's greatest physicists were secretly working on a weapon of mass destruction that could avoid America's bloodiest campaign yet.

The firebombing of Tokyo

In August 1944 General Curtis LeMay took charge of XX Bomber Command, responsible for the bombing campaign against Japan. He found that the powerful jet stream winds over the Home Islands made high-altitude precision bombing almost impossible. So instead of relying on accuracy, he harnessed the destructive potential of tonnes of incendiary bombs.

This was most terribly demonstrated during Operation Meetinghouse, a large raid on the capital Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945. This bombing raid destroyed vast swathes of the capital and killed over 100,000 people, mainly civilians, more than four-times the estimated deaths during the bombing of Dresden a month earlier.

Meetinghouse was a new and terrible milestone in the destructive capability of air power, leaving more than an ambiguous question mark over the legality and morality of the tactic. "If we lose, we'll be tried as war criminals," LeMay soberly remarked.

Over the following five months, B-29 raids turned 66 Japanese cities to ash. Traditional wood and paper housing erupted into flames across the country. Estimates of the deaths from the bombing campaigns against Japan in the United States Strategic Bombing Survey reports range from 333,000 to 900,000, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

LeMay's use of napalm was horrifically effective, with 56-84 percent of the fatalities caused by burns. Despite the destruction, firebombing proved a failure in forcing the Japanese government to surrender. Unimaginable casualties, and the evacuation of a quarter of Japan's urban population, could not end support for the war effort.

"The Japanese were controlling information so tightly that the population didn't even know they were losing," Al Murray told History of War. "[But] perhaps there was a sneaking suspicion in the backs of their minds that the war wasn't going as well as it could." The Allies needed a more destructive weapon to break the Japanese government's ironclad commitment to fight to the bitter end.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 149. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 149.

The border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia in July 2025 originate in the region's colonial era over a hundred years ago. At least 12 Thai nationals and an unknown number of Cambodians were killed during the fighting, according to the BBC. The attacks took place in a disputed region known as the 'Emerald Triangle', which lies between Cambodia and Thailand.

The area is home to the Preah Vihear temple complex, a UNESCO heritage site dating back to the 11th century. Tensions between the two countries persisted throughout the 20th century, and was preceded by French and British colonial interests and interventions in southeast Asia. Tensions on the border escalated during the chaotic periods of the Vietnam War, Cambodian–Vietnamese War, and the Khmer Rouge dictatorship.

Origins of the Thailand-Cambodia dispute

In the early 20th century Thailand was still known as Siam, a kingdom that while under economic control of the British Empire and its unstoppable merchant fleet, had largely preserved its independence. The kingdom spent decades refashioning itself into a modern state, aided in the process by treaties with England and France that agreed on lasting borders.

Having formulated the borders of Indo-China (Vietnam) from the mid-19th century onward, France also wrangled distant Siamese provinces with treaties in 1904 and 1907. Similar arrangements were settled with the British in 1909, which ended years of incursions from the Malayan peninsula, as well as from Burma (Myanmar) in the northwest.

After renaming itself Thailand in 1939, modernisation progressed with the usual characteristics of Southeast Asian countries – foreign investment and centralised government – helped along by the country's location. Its capital Bangkok not only flourished at the mouth of a river delta but also had access to a vast gulf.

The country's interior was neatly bracketed by dense forest and mountains, leaving uninterrupted wetlands suited for large-scale rice cultivation. These advantages gave its borders paramount importance, even during the Second World War. The non-aligned Thai state fought Vichy forces in 1940 in a sudden rebuke to decades of amity.

With as many as a dozen coup d'etats sweeping its government since the 1930s Thailand's democratic tradition is unchanged today: civilian leadership in name only, while former generals enjoy important government positions with the monarchy's blessing. This age-old problem metastasised as the Cold War loomed over Southeast Asia.

By the 1960s, Bangkok's pseudo-military junta, where former generals monopolised the civilian high offices with the explicit backing of the monarch, eagerly joined any arrangement to keep the ongoing war in Vietnam at bay. This meant the unfailing support and largess of the United States.

Thailand was also briefly a member of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and managed to shape the newly minted Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional bloc that brought it in league with Indonesia, a country that swayed from one alliance to the next depending on its leaders' calculations.

But the 1970s and the victory of North Vietnam in 1975, as well as communists seizing Laos and Cambodia that same year, unravelled Thailand's hedging. By the middle of that decade a refugee crisis almost overwhelmed its eastern provinces as exiles from Cambodia and the fallen Republic of Vietnam arrived by any means necessary.

Isolated and enjoying diplomatic support from China, the murderous Khmer Rouge regime that dominated Cambodia was now a heavily armed menace, and the Thai army had the thankless task of keeping them at bay.

Cambodian–Vietnamese War

In 1979 Vietnam launched a surprise invasion of Cambodia, which created another refugee crisis and replaced the challenge of an unstable regime with a Vietnamese occupation now on Thailand's doorstep.

Just as in the early 20th century, Bangkok preserved its strength and sought compromise. With a communist rebellion snuffed out through amnesty and cash handouts in 1982, heartfelt diplomacy with China became essential.

The re-emergence of a viable Cambodian state in the late 1990s and its modest prosperity was not the godsend Thailand needed. Having grown to the second-largest economy in the region and with its political fault lines unresolved, Bangkok had the twin headaches of rampant drug trafficking on the Myanmar border and a post-war refugee crisis on the Cambodian border.

The independence of the kingdom once known as Kampuchea, later subsumed by French colonialism in the late 19th century, always left endangered borders where rebellion and illicit trade flourished. The risk was always too great for Bangkok to withstand, whether in the primacy of the Chakri kings or today's thinly veiled junta, so the occasional show of force was almost inevitable.

Successive prime ministers cultivated their counterparts in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, including the affable and nepotistic Hun Sen (his son has since replaced him), but the lingering question of the border remained, especially in the romanticised 'Emerald Triangle'.

While neither country sees the status of their border and its landmarks as existential — both have an abundance of arable land blessed by fair weather all year round — the stark ruins of heritage sites like the Preah Vihear temple complex become flash points because of overzealous border policing.

The 2025 border clash

The Royal Thai Armed Forces have sought to contest the 'emerald triangle' region several times in 30 years but have never launched a full-scale war. Prudence has often prevailed because the army is preoccupied with domestic politics in an affluent society.

If revisionism were the cause of the border dispute, it is a very mellowed-down version as neighbouring countries in the ASEAN bloc insist on mediation.

The problem endures as the modern statehood of Cambodia and Thailand demands that present borders be revised, with the view from Phnom Penh favouring international court rulings while Bangkok prefers the historical approach of bilateral agreements. The Thais are sticking to their successful compromises with colonial powers and Cold War rivals.

When cross-border artillery duels erupted in the middle of 2025 the almost quarter-million Cambodian and Thai civilians who fled for their lives hastened a summit organised by Malaysia over a weekend.

When a smiling Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim eventually settled the conflict with vague promises and glowing news coverage it seemed the world breathed a sigh of relief. At the very least, the worst was averted for a time.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 149. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 138.

The Kinmen Islands is a small Taiwanese territory located a few miles off the coast of mainland China, in Xiamen Bay. The largest island is encircled by a sandy shoreline and studded by rocks. The island is 93 miles (150km) away from the Taiwan main island (formerly called Formosa), but being so close to the Fujian coast of mainland China it has historically been within range of communist artillery batteries and surveillance.

The close proximity of the Kinmen Islands to mainland China has placed it on the frontline of several conflicts between the People's Republic and the Republic of China, meaning it could be the target of any future Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

First attack on the Kinmen Islands

In 1949, Republic of China leader Chiang Kai-shek retreated his forces to the island of Formosa (the Chinese name Taiwan was rarely used at this time) after being forced to withdraw from the mainland by the communist offensive.

The defence of Formosa required a perimeter in the form of the offshore islands. Most precarious among these was the fishing community that inhabited Quemoy, or Kinmen.

Since 1948 the reeling Nationalists planned, albeit in haphazard fashion, on withdrawing from the mainland and to scatter their army's veteran divisions among China's coastal or offshore islands. By April the following year it was reported that nearly two million Nationalist soldiers and civilians had evacuated to Formosa.

When the new Communist rulers in Peking (Beijing) declared the People's Republic in October 1949, Mao Zedong was determined to quash every last vestige of the defeated Kuomintang (KMT).

With its ranks numbering in the millions, the People's Liberation Army had its orders and remained on the offensive. The Battle of Guningtou on Kinmen spanned the last weeks of October and was underway once communist troops had occupied Xiamen, the island barely 2.5 miles (4km) from Kinmen.

On 22 October it was believed at least two infantry divisions were prepared for a crossing. By the reckoning of the nationalists this force numbered at least 20,000 Communist soldiers. The amphibious operation was underway from 24 October unpredictable fighting lasted until 28 October.

Contrary to the myth of their limited skill at naval warfare, the Communists reached the shore unopposed and assaulted a spit of rock-strewn beach on the island's northern shore: this was Guningtou.

How the battle unfolded on the first day is poorly recorded, although it's known that the nationalists were caught by surprise and initially put up a feeble defence with just machine guns. The communists took appalling losses but, undeterred, moved inland on foot. The close-quarters fighting dragged on until the next day, when artillery from the Chinese coast hammered the defending KMT troops.

Less is known about the communist forces than the nationalists, who were led by trusted veterans of the KMT armed forces such as Chiang Wei-kuo, the adopted son of the dictator Chiang Kai-shek. As an officer in the Nationalist army who had trained in Germany and commanded a tank unit, he utilised what little armour could be mustered to scatter the Communists.

Another stalwart who joined the battle was no less than General Hu Lien, who had served the KMT since the 1930s and had arrived on the second day of hostilities. Communist troops had almost overrun the village of Guningtou and were halted by the timely appearance of Lien's 12th Brigade.

The balance of manpower between the communists and nationalists at Guningtou makes for a baffling assessment as both sides had troops to spare. What decided the outcome were tanks and bomber aircraft, neither of which the Communists could bring to the theatre.

In the case of the nationalists these were outdated American-made M5A1 Stuart tanks commanded by Chiang Wei-kuo. Even Wei-kuo's half brother, Chiang Ching-kuo, had a role in the fighting, although this was obscured for the sake of his political career. Having spent his formative years in the Soviet Union as a de facto hostage, he returned to China with a Russian wife and was given a suitable rank in the army.

To their credit the Chiang brothers had a profound influence preparing the offshore islands against fresh invasion attempts and the work continued after 1951 when American advisers were embedded with Nationalist units.

According to Taiwanese accounts the Battle of Guningtou lasted 56 hours. Both sides suffered appalling losses, with the communists coming off worse; their entire invasion force was decimated and some 10,000 stragglers surrendered.

The nationalists' remaining light bombers, flying in from airstrips 60 miles (100km) away, helped scatter the enemy and prevent their evacuation attempts.

For decades this attempted communist landing, memorialised by the KMT regime in Taiwan, was ignored by the Western press and only considered a smaller clash in the long struggle for Kinmen and the offshore islands.

When it was finally immortalised by Taiwan's press as a lasting victory against communism it served to bookend the defeat suffered in the mainland and raise a new 'origin story' for local heroism against invasion. It was a narrative that was acceptable for a Taiwanese citizenry fed with constant warnings about the mainland's designs on their way of life.

American intervention

During the 1950s the Taiwan Strait became the Cold War's deadliest flashpoint and a potential theatre for a nuclear showdown. Since 1949, when the Kuomintang (KMT) retreated to Formosa (Taiwan) and other offshore islands, the communists in Beijing slowly overwhelmed these garrisons. The greatest prize was the capture of sprawling Hainan in 1950 just months before one million Chinese troops, dubbed 'people's volunteers', attacked UN forces in Korea.

By 1951 President Harry S Truman's administration pivoted back to supporting the KMT after its abandonment in the late 1940s. The cherry on top was assigning the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet to sail its aircraft carriers across the strait separating the main island of Formosa from the Chinese coast, which effectively blocked any invasion attempt.

The Truman administration, then the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration later on, maintained a pro-KMT stance with the caveat that fighting would not embroil U.S. air and naval assets in Japan and the Philippines. But this is exactly what happened in the final months of 1954 when Beijing moved its forces from Korea to the coastal southern provinces.

The rationale from their perspective was clear: since 1949 KMT-backed 'guerrillas' – smuggling rings in the offshore islands such as Kinmen – had been blockading China's port cities. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) struck on 5 September with a bombardment of Formosa's island chain: the Kinmen and Matsu clusters. The Dachen, or Tachen Islands, located some 250 miles (400km) from the Taiwan coast, were pummelled into submission.

By January 1955 dozens of U.S. Navy ships organised as Task Force 502 evacuated 30,000 soldiers and civilians from the Dachens in the most brazen American intervention yet. The risk of a crossing by PLA divisions on boats panicked Taipei and the ageing Chiang Kai-shek wanted immediate American reinforcements.

A subtler approach prevailed. In a matter of weeks the superior air and naval resources of the U.S. military reinforced the Kinmen garrison with fresh artillery rounds for 6.1in (155mm) M1 Long Tom and M114 howitzers. A rare gift of the U.S. Army to their Formosan allies were divisional 8in (203mm) howitzers that had the range for hitting mainland China if they were positioned in concrete forts on the Matsus.

Over the years hundreds of U.S. advisers under the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) relocated to Taiwan. The risk to Americans embedded with KMT command staff meant there had to be strict guidelines on decision-making, so the Eisenhower administration wrung a promise from Chiang Kai-shek: there would be no attempts at a counter-invasion on the mainland in order to avoid starting World War III.

What became the First Taiwan Strait Crisis (1954-55) was portrayed by the global press as a high-risk skirmish that ebbed as a result of decisive American intervention. But neither Taipei or Beijing de-escalated in the ensuing years. Both sides grew their militaries, with the KMT fielding between 400,000 to 600,000 troops in its army, including airborne and marine units patterned after their American equivalents.

The remaining offshore islands, Kinmen and the tiny Matsu cluster, were reinforced with tunnel complexes and artillery. Constant surveillance and close calls with enemy aircraft were ever-present. A Mutual Defence Treaty and other obligations allowed the U.S. to deliver hundreds of brand new aircraft, including jets, to Taiwan's Republic of China Air Force.

By the summer of 1958 the intelligence from the Chinese coast set Taipei and Washington, D.C. on edge. The PLA was assessed to have collected almost 200,000 troops and hundreds of artillery pieces in Fujian for an upcoming operation. Its navy had grown by leaps and bounds with new gunboats armed with torpedoes.

Even more troubling was the rise of its air force, with 1,000 new Soviet fighters – the MiG-15 and MiG-17 – and the Ilyushin-28 medium-range bomber. Matters got out of hand once again on 23 August 1958 when coastal batteries hammered Kinmen with 40,000 shells inside 24 hours.

A shaken and injured Defence Minister Yu Ta-wei returned from Kinmen and met with the international press to make Taiwan's case: Beijing was ready to launch a full-scale assault. The 7th Fleet performed its usual mission reinforcing the islands while the ROC Air Force tangled with its rival on the mainland using air-to-air missiles. This time around the pinnacle of U.S. military technology was lavished on Taiwan.

The non-stop shelling of the Kinmen islands lasted 44 days, with the 7th Fleet taking pains to avoid getting within howitzer range as it escorted the resupply missions, while the sky buzzed with Taiwanese Saber jets. Aerial clashes with Chinese MiGs began at the start of August and lasted two months (the Cold War's first dog fights involving air-to-air missiles). The siege was lifted by October, but the circumstances remain debatable.

Did Beijing hesitate and order a cessation when its army began to run low on artillery shells? Or did the implied threat of nuclear attacks on Chinese airfields serve as enough warning from the Americans? After all, the deployment of Matador cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads on a Taiwanese air base was a poorly kept secret.

Other contingencies involved tactical nuclear warheads for 8in (203mm) howitzers and the arming the Honest John rockets destined for Taiwan with the same. The PLA continued raining artillery shells on the Kinmen islands. When President Eisenhower visited Taipei in June 1960 the PLA signalled its displeasure with 86,000 shells on Kinmen.

The pattern continued every week, albeit with fewer shells and on select days, for two decades. But the Eisenhower administration encapsulated the Taiwan Strait crises as separate campaigns of Chinese aggression.

The truth was more complicated as the two regimes that once fought a civil war on the mainland continued their struggle in the nuclear age with the world's most advanced technology. But the course of history, as always, took unexpected turns in the following decades.

By the 1960s the Chinese mastered nuclear weapons and secret diplomacy was carried out with the Americans in the years after. On 1 January 1979 the bombardment of the Kinmen islands stopped as Beijing and Washington, DC entered a new era of economic co-operation.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 112. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

"Throughout the 1970s, Italy was convulsed by a series of bomb attacks, political kidnappings and assassinations" carried out by left-wing terrorists, said Ian Thomson in the FT. Of the groups that operated during the anni di piombi ("years of lead"), the "most feared" was the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), which "combined a Marxist-Leninist utopianism with a murderous disregard for human life".

During its "18-year reign of terror", the group killed around 75 people and maimed hundreds. Its highest-profile victim was former prime minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped in March 1978 and whose bullet-riddled body was found 55 days later in the boot of a Renault 4.

Now John Foot, a professor of history at Bristol University, has written a "grimly absorbing" history of the brigatisti and their attempts to overthrow the Italian state. As his "superbly researched" book shows, the group subjected Italy to "some of the bloodiest acts of terrorism yet seen in an industrialised society" – all for nothing, as they never came close to realising their goals. Their story, Foot observes, amounted to a "national tragedy".

The Red Brigades was founded in 1970 by Renato Curcio, a student in Trento, his girlfriend (later wife) Margherita Cagol, and Alberto Franceschini, a communist from Reggio Emilia. "Its roots, however, lay much deeper," said Simon Gaul in Literary Review – in disquiet at America's influence over Italy, growing industrial unrest in the country's northern heartlands, and a belief that neo-fascists were plotting a military coup.

At first, the Red Brigades was backed financially by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the "increasingly activist publisher of 'The Leopard' and 'Doctor Zhivago'", said James Owen in The Times. But that source dried up in 1972, when Feltrinelli blew himself up while trying to detonate an electricity pylon outside Milan. Italy in the early 1970s had an "epidemic of kidnaps by organised crime groups", and the brigatisti jumped on this bandwagon, said Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. They first targeted industrialists or minor officials, but widened their net to include prominent politicians. And they upped the violence, adding kneecappings and executions to their repertoire ("Strike One to Educate 100" became their mantra).

Eventually, it became clear the group were "killing just because they could" – and as public support seeped away, they turned on each other, and finally disbanded in 1988. Based on exemplary scholarship, Foot's book provides a "fascinating insight" into these "moronic" fanatics.

Understanding the past "gives us perspective" on current events, said GQ. "And right now, we sorely need perspective." With "war raging in Europe" and Donald Trump causing chaos across the pond, it's worth spending some time discovering how we got here. These are some of the most insightful history books to add to your reading list.

Baltic: The Future of Europe by Oliver Moody

"Hands up all who know when Tsarist Russia took Finland from Sweden (1809) and when it partitioned Poland (1795)," said Edward Lucas in The Times. If you read Oliver Moody's "timely and insightful" book, you'll find out. The Times' Berlin correspondent describes the centuries-old power struggle for control of the Baltic region, what this means for the future of Europe and, crucially, "what we should do about it". In 1997 Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state said: "Europe is not safe unless the Baltic region is safe". This is a book which analyses, explains and galvanises, but does not reassure. For too long the West has ignored the lessons the Baltic has to offer. Time to learn.

Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr Crippen by Hallie Rubenhold

Many books explore the twisted history of one of Britain's most famous killers, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. But Rubenhold's primary focus is not the doctor himself – who, as it turns out, was more of a self-appointed homeopath. Instead, she puts Cora Crippen "back at the centre of the story", a woman brutally murdered by her husband "for no other reason than a man wanted her out of the way". Rubenhold "has form" when it comes to examining the cliches of historic crime; her last book explored the lives of Jack the Ripper's victims. With "Story of a Murder", Rubenhold works her magic once again, taking a woman repeatedly caricatured as a "silly, slatternly floozy" and producing, through rigorous research, the portrait of a real woman. It's about time someone set the record straight.

Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung by Fyodor Tertitskiy

Now is a good time to learn more about authoritarian rulers, said Victor Mallet in the Financial Times. And how better to start than with the "ultimate totalitarian leader of the postwar period": North Korea's Kim Il Sung. In this "comprehensive biography", South-Korea based Russian and North-Korean specialist Fyodor Tertitskiy explores how Kim gained power, kept it for himself, and "above all", how world leaders like Stalin and Mao helped him do it. Tertitskiy shies away from caricaturing Kim as a "man of pure evil" but he is certainly the "darkest figure in Korean history". "Given that the rewriting of history and spreading of lies for political ends is of grave concern today", one of the fascinating points of this biography is that it "demonstrates how Kim and his regime became masters of the art," slowly transforming national historical understanding into today's "Orwellian" falsehoods. "Kim Il Sung's pernicious legacy persists, and not just in North Korea."

1975: The Year the World Forgot by Dylan Jones

In 1975, "there was a lot going on in the world and artists were responding to it", said Alan Edwards in London's The Standard. Dylan Jones' book mingles "serious stuff with hefty doses of pop culture"; chapters jump from the Vietnam War to the importance of disco. Jones argues that 1975 is a forgotten year that was also a golden one for music. It is "certainly hard to find 12 months with a more eclectic and long-lasting collection of great songs", attested to by a playlist at the end of the book "for anyone wanting to see what all the fuss was about". Despite his obvious passion for David Bowie, Jones' analysis is wide-ranging. He revels in describing the ingenious way Island Records owner Chris Blackwell seized the contemporary mood to bring Bob Marley's revolutionary message to a wider audience. Likewise, he dives into the feminism and punk of Patti Smith's "bohemian credentials". Jones pulls all these cultural behemoths together "in a way only he can", with an "informative, thoughtful and gossipy" style. "Never has pop history been so elegantly told."

Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry

Even as a child, historian and writer Imani Perry recognised that blue "managed to be simultaneously one and many", said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. Her book, Perry assures us, is not an "exegesis on blue", but an attempt to uncover its mysteries and "its alchemy in the lives of Black folk". In a series of micro-essays she delves into a range of themes from the indigo prized by ancient dignitaries of the Benin to the blue candles burned during Haitian Voudou rituals and the violent racism of the "boys in blue". The breadth of her connections is vast, sometimes "dizzyingly so" and her reasons for such discursiveness aren't "entirely convincing". "But even if blue were a literary device, the book would not be spoiled." It is united by a mood – "just as valuable as an argument" – and a prose style both "musical and moving", which draws the reader through its "tumbling abundance" like a song.

Medicine River: a Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools by Mary Annette Pember

From the mid-19th century to the 1930s, thousands of Native American children were forced through hundreds of boarding schools set up by Christian organisations in North America. Their experiences are documented in this "searing" book by Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, whose own mother experienced the system, said Kelly Blewett in Book Page. She documents the abuse, rampant in such schools, and also experienced by her mother, including a "tale of a nun whose punishments were so cruel that her fall down a flight of stairs was cause for celebration". "All of this is tremendously personal," but Pember couches this individual story in the wider context of boarding schools as a tool of control in North America and, perhaps most importantly, "how we reckon with their existence today". She discusses the beginnings of Canadian reparations, the revival of cultural practices, and the unwillingness, even now, of Catholic institutions to make available documents which might help families learn what happened to their relatives. This "unforgettable read" shows that the road to recovery is long. But Pember remains "hopeful" that one day North America can get there.

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia by Sam Dalrymple

Contemporary accounts of the Indian partition seem to come out "every other year", said Abhrajyoti Chakraborty in The Observer. But Sam Dalrymple (son of historian William Dalrymple) manages to add something fresh by "incorporating the lesser-known tale of Burmese independence into the larger story of British India". His book "shines" when discussing shifting alliances between Indian and Burmese nationalists in the wartime years, following the life of Aung San, a young Burmese activist who escaped arrest in 1940 before returning to the country to lead an anti-British militia. An account of the Raj's western protectorates is also enlivened with a personal strain, this time in the form of accounts from Muhammad Ali Luqman, an Arab journalist in Aden, Yemen. The book tracks his journey from mild multiculturalist to believing South Asian residents should "quit our country". Dalrymple points out that "today most Brits seem convinced that immigration… started with the HMT Empire Windrush docking in London in 1948". His book puts paid to that theory.

The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780 by Rick Atkinson

"The upcoming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution will produce a great deal of jingoistic nonsense parading as history", said Amy S. Greenberg in The New York Times. Thank goodness for Rick Atkinson's "accomplished chronicle" of the middle years of the War of Independence. To restrict this book to the genre of "military history, or even American history, does it a disservice". Of course, he investigates the period's heavy-hitters: Washington's zenith as a commander, Benedict Arnold's defection to the British, and the despair of King George III, who cannot bring this "ruinously expensive conflict" to a close. However, his intimate portraits of lesser-known characters are "just as enjoyable", especially the chronicle of Baroness Frederika Riedesel, the wife of a Hessian commander, who travels to America with three young daughters. All of this creates a history so "compulsively readable" that its length (around 800 pages) is hardly noticeable. "This is great history."

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 40.

Following Israel's Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's first formal order was to announce the establishment of an official army for the new nation: the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Founded on 26 May, This organisation combined several military groups and militia, and went on to acquire a status of superiority to rank as one of the world's most effective fighting forces.

Membership of the IDF included not only armed personnel from Jewish military groups active during World War II, but also Europeans who had survived the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. From 1948, the IDF superseded all other Jewish armed forces.

At Israel's birth, the IDF played a key role in Israeli society. These forces were a direct outcome of the dissolution and assimilation of the previously active Jewish underground militias and the IDF was formed in a conservative effort to withstand the later threat of Arab armies.

The IDF became determined to give expression to Zionist values and to commit itself to the protection of Israel. Between 1949 and 1956, the IDF concentrated on developing itself into a modern army and air force. Tensions between the Arabs and Jews persisted and the divisions between the two groups are still ingrained into the contemporary fabric of Middle Eastern religious and political life.

Roots of the Israel Defence Forces

The transformation of a series of disorganised underground militias to the formation of a national defence corps was a complex and haphazard affair. Various activists had to be compelled into unification, and to accept the importance of forming a single state entity to defend Israel and its borders.

The newly created Israeli government recognised the need to absorb and consolidate the armed elements that had operated during the years of the Mandate, when there was administrative and political control imposed by the British. The IDF then came about after the dismantling of all other Jewish armed forces.

The unravelling of events prior to Ben-Gurion's first order indicates that the formation of the IDF pre-dated a military struggle, at the centre of which was the Haganah – a Zionist military organisation that sought to repel Arab forces in Palestine and to defend Jewish settlements. Underpinning what in its early days was a 'softer' approach, the Haganah emphasised an adherence to principles of 'self-restraint'.

While the Haganah itself operated before the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the origins of the IDF can be traced back more than 100 years. Modern Jewish settlements in Palestine were around in the 1870s and their safety depended on protection against bandits and thieves.

At the beginning of the 20th century, these settlers increasingly drew upon the services of vigilantes to protect their colonies, and established self-defence units. These, often found in the north of Israel, consisted of a motley collection of inexperienced and unprofessional men and women.

During World War I, the Zionist Movement lobbied the British government to mobilise three battalions of Jewish soldiers. These went on to be known as the Jewish Legion, which itself was followed by the introduction of other splinter groups such as the First Judean Battalion. The desire for autonomy, in order to deter external threats, culminated in the creation of the Haganah.

In the run-up to the formation of the Haganah, many Jews in the region had begun adopting an ideological commitment to counter the rise of anti-Semitism since the 1920s. Those Jews who joined the Haganah received training and were supportive of Zionist principles.

The military units that were to underscore the roots of the group could be distinguished by their knowledge of modern warfare and theories following attendance of an array of courses that were available, even though systematic and organised training programmes proved difficult to run.

The effective use of tuition was also limited, as personnel had to be in place all over Palestine and could not be detracted from their primary military role. Yet evidence of such training among the Haganah troops, albeit on a minor scale, is available as far back as the mid-1920s when, for example, 20 men attended a commanders' course in the woods on Mount Carmel, near to Haifa.

In 1941, similar programmes were still held: at Juara, for example, an isolated district near to Esdraelon where several future IDF chiefs of staff attended. Other training was sporadic yet often entailed intensive tutelage in sniping, reconnaissance and explosives. Such military education was not really tolerated by the British, but the Palestinian Jews ignored any unwanted criticism.

Jewish forces in World War II

The outbreak of World War II prompted the fragmented Jewish defence groups to bring about better organisational cohesion, though these changes were not as pronounced as was the case after 1945. Even so, during the war, Haganah reorganised and several fringe groups split into a number of self-defence forces.

At the outset, the British made it clear that it wanted Palestinian Jews to engage with them and to join in the fight within their existing armed forces. These Jews attached themselves to the Royal Air Force, Royal Navy and other recognised branches of the British military. There were even units composed solely of Palestinian Jews, and of Arabs and Jews, such as the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps which was quickly despatched to France in 1940.

It was during the summer of 1940 that the Haganah set about organising itself into an effective fighting force in readiness for any Axis threat that could scupper the plans of the Yishuv (the Palestinian Jews). The Axis forces were thereby added to the list of enemies who could thwart the wishes of those wanting the creation of a Jewish state.

In the absence of being able to impose a national taxation system, financing a defence force became a problem. Voluntary contributions were not adequate to fund the activities of the Haganah and associated paramilitary groups. To some extent the Kibbutz movement, an autonomous Jewish community, was not slow in coming forward to assist, and introduced a work programme to aid the troops.

During the course of World War II, 15 Jewish groups of Palestinian Jews joined the British and they became known as the Palestine Regiment. This in turn led to the creation of the Jewish Brigade. Ben-Gurion wanted to maximise the value of these volunteers and the British promised him a force based on the model of the WWI battalions.

The British were slow to act, but eventually conceded that the brigade could be formed and it was established on 3 July 1944. Ben-Gurion's desire to form the brigade was also a reaction against a White Paper issued by the British government in 1939, which almost put an end to Jewish hopes for their own state in Palestine.

The British wanted to remove the tension and dispel attention on the Middle East in order to focus as much as possible on the imminent European crisis. This entailed pacifying the Arab majority in Palestine and reducing the military intervention there, when troops and equipment were far more in need in Europe.

Even so, the Jewish Brigade provided military backup to the British in Iraq, Syria, Italy and North Africa, and from this diverse background, the Haganah elite companies came into existence.

The Jewish Brigade served in Europe until 1946, and after the war launched itself into securing the safe passage of European refugees and contributed to the Jewish self-defence movement.

Special care and aid by the brigade was also given to survivors of concentration camps and ghettos, so its role went beyond that of merely a military outfit. However, largely because of persistent conflict with the British, the brigade was disbanded. It later became what is recognised today as the 'foundation' of the IDF.

Resistance to British rule

In the wake of Allied victory , the Haganah numbered 30,000 active personnel. The backbone of this organisation was the Palmach, which consisted of 2,000 members. At the outset, Palmach was formed to act against the onslaught of a German invasion, should the British decide to evacuate Palestine.

Preparations were also put in place to stockpile arms and military equipment to use at a later stage in the conflict. The self-defence movement also busied itself by amassing additional arms and these were smuggled into Palestine in varying degrees of risk and uncertainty; in some cases, they were illegally bought or stolen from the British.

The Jews were able to seize vital armaments such as hand grenades, rifles and mortars. Occasionally British soldiers came across workshops organised by the Haganah and they would dismantle and destroy these facilities.

It is no surprise that after the end of World War II, the Haganah saw that its main threat was not wholly Arab forces, but rather the British Army. The British were hostile to the Haganah's primary aims and there followed an engagement between the two sides that was both aggressive and violent.

The British reaction was temporarily to define the actions of the Haganah as dangerous and 'illegal'. Where its members were found to be in possession of firearms without licence, they were arrested and sentenced to jail.

While there was some tolerance of the Haganah by the British, it was more the case that the British forces were not extensive enough to police the whole of Palestine. In some instances, the British turned a blind eye to some of the Haganah's activities.

The British position in Palestine was precarious by this time, and in places the Haganah was allowed a free rein to do as it pleased. The Haganah and the British engaged in a conflict designed by the latter to impose severe restrictions on immigration and to prevent constraints on the Jews, even though evidence was fast emerging of the trauma of thousands of potential immigrants who had escaped German concentration camps.

Records show how 100 members of the Palmach invaded a stronghold at Atlit, south of Haifa, and freed 200 illegal immigrants. Such actions resulted in the death of an occupant of a British police car. The Haganah had initially wanted a bloodless struggle and it was intent on minimising the number of deaths of both British and Arab forces.

To fulfil this aim, it confined itself to damaging and sabotaging Palestine's railway network. The softer approach to attacking Arabs and the British may partly explain the label of 'semi-legal' in the Haganah's moves to effect resistance.

How the IDF was founded

The IDF's origins were based on the inclusion of men and women who had served in the Haganah and the Palmach, and these, along with other underground manpower and survivors of World War II, collectively formed the sole legal armed force in Israel.

The theme of combining both Arab and Jewish groups was later extended to the IDF after Christian and Muslim Arabs joined. The IDF assimilated these elements without compromising the Zionist standpoint of the army in any significant way. As well as those from the Haganah and Palmach, the military group referred to as Irgun was absorbed into the IDF, and another militia known as the Stern Gang.

In the months following the end of World War II, these military factions made plans to effectively co-ordinate, and the distinctive co-operation between Irgun and the Stern Gang led some to believe that these militias had joined forces at a time pre-dating the official launch of the IDF.

Both paramilitary organisations were determined to evict the British from Palestine and to form a Jewish state. From 1946 to 1947, there was a proliferation of incidents involving these paramilitary forces.

The British drew upon every aspect of their experience of colonial rule to maintain law and order, but they could not break the strong determination of the Palestinian Jews to work towards the founding of an independent Jewish state.

The British Army was criticised for the rough treatment of those who had escaped the Holocaust, some of whom were killed in their attempts to fight for independence.

Impeded by a British military interventionist presence, the Jewish underground groupings were limited in their ability to demonstrate professional competence. Yet collectively, the Haganah, Irgun and the Stern Gang attacked Arab settlements and exercised considerable violence in the town of Jaffa, villages in Galilee and northern parts of Palestine.

1948: The Battle for Jerusalem

From January 1948, Jerusalem, due to the military resistance of the Arabs, became virtually cut off from the rest of Palestine. Access to the city was only possible by the use of convoys of trucks, whose safety was put into jeopardy by opposition from Arab troops who blockaded the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Any progress to reach Jerusalem was only really feasible by the intervention of Palmach, whose members escorted the trucks in their dangerous mission to supply food and provisions to the city. As the convoys proceeded to climb the hills of Judea, the Jews were subjected to hostile Arabs armed with rifles who had constructed road blocks in readiness to resist the advancing vehicles laden with supplies.

Palestinian Arabs ambushed the convoys in actions that became more regular and 'sophisticated'. The Haganah received orders to launch Operation Nachshon to clear the way for the convoys to pass along the last few miles before reaching Jerusalem.

Fierce fighting between Jews and Arabs took place. After the British pulled out of Palestine, the two sides were left to fight each other and the battle for Jerusalem continued. By February 1948, Jerusalem was still locked in battle, and the Arab strongholds in the surrounding hills still posed a major threat to the convoys that tried to break through.

The British accompanied some of the trucks en route, but this support dwindled when the Haganah made it clear that it wanted to take full responsibility for its own security. Soon a secret passage was secured, providing a safe opening for the delivery of ample supplies.

By July 1948, 8,000 trucks reached Jerusalem, putting an end to fears that the Jews there would perish through starvation. A truce ensued, and the Haganah claimed victory, but it was not fully achieved owing to the sharing of Jerusalem between both Jews and Arabs.

Meanwhile, preparatory moves were taking place to dismantle the Stern Gang and Irgun (all Irgun members merged with Haganah and the Stern Group, apart from those based in Jerusalem) and to place their activist members to constitute a national force in the form of the IDF; this objective was realised by 31 May 1948.

The Stern Gang's leadership in the wake of integration received amnesty from prosecution in respect of its record of rebellion and conflict. As to Irgun members, they became integrated into the IDF at the beginnings of the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, and the process of absorbing all military organisations into the IDF was well underway at this time.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 40. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 138.

From the earliest days of the Cold War, both the US and the USSR had nuclear weapons, but only one means of delivering a strike – long-range, strategic bombers. As the conflict wore on, technological advances changed that, and soon the two sides were capable of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

"The phrase was first coined by the US Secretary of State Robert McNamara in the early 1960s," historian and author Roger Hermiston told History of War. "In 1953 the respective nuclear weapon stockpiles of the three countries were USA: 1,169; Soviet Union: 120; and the United Kingdom: one."

Throughout the 1950s, both superpowers began developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) armed with nuclear warheads which they stored underground in protective silos. In some cases, these missiles had several warheads and were known as Multiple Independent Re-Entrant Vehicles (MIRVs).

In addition, both sides also developed Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBM) that were harder to track and target because they operated beneath the oceans' surface. Between them, the bombers, ICBMs, and SLBMs formed what came to be known as the nuclear triad, a joined-up, combined-forces land, sea and air strategy that mirrored the approach to conventional warfare.

The difference, however, was that this was not a strategy designed to win a war, it was designed to prevent one.

What is the concept of MAD?

The idea of a military deterrent can be traced back to Roman times but it wasn't until the Cold War that nuclear weapons unleashed the real potential of this idea.

At its heart, it had always proposed that the threat of an overwhelming military response could be used as a psychological weapon to dissuade an enemy from attacking. As the Cold War progressed and both sides acquired vast arsenals of nuclear weapons, this concept gained more and more credence.

By the mid-1965, the combined US-USSR stockpile of nuclear weapons had grown from 3,000 in 1955 to 37,000. Enough to annihilate their respective populations and eradicate their civilisations several times over.

Rather than call a halt to the production of nuclear weapons the arms race continued unabated amid a doctrine that was named Mutually Assured Destruction. This effectively terrorised each side into keeping the peace, knowing that an act of aggression would ultimately be a suicidal one.

The seismic shifts in technology and the evolving geo-political landscape helped to define what MAD looked like. This resulted in the development of two distinct lines of strategic thinking.

One argued for what was called a 'flexible response' and spoke of the need for nonmilitary and non-nuclear options to be considered in the event of an attack. The other highlighted the need for what was known as a 'second strike capability' and made the case for having the means to respond to a nuclear attack with a retaliatory attack of similar or greater magnitude.

Operation Chrome Dome

By the early 1960s, US intelligence was claiming, wrongly as it turned out, that the Soviets had enough ICBMs to wipe out all of the US' retaliatory capability before a second strike could be launched. In keeping with the logic that had given the world MAD, the US military came up with a solution to this perceived 'missile gap' as it was called.

Operation Chrome Dome was a United States Air Force (USAF) mission that lasted from 1961 to 1968. It saw a never-ending convoy of B-52 bombers armed with nuclear warheads fly in constant rotation just outside Soviet airspace, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

At any given time, there were up to 50 fully armed B-52s in the air, guaranteeing a second strike capability even if a Soviet attack destroyed all of the US' airfields and missile sites.

Sorties typically lasted 24 hours, with planes being refuelled in mid-air, and often took the bombers, and their bombs, over large tracts of the US, Canada and Greenland. With so many sorties being flown, accidents were inevitable.

In total, there were five crashes involving thermonuclear devices including the infamous Goldsboro crash in 1961. The operation was eventually closed down in 1968 after a B-52 crashed into sea ice in North Star Bay, Greenland. The nuclear payload ruptured in the subsequent explosion causing radioactive contamination of the entire area.

Does Mutually Assured Destruction still exist?

Despite several international treaties that sought to curtail the proliferation of nuclear weapons, there were an estimated 70,000 in existence by the time the Cold War ended in 1991.

Today, that number has dropped to around 12,000, although ownership of them has spread. In addition to the US and Russia, the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea all have nuclear weapons. Because of that, deterrence still plays a vital part in global security and international relations.

Its role, however, has become far more complex, as each of those countries has its own set of deterrent relationships with those nations it views as adversaries.

There are also many other countries, such as Japan, South Korea, and the growing list of NATO states, that are closely allied to the US and therefore enjoy what's called extended deterrence status. In other words, their security is underwritten by the US nuclear capability.

The US is the only nuclear power to do this, leveraging its nuclear arsenal both militarily and diplomatically to extend and maintain its global dominance.

On the cusp of World War Three: Q&A with Roger Hermiston

Roger Hermiston is an historian, journalist and author of several books including Two Minutes To Midnight 1953, The Year of Living Dangerously The following interview originally appeared in History of War issue 106 (published March 2022).

What nuclear capabilities did the West and the USSR respectively reach in 1953 that made that year so significant?
It was the year when the world moved a dangerous step forward from the atom bomb to the new terrifying 'superbomb' – a thermonuclear explosive, based on hydrogen fusion, up to a thousand times more destructive than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Americans had produced their prototype H-bomb – codenamed Ivy Mike – in November 1952; now the Russians successfully tested their own, codenamed Joe-4, in August 1953. As a result the Doomsday Clock, that measurement of how close the world is to Armageddon, was moved to two minutes to midnight (the closest it had been in seven years of Cold War).

How much did both the White House and the Kremlin know about the other's nuclear capabilities at this time?
Not a huge amount – nowhere remotely what they know today. The Soviets had been well-informed about the American atom bomb by their Western agents, especially Klaus Fuchs, but by 1953 nearly all of them had been uncovered and arrested.

As for the West, when the Iron Curtain came down in 1947 it made it very difficult for their spies to penetrate the Kremlin. It was certainly a surprise to President Dwight Eisenhower's administration when Georgy Malenkov, the new Russian leader, announced to the Supreme Soviet that his country now had the H-bomb.

When were safeguards put in place between Moscow and Washington to prevent any accidental escalation or nuclear strike?
After the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 President JF Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev set up a 'hotline', providing direct communication between the White House and the Kremlin.

In future years additional safeguards were put in place, including the 1971 Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Risk of Outbreak of Nuclear War and the 1972 Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents at Sea.

How did these safeguards developed during the Cold War and to what extent do they still exist?
Broad safeguards – through reducing the amount of nuclear weapons in circulation – developed through treaties like the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) in 1991, and the Strategic Offensive Reduction treaty (SORT) in 2002.

Interestingly, on 3 January 2022 the five big nuclear powers – United States, China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom – signed a joint statement committing themselves to 'Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races'.

You write that President Eisenhower considered a preliminary strike during the Korean War. Do we know if he had any specific plans to carry this out?
The idea of using tactical A-bombs on the battlefield to end the Korean War was discussed in seven National Security Council meetings between February and March. It never came too close to fruition, but John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, wanted to remove the 'taboo' on the nuclear weapon and view it as simply another weapon in his nation's armoury.

Then, after the Soviets successfully tested their H-bomb in August 1953, Eisenhower, thinking about possible nuclear conflict, pondered "whether or not our duty to future generations did not require us to initiate war at the most propitious moment that we could designate".

Are there any parallels with today's rhetoric regarding nuclear arsenals?
In 1953 the most worrying moments came after the death of Stalin, with the Korean War still raging. There was optimism that we might enter a new era of 'détente' with the Soviets, but the problem was no-one really knew what his successors in the Kremlin were thinking.

Two weeks after Stalin's funeral, the shooting down of a British Lincoln bomber by a Soviet MiG fighter – killing all six crew – was a dangerous flashpoint. Today mutually assured destruction is entrenched and acknowledged, so Vladimir Putin's disturbing rhetoric will remain just that – rhetoric. By attacking the West with nuclear weapons he would invite the destruction of his own country.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issues 106 and 138. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price.

No matter how many books and TV documentaries are made appearing to give a definite account of life in ancient civilizations, the ongoing work of historians and archaeologists means that the story of the past is never finished. There are always new discoveries being made – here are seven of the most surprising.

Sunscreen's role in human history

A form of ancient sunscreen could have helped Homo sapiens survive a period of intense environmental stress that killed off the Neanderthals, scientists have suggested.

The two species existed alongside each other for millennia until about 40,000 years ago, when Neanderthals disappeared. The reason for their demise is not entirely clear, but one factor may have been the shift of the Earth's magnetic poles that occurred around that time. Known as Laschamps excursion, this phenomenon lasted 1,000 years and weakened Earth's magnetic field to about 10% of its current strength, leading to a massive increase in solar radiation.

Researchers in Michigan have found evidence that Homo sapiens developed what may have been protective strategies: they took shelter in caves and ramped up their extraction of the pigment ochre, perhaps because they were using it to paint their bodies. Needles and awls unearthed at Stone Age sites also indicate the use of tailored clothes – which would have kept them warmer too, enabling them to travel further for food. But there is little evidence that the Neanderthals adapted in such ways. Solar radiation can damage sight and lead to birth defects and infant deaths – so protection from it would "have conferred significant advantage", said Raven Garvey, who co-authored the study.

Vesuvius eruption "turned a brain to glass"

The eruption of Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago buried Herculaneum and Pompeii under a thick layer of ash, which preserved everything from its residents to the frescoes in their villas. Numerous bodies have been excavated, but one is more unusual than most: that of a young man who was found lying in his bed – and whose brain appeared to have been turned to glass. When this was observed in 2020, such a phenomenon had never been seen before, and scientists were baffled as to how it could have occurred. Now a team have come up with a possible explanation.

For glass to have formed, the tissue would have had to have heated very rapidly until it liquefied, then cooled fast enough to prevent crystals forming as it solidified. Analysis of fragments of the man's brain has shown that it was heated to 510C, before fast-cooling. The pyroclastic flows from the volcano did not get that hot; nor would they have allowed for rapid cooling. However, the ash cloud that swept through the town first would have been far hotter. This heat, says the study, could have evaporated the water in the man's brain, causing it to explode into tiny pieces. The cloud would then have rapidly cleared, allowing the fragments to cool and vitrify.

The gruesome death of a gladiator

We think of gladiators being made to fight tigers, lions or bears as a staple of the Roman circus. But though the Romans wrote about such spectacles and depicted them in frescos and mosaics, there has never been any direct physical evidence for their existence – until now. Archaeologists have analysed wounds on the hip bone of a gladiator who died in England in the 3rd century AD, and concluded that their shape is "consistent" with the bite marks of large cats, with lions being the closest fit.

The skeleton was one of dozens unearthed 20 years ago in a cemetery in York. Most belonged to well-built young men, and had been decapitated; their bones bore marks of injuries inflicted by blades; one had been shackled; and DNA tests indicated that they came from all over the Roman empire. All of which led the team to conclude that they were gladiators. The researchers do not think that this gladiator was killed by the lion bite, however, but that he'd been injured already and was dragged off at the point of death – which "must have been absolutely terrifying", said Tim Thompson, one of the study's authors. Given the difficulty of transporting big cats, the find also underlines the importance of York in the Roman world.

Hunter-gatherers travelled by sea

Archaeologists have been startled to find evidence that humans lived on Malta some 8,500 years ago. The findings, published in Nature, mean that the seafaring abilities of hunter-gatherers must be rethought. Previously, it was assumed that journeys of such length across the Mediterranean only started following the invention of boats with sails.

The archaeologists, from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, believe that they arrived in dug-out canoes, having undertaken a journey in open water of at least 100km, some of which (given the limited speed of such vessels) must have been in darkness.

The island is so small and isolated, the presumption had been that it could not have sustained a population that wasn't growing its own food. But carbon dating of charcoal, found in hearths outside a cave complex in the north of the island, indicates that hunter-gatherers were there a millennium before farming became widespread. Other evidence at the site shows that these ancient people hunted meat, in the form of deer, birds and seals; they also cooked sea urchins, crab and fish.

Ancient Romans suffered from lead pollution

The Romans came into so much contact with lead – via everything from their paints to their coins, water pipes and drinking vessels – that historians have long speculated that lead poisoning could have hastened the fall of their empire. Now, a study has shown that there were also high levels of lead in the air they breathed – enough, in fact, to have affected brain development.

Romans' mining of lead and their smelting of lead ore to obtain silver would have released vast amounts of lead into the atmosphere. To gauge the scale of this, a team in the US analysed residues trapped in ice that formed between 500BC and AD600. Their findings indicate that levels of the neurotoxin in the air increased sharply in around 15BC, and remained high for two centuries. They then used atmospheric models to map the pollutants' spread, and modern health studies to assess its impact.

Their results showed that, at its peak, the lead pollution across Europe (believed to be the first widespread industrial pollution) was severe enough to cause a two-to three-point drop in IQ. That might not sound much, but, "when you apply [it] to essentially the entire European population, it's kind of a big deal", said co-author Nathan Chellman.

We sleep more than our ancestors

In our "always on" world, there is a feeling that no one is getting enough sleep; and that the time we spend staring at screens is preventing us from sleeping well. Yet according to recent research, we get more – and better – sleep than our ancestors in pre-industrial times are likely to have done.

For a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists in Canada analysed data on the sleep patterns of 866 people in 54 sleep studies from around the world – from the residents of big cities to the members of hunter-gatherer tribes. They found that the participants living in industrial societies slept more, clocking up an average of 7.1 hours a night compared with just 6.4 in the less industrial societies.

And they also found there had been no significant decline in sleep in Westernised places over the past half-century. The study also revealed that people in these societies tend to get more efficient sleep – meaning they are asleep for more of the time they spend in bed (88% compared with 74%). The researchers suggest modern living conditions are simply more conducive to restful sleep: "We don't have to fend with rival human groups at night or predators," said David Samson.

But if that is the case, why then do so many people in the West seem to wake up feeling exhausted? This may be due to the study's other main finding, which is that people living in industrialised countries have a less regular circadian rhythm: their sleep patterns don't match the natural cycles of light and dark.

Iron Age women had real power

When the Romans invaded Britain, they found the natives strange, says The Times. Their warriors painted themselves blue; and they had moustaches – a concept so foreign to Romans, they had no name for it. Perhaps worst of all, Roman scribes recorded that Celtic rebellions against Roman rule were often led by women. This would have seemed outlandish in Rome, where women were legally owned by their fathers and their husbands, and had no role at all in public life.

But while the existence of female warriors such as Boudicca is not in doubt, historians have long distrusted these accounts, suspecting the extent of female power and influence was overstated, to make Celtic societies seem completely barbaric. Now, however, archaeologists at Trinity College Dublin and Bournemouth University have backed up the scribes' observations.

The research was based on the remains of 57 people unearthed at an Iron Age cemetery in Dorset. By tracing mitochondrial DNA (which is only passed on by women), the team established that most of the female members of this community were related and all descended from a single woman; by contrast, there was considerable diversity in the male Y chromosomes, suggesting that the men came from lots of different families.

This, the study says, indicates that men moved into their wives' community on marriage – a pattern known as matrilocality – perhaps because land and wealth passed down through the female line. The grave goods found back up this theory: the higher status items tended to have been buried with women.

For much of human history, said Erica Wagner in the FT, friendship has been regarded as a male preserve. "Perfect friendship," Aristotle wrote, "is the friendship of men who are good and alike in virtue." For the 17th century poet Margaret Cavendish, women's brains were "simply too weak" to support the "complex bonds" of friendship. In this "thought-provoking, open-hearted" cultural history, Tiffany Watt Smith explores how this situation has changed.

Nowadays, while men are castigated for their lack of emotional articulacy, female friendship is a "kind of cultural ideal". And by the late 20th century, being likeable and popular had become part of the conventional feminine paradigm, said Eleanor Halls in The Daily Telegraph. With this came various tropes: the "girl crush", the "popular" girl (a staple of 1990s romcoms), and the "bad friend", who "eschews sisterhood to pursue her individual ambition". All this, Watt Smith suggests, has created unrealistic expectations – meaning female friendship is "more fraught than ever".

Watt Smith fleshes out her "deeply researched" account with descriptions of how she fell out with her best friend Sofia, said Kitty Drake in The Guardian. The cause, she admits, was largely her own jealousy at feeling "left behind" when Sofia started a family. But she also blames the societal expectation that female friendship should be "frictionless": this, she says, often drives women to abandon a friendship when "they feel jealous or hurt".

"Bad Friend" is a "knotty" and rather "poorly organised" book, but its "moral is a good one", said Ceci Browning in The Times. Watt Smith advises us to ditch the "grand fantasy", to stop proclaiming our friends either "amazing" or "terrible". With friendship, she wisely concludes: "The flawed experiment teaches us more."

Available at The Week Bookshop

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 112.

The standoff across the Taiwan Strait began during the Chinese Civil War, which pitted the fledgling Communists and the ruling Nationalist government. Originating in 1927, the civil war stretched into the Second World War, when the two sides upheld a shaky alliance against Japan.

By December 1945 the Japanese army had been driven from the mainland and Mao Zedong's generals were able to capture Manchuria. In the city of Chungking, American envoy General George C Marshall arranged a truce between the Nationalists and Communists. By 1946, however, the Communists went on the offensive.

Armed to the teeth and with full Soviet backing, in early 1949 the old imperial capital Peking was theirs. Seeing his own generals bogged down south of the Yangtze River, the Nationalist leader and US ally Chiang Kai-shek decided to withdraw and relocate the government on the island of Formosa (Taiwan), which Japan had colonized from 1895 until 1945 and was nominally controlled by the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The Taiwan Strait formed the maritime border between the Republic of China (ROC) and People's Republic of China (PRC), which remains today.

The ROC in its new home on Taiwan endured decades of martial law, with Kai-shek as lifelong dictator. Within a year after their victory on the mainland in October 1949 the Communists received even more aid from the Soviets and expanded the borders of the PRC to Central Asia and Tibet.

On October 19, 1950 a massive PRC volunteer army fought American and United Nations troops in the Korean peninsula until the ceasefire in Panmunjom on July 27, 1953. Chairman Mao Zedong, with total faith in the strength of his military, vowed to someday conquer the Nationalists in Taiwan.

1954-1955: The First Taiwan Strait Crisis

Throughout the 1950s the Soviet Union supported the PRC by helping it industrialise and establish a centrally planned economy. The Korean War saw the relationship reach literal new heights as the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) became the largest and best-equipped in Asia thanks to hundreds of Soviet-made MiG-15 fighter jets and Il-28 light bombers.

After the end of the war, which killed an estimated one million Chinese troops, Zedong dreamt of turning the PRC into a superpower. But achieving this meant better technology was needed from the Soviets – especially submarines and nuclear weapons – and defeating his longtime foe, Kai-shek, who ruled over Taiwan.

What became the First Taiwan Strait Crisis, in 1954, was a heavy bombardment of the Quemoy (Kinmen) and Matsu islands groups. These small outposts off the coast of Fujian Province were located mere kilometers from where the PRC's People's Liberation Army (PLA) massed their troops. Since 1949 both Peking and Taipei (the seat of government in Taiwan) insisted their "final conquests" would be carried out, eventually. But this was propaganda for reassuring their respective citizens of their governments' effectiveness.

Using the pretext of Washington DC's plans for a Mutual Defense Treaty with Taipei in 1954, the PLA showed off the firepower it had received from the Soviets. The army's 122mm, 130mm and 152mm howitzers almost covered every inch of the Quemoy and Matsu islands and the latter endured a severe bombardment on September 3, 1954.

But what Mao and his inner circle could not tolerate was American resolve to defend its beleaguered ally. US Navy carrier battle groups sailed the Taiwan Strait during the drawn out confrontation. US forces avoided clashes with the PLA but the presence of the Seventh Fleet's aircraft carriers alone was a strong signal to the Chinese: attack Taiwan at your own risk.

The siege of Quemoy subsided after bilateral talks between Zedong and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who replaced the late Joseph Stalin as leader of the Soviet Union in October. Historians who revisit the First Taiwan Strait Crisis still speculate whether Zedong wanted a test of the US commitment to defending Taiwan and whether nuclear threats against China would materialise.

This was a reckless move since President Dwight D Eisenhower's own generals advised using tactical nuclear weapons against mainland China if it carried out an invasion.

1958: The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis

The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, in 1958, was more dangerous than its predecessor. As before, the PLA attacked Quemoy and Matsu with artillery, on August 23, 1958. But the garrisons on the islands had been reinforced with American-supplied 155mm and 203mm artillery along with ample rounds to spare.

Once again, the US Navy's carriers secured the strait and the Chinese navy had no means to deter them using their own gunboats. Sailing a flotilla across the 200km of open sea between Fujian and Taiwan's western coast was a risky proposition too. If the PLA gathered approximately 200,000 troops for an invasion they would need junks and barges to transport them, with inadequate air cover.

But soon enough the Communists and Nationalists were in direct combat as their respective air forces, now operating fighter jets, tangled in the skies above the Chinese coast. By 1958 the PLAAF counted a thousand MiG-15s in its arsenal. These agile Soviet-built fighters had proven themselves over the Korean peninsula and packed twin large-calibre guns.

The Republic of China Air Force, on the other hand, received superior F-86 Sabre that had also flown in Korea. The US supplied Taiwan with more than 300 of them, along with fighter-bombers and helicopters, as a maximal guarantee against Chinese aggression.

With a better designed cockpit and superior avionics the F-86 Sabre, unlike the MiGs, carried new air-to-air missiles. In a series of dog fights the Taiwanese pilots showed their mettle and trounced the PLAAF. Although the PLA drew down its forces by early September, the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis did not end in a formal sense.

The siege of Quemoy and Matsu continued for the next 20 years, though never intense enough to draw the US Navy's presence, and the sound of Chinese artillery rumbled over the sea on a regular basis. The Taiwanese garrison on the islands adapted to the situation by using their closeness with the mainland as a launching point for propaganda.

1964: China gets the bomb 

On October 17, 1964, an atomic bomb was detonated at Lop Nur, a remote testing site in the Gobi Desert, and heralded China's status as a nuclear power. The fact the detonation took place just four years after a near-total breakdown in diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union was not a coincidence.

The underlying causes of the Sino-Soviet Split in 1960 were the emerging polarities within the Communist Bloc – the Soviet Union had its chosen allies and satellites while China was steadfast in cultivating its own friends and proxies. Until the 1970s Peking had an active foreign policy to arm and train revolutionaries in the Third World.

It is well-known how the Soviets nursed China's fledgling nuclear programme in the 1950s, which blossomed in the years between the First and Second crises with Taiwan, and this was supposed to culminate in a viable nuclear triad for Peking: land-based intercontinental missiles matched with warheads delivered by air and sea.

After the breakthrough at Lop Nur further tests were carried out until 1967; however, the detonation of a hydrogen bomb not only revealed the extent of Communist China's technical know-how but also its limitations.

On a strategic level, having nuclear warheads on a few dozen Long March rockets ended the threat of nuclear blackmail by the US, but China could barely afford a nuclear arsenal as devastating and elaborate as those of the main Cold War adversaries.

Meanwhile, Taipei did not take the news sitting down. Many Asian countries at the time were either discussing or setting up clandestine nuclear weapons programmes, with varying levels of success.

Both India and Pakistan, for example, had thriving nuclear weapons programmes in the 1970s but did not actually deploy these until 1998. North and South Korea had nuclear weapons programmes as well. In Taiwan's case, a civilian nuclear energy programme was started as early as 1956, with US assistance.

By the 1970s there was growing evidence collected by the State Department of a Taiwanese enrichment programme for weapons-grade uranium as well as efforts to assemble a prototype bomb. Finally, in 1988, the CIA plant and defector Colonel Chien Hsiun-yi fled to the United States and exposed the Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology's secret research programme, which was later stopped under American pressure.

1976: Death of Chairman Mao 

When China's dictator passed away from old age on September 9, 1976, the regime he left behind was reeling from the Cultural Revolution in which many senior cadres were purged, and sometimes killed.

The tense rivalry with the Soviet Union coupled with international isolation left China impoverished, despite its large industrial base. A silver lining amid this uncertainty was the improved relationship with the United States that began under President Richard Nixon. By 1978 full diplomatic relations were established between Peking and Washington DC, and the United Nations formally welcomed the PRC while invalidating the ROC's own membership.

Taiwan's importance and diplomatic standing in the world suffered as a result. The Taiwan Relations Act passed by US lawmakers in 1979 did little to mitigate the damage, although it had provisions for assisting the country with self-defense.

The thaw in the US-China relationship was barely felt in the Taiwan Strait, where the ROC Navy kept zealous guard of the open waters – more importantly, the Median Line dividing the strait – and up to 30,000 troops were stationed in Quemoy and Matsu. Although there was now renewed hope that peaceful coexistence would prevail during the 1980s, as many as five million soldiers were enlisted in China's armed forces, the majority of them in the army.

The PLAAF had 4,000 combat aircraft, most of them outdated J-6 and J-7 fighters, while China's three naval fleets totaled 2,000 ships and as many as 200 diesel submarines. Yet these numbers had no practical use under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, whose long tenure until 1993 was focused on opening up China to grow its economy.

The US military intelligence assessed that Peking (later renamed Beijing) had neither the means nor the will for an invasion as economic growth became the national priority. This proved correct – until the situation in the strait almost spiralled out of control again.

1995: The Third Strait Crisis

By the 1990s, Taiwan had developed into a prosperous democracy, and optimism for a peaceful unification flourished, until Beijing decided on a show of force. From 1992 the ruling Kuomintang party, which had governed Taiwan since 1949, reached an agreement with its rival on the mainland.

This 'consensus' was to promote the idea that a single Chinese nation existed with separate political systems. Or, in the official wording of Beijing, to accept only one Chinese nation existed and to work for peaceful reunification. But in the summer of 1995 all this progress was thrown out of the window and East Asia returned to the brink.

When Taiwan's President Lee Teng-hui wanted to visit his alma mater Cornell University in the United States this was poorly received by the Chinese government.

In their view the US was recognizing a different Chinese head of state by allowing President Lee to make the trip. When he arrived in the US amid wall-to-wall media coverage the response from Beijing was furious. While no outlying Taiwanese islands came under direct attack, Beijing sent its air force and its navy on month-long drills.

To further intimidate Taipei, the PLA Rocket Force tested its latest ballistic missiles. These were carried by wheeled transporters and could be prepared for launch within minutes. The destabilizing effect of these missiles had been established earlier in the Middle East and the same technology was flourishing in the Asia-Pacific.

In a shift from its softer stance on China since the 1970s, the US Navy sent two carrier strike groups to the Taiwan Strait as a clear signal China's behavior would not be tolerated. It seemed to work as Beijing kept its forces from attacking Taiwan, although over the next 25 years China and the US were drawn into serious 'great power competition'.

2020: America sends arms

In late 2020 the US government, through the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, announced it was prepared to sell 11 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers to Taiwan along with the powerful Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) ballistic missile, which has a range exceeding 500km. The HIMARS is an air-transportable truck with an armored cab and a pivoting launcher that contains a pod of six rockets.

The rockets can be swapped for a single ATACMS missile that can carry either sub-munitions spread in mid-air over a target area or a powerful unitary warhead. The ATACMS in particular is a weapon system the Taiwanese military has never fielded before, although it possesses mobile rocket launchers such as the RT2000.

The value of deploying HIMARS launchers is in long-range artillery coverage beyond the usual 20 to 25km range of most 155mm howitzers. The announcement of the ATACMS sale followed an earlier decision to sell shore-based Harpoon missiles to help the Taiwanese military fend off either an amphibious attack or a blockade.

Other US arms sales included 66 F-16V multirole fighters for the Taiwanese Air Force, whose F-CK-1s and older F-16A/Bs lagged behind China's newest fighter jets. This renewed effort to equip Taiwan for defending itself against invasion came as the likelihood of such an attack increased as Chinese military aircraft repeatedly encroached on Taiwan's air defence identification zone.

This was meant as retaliation for President Tsai Ing-wen's refusal to acknowledge the 1992 consensus of "one country, two systems" that Beijing values. Her defiance of Beijing stems from her background with the Democratic Progressive Party rather than the 'old guard' Kuomintang that had long buried the hatchet with the Chinese Communist Party.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 112. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!

This article and interview originally appeared in All About History magazine issue 96. "The Sword And The Shield" by Dr Peniel E Joseph is available from Basic Books.

They didn't hold high public office, they didn't fight wars and they didn't possess vast wealth and riches. Yet, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X still managed to become two of the most iconic figures of the 20th century.

Rising to prominence at the height of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, each became equally revered and reviled by different parts of the United States.

Both would ultimately come to be the de facto leader of their groups and each would meet an untimely and violent end at the hands of assailants whose identities and motives continue to be hotly debated.

In Dr King's role as first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Malcolm X's position as a minister and leading national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam (NOI), these two men often appeared to offer two conflicting arguments and approaches to the challenge of achieving racial justice and equality in America.

What's more, each existed in the public eye to a far greater and wider extent than any of their contemporaries fighting for African American rights and representation, and as a result each has developed their own legend.

To discover more about the lives of these two men, as well as what linked or divided them All About History magazine spoke with Dr Peniel E Joseph, an author, scholar and public speaker who holds a joint professorship at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin.

"The mythology around both men frames them as opposites," he explains. "It frames Malcolm as Dr King's evil twin. It frames Dr King as this saint who would just give everybody a hug if he was alive right now and that really takes away from understanding the depth and breadth of their political power, their political radicalism and their evolution over time."

Early years of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr

First let's consider where each man came from and how that might have informed his world view.

"Martin Luther King Jr is raised in an upper-middle class, elite household in Atlanta, Georgia," Joseph tells us. "His father is a preacher, his mother is present in his life and it's a very comfortable upbringing. Malcolm X is raised in Omaha and in Lansing, Michigan on farms, so he's a country boy.

"His father is murdered by white supremacists when he's six years old and his mother is put in a psychiatric facility, so he's a foster child by the time he's in elementary school.

"Then he becomes a hustler in Boston and Harlem as a teenager and he's finally arrested for theft and spends seven years in prison," Joseph continues. "When Malcolm is in prison, Dr King is at Morehouse College, the most prestigious, historically Black, all-men's college that you could go to then or now.

"He goes and gets a theological degree at seminary school – Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania – and then gets a PhD at Boston University."

The strong religious upbringing of King clearly had a massive influence on his life, becoming a preacher himself as well as a political activist and integrating his faith deep into his speeches. Meanwhile, Malcolm's tough upbringing and the tragedies he endured help to explain the righteous anger and pain he expressed as a minister for the NOI.

However, Joseph does point out one curious similarity in their upbringing: "They're both impacted by the movie Gone With The Wind (1939). It premieres in Atlanta when Dr King is ten years old. Malcolm is 14 years old and sees that movie in Mason, Michigan, and talks about squirming in the movie theatre at all the racial stereotypes that the movie's filled with.

"It's filled with Black women who are servants who are getting slapped in the face by white women who are masters, and it's this sepia-toned, nostalgic vision of racial slavery. So that's similar."

It was during his time in prison that the then-Malcolm Little was introduced to Islam by some of his siblings and he joined the NOI. Its leader Elijah Muhammad took a personal interest in him, with letters being sent between them, before he was released in 1952.

He abandoned his 'slave name' of Little and became Malcolm X, a minister in the NOI advocating for Black separatism (which was the policy of the organisation), first in Chicago and later in Harlem, New York, which would become his base for years to come.

Two radically different approaches

The formative years of each man's life are ultimately what frames them as polarised voices in a similar struggle. "Malcolm X is really Black America's prosecuting attorney and he is going to be charging white America with a series of crimes against Black humanity," explains Joseph.

"I argue in 'The Sword And The Shield' (Basic Books, 2020) that in a way his life's work boils down to radical Black dignity, and what he means by Black dignity is really Black people having the political self-determination to decide their own political futures and fates.

"They define racism and they define anti-racism and what social justice looks like for themselves. It's connected to the United States, but globally it's also connected to African decolonisation, African independence, Third World independence, Middle East politics, all of it."

Radical Black dignity is also, importantly, about building up a Black cultural identity that is independent of white America and building self-worth, which is a big part of where ideas like Black Power would later come from. King naturally comes to things from a different direction.

"Martin Luther King Jr is really the defence attorney," says Joseph. "He defends Black lives to white people and white lives to Black people. He's really advocating for radical Black citizenship and his notion of citizenship is going to get more expansive over time; it's going to be more than just voting rights and ending segregation. It's going to become about ending poverty, food justice, health care, a living wage, universal basic income for everyone."

So radical Black citizenship is about outward expression, about African Americans having an impact on the social systems that are in place, becoming engaged and demanding to be heard.

These two approaches, one that builds personal identity and another that looks to express that identity and have it recognised by a system that's set up to ignore Black voices, seem more complementary than adversarial when we look at them from a slight remove.

"Their differences really become differences of tactics rather than goals," says Joseph. "They're both going to come to see that you need dignity and citizenship and those goals are going to converge over time, but it's the tactics and how we get to those goals."

Famously, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr did not always see eye to eye. Malcolm X in particular took aim at King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on multiple occasions (likely because he was a high-profile target and Malcolm was nothing if not media savvy).

Malcolm regularly referred to King as an 'Uncle Tom', implying that his nonviolent strategy was either too accommodating to white America or even saying he was being subsidised by white America to keep African Americans defenceless.

King for his part warned, "Fiery, demagogic oratory in the Black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as [Malcolm X] has done, can reap nothing but grief."

And yet despite the animosity between the two men publicly, Malcolm X continually attempted to reach out to King over the years. He sent articles and NOI reading materials and invited him to speeches and meetings.

On July 31, 1963, Malcolm X even publicly called for unity. "If capitalistic Kennedy and communistic Khrushchev can find something in common on which to form a United Front despite their tremendous ideological differences, it is a disgrace for Negro leaders not to be able to submerge our 'minor' differences in order to seek a common solution to a common problem posed by a Common Enemy," he wrote, inviting Civil Rights leaders to join him in Harlem to speak at a rally.

But they did not attend, perhaps because shortly after they would be attending the March on Washington and they were deep in planning. The slight was taken, though, with Malcolm dismissing the August 1963 event the 'Farce on Washington'.

Despite the rhetoric, Joseph thinks Malcolm was still learning much from King's activities. "Dr King is the person who helps mobilise Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 and King is going to be facing German Shepherds and fire hoses and it's going to be a big, global media spectacle," he says.

"King writes his famous 'Letter From Birmingham Jail' during that period. Malcolm is in Washington DC for most of that spring as temporary head of Mosque No. 4 there and he's really going to be influenced by King's mobilisations – his ability to mobilise large numbers of people – even as he's critical of King because of the nonviolence and the fact that so many kids and women are being brutalised."

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King meet

The really big shift in world view for Malcolm X came in 1964 as he gradually broke away from Elijah Muhammad (who was mired in allegations of extramarital affairs) and the NOI and sought to define his own path forward.

"By 1964 in 'The Ballot Or The Bullet' speech, you see Malcolm X talking about voting rights as part of Black liberation and freedom," explains Joseph. "You see him in an interview with Robert Penn Warren saying that he and Dr King have the same goal, which is human dignity, but they have different ways of getting there."

It's around this time that Malcolm X left the United States for several months, travelling to Egypt, Lebanon, Liberia, Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana and Saudi Arabia, including taking his pilgrimage to Mecca where he received his new Islamic name, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

The trip made a big impression on him, and he spoke subsequently about how seeing Muslims of so many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds worshipping together opened his eyes to the real possibility of racial integration and peace.

All of this actually took place not long after the two men had met for what would be the first and only time. In the midst of the passing of the Civil Rights Act, as it was being filibustered on the Senate floor, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X crossed paths on Capitol Hill.

"They both come and are talking to reporters and doing press conferences in support of the Civil Rights Act," says Joseph. "They're both coming there for the same reason. People are surprised that Malcolm is there and he's watching the Senate and he's doing his interviews and there's a point where Malcolm is in the same room as Dr King and on the couch while Dr King is doing his press conference and they meet afterwards, exchanging pleasantries."

It was a moment captured by only a couple of photos, catching them mid-conversation with Malcolm recorded as saying, "I'm throwing myself into the heart of the Civil Rights struggle."

Malcolm X continued to make overtures to King in the months that followed, offering him protection in St Augustine, Florida, that spring as protestors fought for desegregation of its beaches and playgrounds and later in Selma, Alabama, as King's attention turned to voting rights where he felt he had a role to play.

"I think Malcolm gave King more room to operate and I think Malcolm knew this," says Joseph. "When he visits Selma shortly before his own death, he's trying to visit Dr King in February of 1965 in Alabama, but King is jailed and he gets to visit Coretta Scott King, gives a speech and visits some of the student organisers.

"He tells Coretta Scott King that he's only there to support her husband and he wants people to know that if her husband's advocacy of voting rights is not accomplished that there are other alternative forces out there that are going to be led by him. So he definitely offers King more strategic leeway."

Impact of Malcolm X's assassination

Whether or not the two men could have ultimately found a way to coordinate their approaches in a less ad hoc fashion we will never know because on February 21, 1965, just days before the Selma to Montgomery marches were about to be attempted by King's movement, Malcolm X was assassinated in New York.

The impact of his death would be felt throughout the movement, and profoundly by King.

"One of the surprising things is that we don't discuss the way in which the person who is most radicalised by Malcolm's assassination is Martin Luther King Jr," Joseph explains.

"He breaks with Lyndon Johnson on April 4, 1967, with the Riverside Church speech in New York, where he says that the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. Malcolm had always talked about racial slavery and how racial slavery had shaped the present and King talks about that much more after 1965."

As King turns his attention to economic inequality through the mid- to late-1960s, he digs deeper and deeper into the wider historic inequalities and injustices of America. "He becomes this very prophetic, radical figure after Malcolm's assassination and he's much more interested in race and Blackness too," says Joseph.

"There's a speech he makes in 1967 where he says they even tell you 'A white lie is better than a Black lie'. He gets into it in a granular way; and this is King, not Malcolm. It's Dr King who says that the halls of the US Congress are 'running wild with racism'.

"King is testifying before the Kerner Commission, the president's riot commission, and talking about the depth and breadth of white racism," Joseph continues.

"He speaks to the American Psychological Association in September 1967 and says that white people in the United States are producing chaos, blame Black people for the chaos and say there would be peace if not for the chaos that they produce.

"He's really much more candid and much more blunt, much more radical, much more revolutionary and there are no more meetings with the president of the United States."

It is perhaps because they evolved and were willing to learn from one another that each has remained as relevant today as they were in the 1960s. The question that hangs around them, though, is could either of them have achieved as much as they did if the other hadn't been there challenging them?

"I think they both need each other," concludes Joseph. "They both have misapprehensions about each other and they make mistakes about each other. King thinks Malcolm is this narrow, anti-white Black nationalist. Malcolm thinks King is this bourgeois, reform-minded Uncle Tom when they start out. Neither of them are those things, so they both needed the other."

What's more, the contributions of each remain important to this day. "Dr King is this major global political mobiliser and the way in which he frames this idea of racial justice globally is very important, and the numbers he attracts are very important," says Joseph.

Meanwhile Malcolm has perhaps given us much of the vocabulary around racial justice even in the 21st century: "Malcolm is the first modern activist who is really saying Black lives matter in a really deep and definitive way and becomes the avatar of the Black Power movement."

"I thought all the Nazis ran away to Argentina." That line in the 2024 film "The Holdovers" got "a big laugh in cinemas in Buenos Aires", said Sam Meadows in The Spectator. Audiences recognised the uneasy truth: the flight of thousands of Nazi party members to Argentina after the Second World War remains "an extremely uncomfortable period" in the country's history.

Argentina has not been good at "reckoning with its past as a haven for war criminals". President Javier Milei, however, "appears to have changed tack". On 29 April, he released 1,850 documents from the national archives containing details, said the Buenos Aires Herald, of "prominent Nazi criminals who escaped to Argentina" – including Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz doctor known as the "Angel of Death".

'A haven for Nazis'

Most of the documents, a mix of police and intelligence agency files, were declassified in 1992 but "remained almost impossible to access", said The Times. They were only viewable "by appointment, in a single designated room".

Milei pledged to "lift the shroud with which Argentinian governments have long concealed the level of assistance that their predecessors provided to war criminals". And the documents, now viewable online, confirm "a long-known dirty secret": the "ease" with which senior Nazis lived in Argentina. "At one point," said defence minister Luis Petri, "Argentina became a haven for Nazis".

Mengele, "notorious" for his inhumane experiments on prisoners, arrived in 1949 and lived under "various aliases", said The Times of Israel. The documents include "nearly 100 pages detailing his time in Argentina" and show, for the first time, that he filed a request to travel from Argentina to West Germany in 1959, using his real name, according to German public broadcaster MDR. This means "several countries likely had more accurate information on Mengele than previously thought," said historian and Nazi expert Bogdan Musial.

There are also several files on Adolf Eichmann, another SS officer and one of the principal architects of the "Final Solution". He arrived in Argentina in 1950 under an alias.

The Supreme Court in Buenos Aires has also discovered Nazi material among its archives, reported The Associated Press on Sunday. An anonymous judicial authority said the court had come across boxes of photos, postcards and propaganda "intended to consolidate and propagate Adolf Hitler's ideology" in Argentina during the Second World War. The court's president, Horacio Rosatti, has ordered "a thorough analysis".

Exposing the 'ratlines'

The Nazi officials who fled to Argentina may be "long dead" but "their hunters insist their work is not done", said The Times. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a US-based human rights organisation, wants to "expose" the so-called "ratlines" – the networks, individuals and institutions that helped Nazis flee Europe and start new lives in South America. For nearly 20 years, the NGO has petitioned successive Argentine governments to release the files.

In January, the US Senate Judiciary Committee released two reports into Swiss bank Credit Suisse, concluding that "70 Argentine accounts with plausible links to Argentina-based Nazis" were opened with the bank after 1945. And, the report claimed, one of these accounts was still active as recently as 2022.

A previous investigation had found also "significant connection" between Credit Suisse and individuals who ran the ratlines, said Le Monde. "Money is not innocent," Ariel Gelblung, the Latin America director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the paper. Credit Suisse, which was taken over by the UBS Group in 2023, has pledged to provide "all necessary assistance". And after meeting with representatives from the Simon Wiesenthal Center earlier this year, Milei ordered the release of the documents.

In a 1999 report by the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina, historian Holger M. Meding "identified the facilitators of Nazi exfiltration to Argentina" as the Catholic Church and the Red Cross, said Le Monde. But the role of then-President Juan Perón was "decisive". Perón had "a preference for all things German", wrote Meding.

It might have been this that spurred Milei's decision to release the files, said The Spectator's Meadows. The president has "made no secret of his hatred of Peronism", and these documents could lead to "further scrutiny" of Peron's role.

Nestling at the point where the borders of India and Pakistan meet in the Himalayas, Jammu and Kashmir is the only Muslim-majority state or territory in Hindu-majority India (excepting the tiny Lakshadweep archipelago). It has been a flashpoint between India and Pakistan since Partition in 1947, partly because of its geo-strategic importance.

The glacial waters flowing through Kashmir provide water and electricity to tens of millions of people in India; Pakistan's biggest river, the Indus, also passes through it. But to both sides it is also a symbol of pride, a land famed for its beauty. "If there is a heaven on Earth," the Mughal emperor Jahangir once remarked, "it's here, it's here, it's here."

Its mountainous landscape appears often in Bollywood films and on restaurant walls across the subcontinent. There are also significant Muslim and Hindu shrines in Kashmir.

How did Kashmir end up largely under Indian control?

In the mid-19th century, Kashmir's Sikh rulers ceded the Valley of Kashmir to the British, who in turn sold it to the Hindu rajah of neighbouring Jammu. Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, became a holiday resort for the British.

Upon independence a century later, the princely states in theory had the right to choose whether to join India or Pakistan, but the decision was largely determined by religious demographics and geographical location. Kashmir's playboy maharaja, Hari Singh, could not decide, as his state adjoined both nations; he pondered turning it into an independent "Switzerland of Asia". But his hand was forced when, after Partition, Muslims in northwest Kashmir, backed by a Pakistani tribal army, rose up against the Hindu population and massacred them.

Independent India's new PM, Jawaharlal Nehru, a Kashmiri Hindu by descent, sent in troops to quash the revolt – in return, Singh ceded Kashmir to India, in October 1947.

How did Pakistan react?

Pakistan has (like India) always claimed the whole of Kashmir, and its regular forces entered the conflict soon after. The resulting First Indo-Pakistani War ended in 1949, with a UN-brokered ceasefire.

Most of the region was left under Indian control, except the northwestern third, including Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad ("Free") Kashmir, which is controlled by Pakistan. In 1948, the UN called for both sides to withdraw troops and let the people of Kashmir vote on their future status. This referendum never took place, essentially because Nehru realised that it would not be decided in India's favour.

Instead, the countries went to war over Kashmir again, first in 1965 and then in 1971. The ceasefire line agreed in the Simla Agreement in 1972 became the de facto border, known as the "Line of Control".

How did the Kashmiris react?

From the 1950s on, popular movements emerged in Kashmir demanding either independence or a merger with Pakistan. India responded with repression, while Pakistan provided support for militant groups. In the late 1980s, growing opposition to Indian rule was fuelled by a rigged election and the killing of peaceful protesters.

The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, a pro-independence group backed by Pakistan, launched an insurgency against the Indian authorities. India responded with a massive counterinsurgency operation, flooding the region with troops, and making Kashmir one of the most highly militarised areas in the world. About 41,000 people were killed over the following 27 years. Extrajudicial military killings were rife; at least 8,000 Kashmiris "disappeared". Nearly all the Hindus in the Valley of Kashmir, known as the Pandits – about 100,000 – left following a series of terrorist killings.

What has happened since?

The insurgency was largely brought under control by the early 2000s, but there have been regular eruptions of violence since. Pakistan's military intelligence service, the ISI, has encouraged the growth of radical Islamist groups that focus on the Kashmir issue, though their members are often not Kashmiris.

The usual pattern is that an atrocity takes place (the killing of 40 paramilitary police by a car bomb in 2019, for example); India then holds Pakistan responsible, and attacks alleged terrorist camps in Pakistan, which denies responsibility and counter-attacks. But the latest atrocity was different, since it hit tourists, not a military target.

What is PM Narendra Modi's policy on Kashmir?

All Indian governments since 1947 have taken a hard line on Kashmir, but Modi's Hindu nationalist BJP has been particularly unyielding. In 2019, it revoked Article 370 of India's Constitution, dating from 1949, which had guaranteed Kashmir a degree of autonomy, and restricted property rights to "permanent residents". Instead, Jammu and Kashmir is now ruled directly from Delhi. His government had also claimed that militancy in the region was in check, and encouraged the resumption of tourism.

What do Kashmiris want?

This is hotly contested, and there is no simple answer. An authoritative poll, conducted by Chatham House and Mori in 2010, found that in India-administered Jammu and Kashmir, 43% said they would vote for independence, while 28% would vote to stay with India, and only 2% to join Pakistan. However, this varied strongly by region: of some 13 million people in the state, eight million live in the Kashmir Valley, which is now over 95% Muslim; upwards of 74% there supported independence.

But in Jammu, where five million people live, 68% of them Hindu, support for independence was only 1%. In Azad (Pakistani) Kashmir, 50% thought Kashmir as a whole should be part of Pakistan, and 45% thought it should be independent. Robert Bradnock, who ran the poll, concluded that the referendum envisaged by the UN would now fail to resolve the conflict.

The capture of Saigon – the capital of America's ally South Vietnam – by communist North Vietnamese forces on 30 April 1975, marked the end of the Vietnam War.

The war had been fought between the two halves of the former French colony since 1955. The US had been deeply involved since 1965; almost three million Americans, mostly young conscripts, had fought against North Vietnam, which was backed by Russia and China, and the Viet Cong, the communist guerillas in the south. The US had spent billions of dollars – and 58,220 of its own soldiers' lives – to block the emergence of another communist regime in Asia.

Vietnamese losses were vastly larger: about two million civilians and perhaps 1.3 million soldiers were killed on both sides during the conflict. But the departure of the last helicopters from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon has gone down in history as a symbol of American hubris and defeat.

How had the war reached this point?

America's direct military involvement had ended in 1973, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. Washington knew that the peace wouldn't hold and the North was likely to win the war, but wanted, in the words of national security adviser Henry Kissinger, a "decent interval" between the US departure and the South's defeat. So the US continued to give financial and military aid.

But involvement in Vietnam was by that time extremely unpopular in the US, and President Nixon's political career was soon to be ended by the Watergate scandal. By late summer 1974, Nixon had resigned, and Congress had cut military and economic aid to South Vietnam by 30%.

The South Vietnamese government, led by President Nguyen Van Thieu, was corrupt and inefficient; it was struggling with runaway inflation, unemployment and rising rates of desertion from the army, as well as a heroin addiction epidemic. The North duly pressed home its advantage.

How did the North Vietnamese army take advantage?

In March 1975, it launched what was expected to be a two-year offensive to conquer South Vietnam. In the event, the South Vietnamese army soon crumbled. After capturing the central highlands, the North Vietnamese took Hue, about halfway between Saigon and the northern capital, Hanoi, and then Da Nang, the South's second-largest city, sparking a refugee exodus. Its forces pushed on to Saigon, a city largely untouched by the war until then.

Realising the imminent danger, President Thieu resigned on 21 April, delivering a furious televised speech in which he accused Washington of having "sold" its ally to the communists. He fled to Taiwan, taking 15 tonnes of luggage, and later lived for a time in Surrey.

What was America's reaction?

President Ford, who had succeeded Nixon, had pleaded with Congress to release additional military aid, to no avail. On 23 April, Ford delivered a speech in New Orleans, in which he declared that America's involvement in Vietnam was now "finished". Four days later, Saigon was encircled by 100,000 North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong.

By now, America had evacuated some of its citizens from Saigon; but about 6,000 remained, along with large numbers of South Vietnamese closely associated with the US, to whom Ford said it owed a "profound moral obligation".

On the morning of 29 April 1975, US forces launched "Operation Frequent Wind" to extract them. The code for the operation's launch was the declaration on US Armed Forces Radio that "the temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising", followed by the playing of the song "White Christmas".

How did the operation play out?

On 28 April, North Vietnamese artillery had shut down Tan Son Nhut Air Base, from which 50,493 people had been evacuated. The only option available, therefore, was to use US military helicopters to ferry evacuees from the embassy in Saigon to 26 US navy vessels stationed about a 30-minute flight away in the South China Sea.

A crowd of some 10,000 Vietnamese gathered outside the embassy, desperate for a flight out; some 2,500 more would-be evacuees were in the embassy compound. Marines guarded the embassy, lifting US citizens and a lucky few Vietnamese over the walls. As flights began taking off, the scenes were chaotic. Keyes Beech, an American war reporter, described being caught in the "seething mass" of bodies outside the embassy, "fighting for our lives, scratching, clawing, pushing ever closer to the wall".

Why was it so chaotic?

The military collapse had been rapid; by the morning of 29 April, North Vietnamese tanks were rolling through Saigon. And the US ambassador to Vietnam, Graham Martin, had deludedly believed that South Vietnam would cut a deal with Hanoi, so had ignored advice to expedite the evacuation.

In light of this, Operation Frequent Wind was a remarkable feat: in less than 24 hours, the US evacuated more than 7,000 people, including more than 5,500 South Vietnamese. Some pilots flew for 19 hours straight. South Vietnamese helicopters carrying refugees joined US aircraft on the US navy carriers; about 45 military helicopters were reportedly pushed overboard to clear space for new arrivals. The last helicopter out of Saigon, just before 8am on 30 April, evacuated the Marine guards.

What happened to those left?

Thousands of South Vietnamese – intelligence officers, special police – were left behind at the embassy. Although surprisingly few were executed, more than 200,000 South Vietnamese spent between three and 18 years in labour and re-education camps. Many more fled the country.

By 30 April, Saigon, soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City, was under full North Vietnamese control. By the end of 1975, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were all under communist rule – which in Vietnam has endured to this day.

The Vietnamese "boat people"

In the 20 years that followed the fall of Saigon, about 800,000 Vietnamese refugees safely fled the communist regime, in one of the largest mass exoduses in modern history. Escaping over land was extremely difficult: Vietnam is bordered only by Cambodia (where the Khmer Rouge had taken control), China and Laos (both allies of Vietnam). So most refugees fled in small boats over the South China Sea – becoming known as the "boat people".

Many made their way to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong; some reached Japan, or even Australia. Journeys were fraught with risk: boats were often unseaworthy and sank, or ran out of food and water; many were raided by pirates, mainly from Thailand, who raped women and killed those on board. It is estimated that 200,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese died at sea.

In 1979, the UN declared a "grave crisis", and urged countries to take in refugees. Some 402,000 were eventually settled in the US; Australia and Canada also welcomed substantial numbers; about 19,000 came to the UK. Despite US public opinion initially being opposed to accepting refugees from Vietnam, 2.3 million people of Vietnamese extraction were living in the US by 2023.

Today Europe commemorates the 80th anniversary of what is known as Victory in Europe (VE Day): the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of the Second World War.

It was so named to "reflect the fact that US and British troops fought on in the Pacific" until the defeat of Japan in August 1945, said The Telegraph.

But Donald Trump has announced that the US would "strip any mention of Europe" from its celebration. The president said VE Day would be known in the US as "Victory Day for World War Two" and "appeared to downplay the role of European forces in defeating Nazism".

His second presidency has been marked by his undermining of Nato, the alliance formed to provide security in the aftermath of the war, as well as his administration's denigration of European allies and his punitive trade tariffs on the EU. Continent-wide rearmament and bolstering of defence spending suggest Europe fears a future without the protection of its once strongest ally. As European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said last month: "The West no longer exists."

What did the commentators say?

There was a "moving ceremony" in Normandy last year to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, said Roger Cohen in The New York Times. It was a "celebration of the ironclad alliance" between Europe and the US, and their "shared resolve" to defend Ukraine. I never imagined "so much so dear to so many could unravel so fast".

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has been "absolved of responsibility for the war he started" by the US president – a "perennial coddler of autocrats". Trump has "taken a wrecking ball to the postwar order".

The rhetoric from Washington is becoming "increasingly feisty", said The Associated Press. Europeans "fear the break-up of the transatlantic bonds that were a core of global politics for almost a century".

A YouGov poll in March suggested that most Western Europeans view Trump as a threat to peace and security in Europe. "The naive belief that the Americans will, by definition, always be an ally – once and for all, that is gone," said Hendrik Vos, European studies professor at Ghent University.

Naive is right, said Katya Adler, Europe editor of the BBC. True, the US gave Europe "post-war security guarantees", but the founding of Nato wasn't "American altruism"; it was "a marriage of convenience". The US was worried about the spread of communism. By "swooping in" to help Europe, it gained "a geostrategic foothold on the Soviet Union's doorstep". Now, it no longer sees Russia as a threat.

Plus, not all of Europe benefited from that marriage. Unlike Western Europe, much of Central and Eastern Europe emerged from Nazi occupation only to "end up under communist regimes – whether they liked it or not".

And despite "countless" analyses painting Trump as "the slayer-in-chief of decades-old common values", the US withdrawal from Europe long predates him. It has viewed China as "strategic threat number one" for some time, concentrating foreign policy on Asia during the two previous administrations.

Despite "all the European hand wringing", there is also recognition that, 80 years after the original VE Day, it is "high time" it takes responsibility for its own defence. And in that, some see "potential".

What next?

Denzil Davidson, a former Foreign Office and No. 10 adviser, told Politico that the lack of support from Trump could offer "a serious opportunity" for Britain to step up in Europe, suggesting greater alignment.

Overall, Europe is "not waiting" for Trump's "next swerve", said Cohen in The New York Times. Germany's new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and France's President Emmanuel Macron are seeking independence from Washington. The Franco-German alliance has "always been the engine" of the EU. "If it kicks into overdrive, the rearmament of Europe, as a military power but also as a guardian of the values for which America fought in World War II, seems plausible over the medium term."

And despite the "current mood of pessimism", it is important to remember that the hopes on 8 May 1945 for a better world have "largely been fulfilled", said The Times. The allied forces "saved the free world from a savage tyranny". "Neither the sacrifices of the dead nor the optimism of the survivors were in vain."

Historians have long believed that ancient humans fought animals in arena battles, but no definitive evidence has been found — until now. An archeological breakthrough two decades in the making has provided the first proof that gladiators did indeed fight animals.

The discovery by a team of archaeologists may simply confirm what historians have already assumed. But some in the scientific community are hoping the unearthing may continue to unlock ancient secrets.

What discovery was made?

The discovery is the "first physical evidence for human-animal gladiatorial combat," according to the findings, which were published April 23 in the journal PLOS One. The findings came in the "form of a skeleton from a Roman settlement in Britain," said The New York Times. This damaged skeleton was found in the city of York, England, 20 years ago, but archeologists have only now proven what caused the injuries.

This skeleton had "small indentations in the hip bones," said the Times, and these "notches looked like bite marks from a large animal, perhaps a lion." But no proof of this was found when the skeleton was originally excavated. So researchers "created a map of the dimensions and depth of the animals' bites." They then "compared the bite marks left by the different animals with the indentations on the ancient skeleton," which confirmed that the marks came from a lion.

Why is this discovery important?

It is "rare for archaeologists to find physical evidence of such combat in the form of Roman gladiators' remains," especially for "something seemingly so well-documented," said Scientific American. Also, this new evidence "not only offers fascinating clues into the culture of gladiatorial combat but also highlights the astonishingly far-reaching influence of the Roman Empire."

These fights were "one of the key ways that Roman culture was spread," Anna Osterholtz, a bioarchaeologist at Mississippi State University, said to Scientific American. The games "taught things like social roles and social norms." The remains also describe "people's lives that weren't considered important enough to be written down, that were never part of the official record."

The findings, additionally, are proof the U.K. "was well integrated into the customs and systems of the Roman Empire at its peak and provide evidence that Roman entertainments were widespread across the empire," Jaclyn Neel, an associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Canada's Carleton University, told CNN.

This revelation now opens the door for scientists to make more discoveries — mainly, how these animals may have been transported. Scientists "know that these events happened in the provinces of the Roman Empire, but it raises other questions," Tim Thompson, an anthropologist at Ireland's Maynooth University and the lead author of the study, said to The Guardian. How do you "get a lion from Africa to York?"

Either way, experts seem excited by the prospect of continued research. The realization "gives us a remarkable insight into the life — and death — of this particular individual and adds to both previous and ongoing genome research," David Jennings, the CEO of York Archaeology, said in a press release. Scientists "may never know what brought this man to the arena where we believe he may have been fighting for the entertainment of others," but it is "remarkable that the first osteoarchaeological evidence for this kind of gladiatorial combat has been found so far from the Colosseum of Rome."

What sparked the war?

American anger at the British, the former colonial overlords who at the time ruled Canada. The already strained relationship between Britain and the fledgling U.S. hit a boiling point in the early 19th century. Britain, embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars with France, put a blockade on American trade ships bound for mainland Europe. And it seized thousands of American seamen and conscripted them into its undermanned Royal Navy. There was another source of tension closer to home: British support of Native American tribes along the Great Lakes, who used British-­supplied weapons in raids on U.S. settlements and inhibited westward expansion. With the rallying cry "Free trade and sailors' rights!" President James Madison made America's first declaration of war. Hopelessly outgunned by Britain's formidable navy, the Americans targeted Canada, figuring its conquest would humble Britain and grant leverage in wresting concessions. For at least some Americans, there was also another purpose in striking north.

What was that motive?

It's one that President Trump might understand: a lust for new territory. "An incipient kind of manifest destiny" drove many in the rural South and what was then the American West, the territory stretching up the Mississippi basin to the Great Lakes, said University of Virginia historian John C.A. Stagg. And Canada seemed an easy target. It had a population of only 500,000, while the U.S. was home to 7.5 million, and Britain was busy battling France. Many Americans thought they'd be welcomed as liberators, because a large share of those living in what is now Ontario "were essentially Americans who had crossed the border because land was plentiful," says Canadian military historian Terry Copp. Acquiring Canada, said former President Thomas Jefferson, "will be a mere matter of marching."

How'd that work out?

Very badly. At the time, the U.S. Army was a ramshackle force of about 7,000 men, which included "too many incompetent officers and too many raw, untrained recruits," said historian Donald R. Hickey, author of several books on the war. And the logistical challenges of fighting on a remote frontier "were daunting if not insuperable." The Americans launched a three-pronged invasion—across the Detroit River and the Niagara River, and at Lake Champlain, N.Y.—but flopped at every juncture. In Detroit, U.S. Gen. William Hull, who had confidently declared that residents of Canada would be "emancipated from tyranny and oppression," surrendered to a much smaller force after falling for a bogus British document that warned of a vast approaching army of Native warriors. Hull was later court-­martialed for cowardice. By January 1813, the American campaign had yielded only "disaster, defeat, disgrace, and ruin and death," said the Green-Mountain Farmer, a Vermont newspaper.

Did U.S. fortunes improve?

Marginally. The Americans racked up a number of victories in 1813, including surprisingly in naval battles on the Great Lakes and in the Atlantic. "It is a cruel mortification," said a cabinet member in London, "to be beat by these secondhand Englishmen upon our own element." The Americans reclaimed Detroit and captured York (now Toronto) and burned several government buildings. But hampered by desertion, a lack of coordination, and deaths from disease, hunger, and exposure, the Americans made little other headway into Canada. Things took a turn for the worse in 1814, when the British sent some 4,500 battle-­hardened reinforcements across the Atlantic. Landing in Maryland, they marched on Washington, D.C., and set fire to the president's house—not yet called the White House—the House and Senate chambers, the Library of Congress, and other buildings. The conflagration could be seen from 50 miles away. With the U.S. demoralized, nearing bankruptcy, and mired in what amounted to a stalemate, many Americans wanted peace. "Most people understood that the USA would now be mainly on the defensive and Canada was now beyond our reach," said Hickey. Meanwhile, the British were exhausted by more than a decade of war and eager to be done with it.

How did the war end?

With a treaty signed in Ghent, now part of Belgium, on Christmas Eve, 1814. It restored the prewar northern borders, with both sides surrendering conquered territory. Given that the British had seized big chunks of Michigan and the Great Lakes, it amounted to "a pretty sweet deal" for the U.S., said University of Virginia historian Alan Taylor. The maritime issues that had ignited the war weren't even mentioned in the treaty—and a major American victory was still to come. Unaware a peace deal had been struck, some 7,500 British troops marched on New Orleans on Jan. 8, 1815. They were repelled by 5,000 defenders led by Gen. Andrew Jackson, who became a national hero and, in 1829, the seventh president.

What was the war's legacy?

It was an unhappy one for Native Americans along the frontier. Battered by the conflict, they lost their British backers and would soon be pushed aside by U.S. westward expansion. As for the primary combatants, both claimed victory. The Americans, buoyed by New Orleans and quick to forget the war's humiliations, celebrated their survival against a powerful foe. "It unified the country with a new sense of national purpose," said American historian Walter Borneman. It also gave a nationalist boost to the Canadians who'd repelled an attempted invasion and would gain nationhood in 1867. The 2012 bicentennial of the war was widely commemorated in Canada through museum exhibits and historical re-enactments. "It's a very defining moment for Canada," said Canadian military historian Mark Zuehlke. "If those invasions had succeeded, we probably wouldn't exist."

Gaming out an 1812 replay

No credible observer believes the U.S. will invade Canada. But President Trump's repeated references to Canada becoming "our cherished 51st state" have generated chatter up north about what would happen should America attack. If Trump did unleash the world's most powerful military, it is universally agreed "we don't stand a chance," said Canadian military historian Marc Milner. But that "would be just the beginning," said Aisha Ahmad, a political science professor at University of Toronto, who believes an invasion would ignite a decades-long Canadian insurgency. Toronto doctor Raghu Venugopal agrees resistance would run deep. "Many of us would rather have our eyes spooned out, be eviscerated, tortured, run over by tanks, than have anything to do with the United States," he said. Be that as it may, U.S. military historian Eliot Cohen emphasizes that nobody should take the "absurd" scenario of a U.S.-Canada war seriously. "My advice to my Canadian friends," said Cohen, "is: Don't give [Trump] the pleasure of getting upset."

'With his marathon speech, Cory Booker showed us how to fight'

Karen Attiah at The Washington Post

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) "displayed a historic level of legitimate cardio — stamina — speaking on the Senate floor," says Karen Attiah. To "stand for 24-plus hours is an honorable display of physical and mental strength," and we "need to see way more fighting spirit from the Democrats." This is "where Booker's spectacle and persuasion matter the most: to stir the masses." What he did "will live on for the history books, but we need bodies on the line."

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'What it's like to be a U.S. historian right now'

Thomas A. Foster at The Hill

The "current cultural climate is filled with historical consciousness, but also with widespread misunderstandings and misrepresentations of history," says Thomas A. Hill. Historians are "often distanced from this sensation because we know how past events turned out," but "living through history in real-time makes that sense of unpredictability palpable in a way that is rarely captured in historical narratives." Adding to this "uncertainty is the intense battle over our national narratives and historical identity."

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'50 years after fall of Saigon, Vietnam can't heal by erasing half its past'

Nghia M. Vo at USA Today

April "marks 50 years since the fall of Saigon, and the wounds of the Vietnam War remain open — not just for Americans who fought there, but also for those who lost everything when the war ended," says Nghia M. Vo. For "those who fought alongside the United States, the past five decades have been defined by discrimination and erasure under Vietnam's communist regime." The "Vietnamese government must acknowledge the suffering of those who had fought for South Vietnam."

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'For beauty products, natural isn't always better'

Joshua Britton at Time

Many "people believe that natural ingredients are always preferable in beauty products," but this "ignores fundamental truths about the toll of global ingredient harvesting," says Joshua Britton. Earth "cannot keep up with consumer demand for natural ingredients in beauty," as its "cultivation is hugely water and energy-intensive, necessitating pesticides and other agrochemicals." We "need to find another way and biotechnology offers a solution. It "reduces our dependence on unsustainable ingredient extraction and addresses our enduring love of naturals."

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Almost 17 years ago, Nepal's King Gyanendra Shah "bowed to the inevitable" and stepped down from the throne, handing over a crown made of "yak's hair and emeralds", said The Times.

After "widespread protests" against his authoritarian rule, Gyanendra fled the royal palace to "live the life of a commoner". But now, the king has returned to the Himalayan nation, and to a hero's welcome. He arrived in Kathmandu on 9 March greeted by crowds of thousands – some of who had taken part in the protests against him – demanding the "immediate restoration" of the monarchy, amid growing frustration over poverty and corruption.

"Vacate the royal palace for the king," the crowds chanted. "Come back king, save the country."

The Nepalese royal massacre

Gyanendra, 77, was never meant to be king. He was the brother of the king, the far more popular Birendra. But one night in 2001, the king's son Dipendra drunkenly opened fire on a party in the royal palace. He killed nine members of his family, including his father, mother, brother and sister, before shooting himself in the head. It would become known as the Nepalese royal massacre.

Dipendra's motives are still a mystery, but the killings followed a longstanding disagreement between Dipendra and his parents, who "objected" to his wish to marry an Indian aristocrat, said The Diplomat. The "needle of suspicion" also pointed at Gyanendra, who wasn't at the palace on the night of the murder. But Gyanendra denied any involvement, and inherited the crown.

At first, he ruled "without executive or political powers", said Al Jazeera. But in 2005, he "seized absolute power". Claiming he was acting to "defeat anti-monarchy Maoist rebels", he disbanded the government, jailed politicians and declared a state of emergency, using the army to rule.

This "triggered huge street protests", which forced him to hand power to a multi-party government in 2006. That government signed a peace deal with the Maoists, ending a decade-long bloody civil war. Two years later, parliament voted to abolish the 240-year-old Hindu monarchy, "transforming the nation into a secular republic".

A failed republic, or a glorified past?

But many Nepalis are increasingly "frustrated" with that republic, said The Associated Press. It has "failed to bring about political stability" – Nepal has had 13 governments since the monarchy was abolished – and they blame it for the struggling economy and "widespread corruption".

"I was in the protests that took away monarchy hoping it would help the country," said one 50-year-old in the crowds greeting Gyanendra. "But I was mistaken and the nation has further plunged so I have changed my mind."

Political leaders, mainly from the "big three" parties, "carry the taint of corruption allegations", said The Indian Express. Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli, with his "totalitarian tendencies", has "earned more enemies than ever before".

On social media there has been "a surge of pro-monarchy posts and videos", said Nepal Times. Monarchists are using these to "fan nostalgia of the golden age of royalty", with former kings "glorified" as nationalists who "upheld Nepal's sovereignty" and "commanded respect worldwide". They believe "public disillusionment" with the country's leaders is "at breaking point".

Young Nepalis are "attracted to the idea of reinstating the monarchy as a form of anti-incumbent protest", added the news site – "but also because they have little to no memory of living under an authoritarian absolute monarchy."

In the era of the civil rights movement, Malcolm X was America's most famous proponent of Black nationalism. A Muslim convert and a member of the Nation of Islam movement, Malcolm X believed that, rather than trying to integrate with the white majority, African Americans should seek economic and political independence. His powerful oratory skill gave voice to black pride – and, with furious clarity, to black anger.

What was Malcolm X's background?

Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, he was one of seven children; his father, Earl, was a Baptist preacher and activist who died when Malcolm was six. At that time, they lived in Lansing, Michigan; his father was seen as a troublemaker by the Black Legion, a Ku Klux Klan splinter group. Malcolm's family home was burned down, and African Americans in Lansing believed his father had been murdered by a Black Legion mob – that they had killed him and staged the streetcar accident officially blamed for his death.

In 1939, Malcolm's mother, Louise, had a nervous breakdown, and he spent the rest of his childhood in foster care. Dropping out of school at 16, he took up various jobs – shining shoes, working on the railways – before ending up in Harlem, where he turned to crime: drug dealing, armed robbery, pimping. In 1946, he was jailed for burglary and served six-and-a-half years.

Why did he join the Nation of Islam?

In 1948, at Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts, he embraced the Nation of Islam on the advice of his brothers (later changing his name to Malcolm X – where X represented his unknown African name, replacing his "slave name"). The Nation is a sect based on Islam, black nationalism and black pride, with an eccentric mythology.

On his release in 1952, Malcolm X travelled across the US spreading its message. He'd read voraciously in prison, and proved to be a charismatic preacher and a gifted organiser. Elijah Muhammad, the Nation's leader, named him national representative, second only to himself. Thanks in no small part to Malcolm X, the sect grew from a few hundred members to about 500,000. He became a national figure – and a hate figure for much of white America. But in 1964, he left the Nation.

Why did he leave?

For some years, he'd been growing increasingly disillusioned. He had a strong puritanical streak and began to disapprove of Elijah Muhammad's theology and strategy, and the fact that Muhammad had fathered children with young Nation secretaries. And in 1963, he was suspended from his duties in the sect for 90 days, following the media storm that resulted from his description of John F. Kennedy's assassination as the "chickens coming home to roost".

After leaving, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and embraced Sunni Islam, adopting the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. He then publicly disavowed the Nation's "racist philosophy", alluded to its links to the KKK (which shared the Nation's desire for a separate black ethno-state in the US South), and denounced Elijah Muhammad as a "religious faker". The Nation viewed this as a betrayal; in late 1964, the order was given to do him "terminal bodily harm".

How did he die?

At 2pm on 21 February 1965, Malcolm X arrived at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, where he was due to launch his new Organisation of Afro-American Unity: a black nationalist group that would welcome all African Americans, and lead mainstream civil rights initiatives: voter registration, rent strikes, campaigns for better housing. By then, Nation assassins had already made attempts on his life (a week earlier his house in Queens had been firebombed); but Malcolm X asked his security not to perform checks at the entrance, so as not to put off potential members.

As he began to speak in front of an audience including his wife, Betty, a smoke bomb was detonated from the back of the audience, prompting him to step from behind his podium to restore order. As he did so, a man from the fourth row charged towards him and shot him with a sawn-off shotgun. Two other men then ran to the stage and fired as well; Malcolm X was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at hospital. He was 39.

Who killed him?

Most historians believe that Malcolm X's killers were three men from the Nation's Newark mosque: Thomas Hagan, William Bradley and Leon Davis. Hagan was arrested at the scene, having been wounded by Malcolm X's security. However, two other Nation members, Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, were convicted with Hagan in March 1966. Some 55 years later, in 2021, Aziz and Islam were finally exonerated; an investigation found that the FBI and the NYPD had withheld crucial evidence.

How is Malcolm X seen today?

Within the African-American community he is widely celebrated: at his funeral, his friend Ossie Davis called him "a prince – our own black shining prince!". His memoir, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", written with Alex Haley and published eight months after his death, is seen as an American classic. But he is also widely reviled – inside and outside the black community – as an extremist demagogue.

He was in some respects the polar opposite of his contemporary Martin Luther King Jr. King believed that America was perfectible, if it would only follow its noblest ideals, and he preached racial harmony and integration. Malcolm X believed that the defining experience of black people in US society was not just of discrimination but of brutal oppression, and that separatism was the solution. King rejected violence; Malcolm X urged black people to defend themselves "by any means necessary". King said, "I have a dream"; Malcolm X said, "I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare."

'The game that shows we're thinking about history all wrong'

Spencer Kornhaber at The Atlantic

The game "Civilization VII" makes a "radical change by firmly segmenting the experience into — here's that word — eras," says Spencer Kornhaber. "Eras are an imprecise tool to make sense of the messy past." Game developers have "argued that the eras system is realistic," but in the most recent version of the game, "history also feels overdetermined." Playing "Civilization" used to "feel like living through an endless dawn of possibility," but this time, you're not in command of history; history is in command of you, and it's assigning you busywork."

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'Learning cursive is an important skill, but should it be mandatory in today's tech age?'

Yvette Walker at The Kansas City Star

Some "think cursive is an important skill," but there's debate over whether it should be required in the modern technological age, says Yvette Walker. One "factor against it is the extra level of rigor for left-handed students." You "might not be able to write it, but you should be able to read it." If there is a "way to build an understanding of cursive into the system without busting the budget or losing another important skill, I'd be up for that."

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'What anti-Musk Democrats can learn from Steve Bannon'

Ross Barkan at Intelligencer

Steve Bannon has made it his "mission to destroy Elon Musk, the new bête noire of Democrats," says Ross Barkan, and "liberals who share that goal — and want to boost their working-class credibility — might want to pay attention to how he's doing it." Bannon's "attacks are potentially potent because he understands the stakes of this battle." Musk "cares far more about his business and tech interests than the fate of working-class America."

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'Cut climate emissions by ticketing the worst offenders, like speeding drivers'

Antoine Rostand at The Hill

If the world "rolls over on methane regulations, we'll need to change tack to bring down methane quickly," says Antoine Rostand. The "best way to do this is to narrow the scope of the regulations and target so-called 'super-emitters.'" Holding "methane super-emitters to account, as opposed to scrutinizing the entire lifecycle emissions of fossil fuels, would be a much more straightforward and effective policy" than the "more arcane rules that the United States is set to tear up."

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A charred scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum has been digitally "unwrapped", allowing researchers to peer inside the ancient document after 2,000 years.

One word appears more than once in the text that's been deciphered so far, so experts have already been able to hazard a guess at the document's subject matter.

Crumbling papyri

The ancient scroll, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. It's "too fragile to ever be physically opened", said the BBC. That delicacy was demonstrated when previous papyri "crumbled to dust" when researchers tried to open them, said The Guardian.

The latest scroll has been taken to a gigantic high-intensity X-ray facility in Oxfordshire, where electrons were "accelerated to almost the speed of light" to produce an X-ray beam powerful enough to "probe the scroll without damaging it", said The Independent.

Artificial intelligence can detect the ink without opening the scroll, although this is "easier said than done", said the BBC, because the papyrus and ink are both made from carbon and are "almost indistinguishable from each other".

When the document was virtually unrolled on a computer, several columns of text were revealed. One word in the Ancient Greek text, διατροπή, means disgust, and appears twice within a few columns.

Human connection

The team are delighted with the initial results. Project leader Stephen Parsons said the researchers are "confident we will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety".

Parsons is the head of Vesuvius Challenge, an international competition for experts who are trying to unlock Herculaneum scrolls. Last year, Youssef Nader in Germany, Luke Farritor in the US, and Julian Schilliger in Switzerland, won the competition’s $700,000 (£558,000) grand prize after reading more than 2,000 Greek letters from another Herculaneum scroll.

That scroll is thought to have been written by the epicurean philosopher Philodemus. It "covered sources of pleasure, from music to food", and "explored whether pleasurable experiences" were derived "from the abundant or the scarce", such as the "minor or major constituents of a meal", said The Guardian. It's already thought that the scroll currently being studied in Oxford will cover similar philosophical topics.

Meanwhile, Nicole Gilroy, who supervises scrolls' care at Oxford's Bodleian Library, said she was enjoying "that connection with whoever collected them, whoever wrote them, whoever rolled those scrolls up and put them on the shelves", because "there's a real human aspect to it that I just think is really precious".

Of the executive orders made by President Donald Trump on his first day back in the White House, one generating tons of attention was perhaps the most symbolic: renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, in addition to ordering Alaska's Denali be changed back to Mt. McKinley, after the 25th president. But these are not the only global naming disputes in recent history.

Greece and Macedonia

For over a quarter century, the Balkans were at odds over the name of the Macedonia region, which contains large parts of Southeast Europe. Macedonia "has long existed as a northern region in Greece," said the BBC, and a quarrel began in 1991 when a "new nation, born out of the collapse of Yugoslavia," began calling itself Macedonia.

The Greeks were "fiercely proud of the ancient heritage of Alexander the Great and his father Philip II of Macedon," said the BBC, and felt the former Yugoslavia was encroaching on their territory. A deal was eventually reached in 2019 to name the country North Macedonia, but in 2024 Greece accused the nation's "new center-right government of breaking a historic deal on the country's name," said The Associated Press, potentially reigniting the feud.

Black Sea

Russian politician Denis Bulanov has proposed renaming the Black Sea to the Russian Sea. Bulanov was reportedly inspired by Trump's decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico, and "claimed that the Black Sea was historically referred to as the 'Russian Sea,' mentioned in some ancient Rus' chronicles," said Ukraine's United24 Media.

The name change "would be for domestic use within Russia only. I'm not insisting that other countries bordering the Black Sea recognize the name change," Bulanov said to a translated Russian media outlet on Telegram. It is unclear if Russian President Vladimir Putin supports the change.

South China Sea

Most Westerners understandably call the body of water south of China the South China Sea. But Asian nations have been pressing for the sea's name to be changed. China, Vietnam and the Philippines all have different names for it, and these "are not just semantic; they each advance a nationalist narrative and a historical claim," said The Diplomat.

This "also reflects the geopolitical stakes in the South China Sea, where overlapping maritime and territorial claims have led to rising tensions among nations," said The Diplomat. Countries have feuded over the sea's name in the past; in 2017, Indonesia angered China when it announced it would "refer to the northern areas of its exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea as the 'North Natuna Sea,'" said CNN.

India

Indians have long feuded over the name of their country. While the nation is officially called the Republic of India, many have pushed to change its name to "Bharat," the Hindu word for India. In India itself, India and Bharat are "used interchangeably officially and by the public," said Al Jazeera.

Hindus have been pining to change the country's name officially, and the nation's constitution refers to it as "India, that is Bharat." India's president has also referred to herself as the president of Bharat. And "while some supporters of the name Bharat say 'India' was given by British colonizers, historians say the name predates colonial rule by centuries," said Reuters.

Persian Gulf

The Persian Gulf, separating Iran from the rest of the Middle East, remains embroiled in a naming controversy. Most Iranians call it the Persian Gulf, but "Arabs are angling for it to be called the Arabian Gulf," said The Economist. The naming disagreement reflects "increasingly troubled relations" in the region, given that it is a "natural barrier for centuries of Arab-Persian rivalry."

This debate has been brewing for decades, as "states on the Arab side began calling it the 'Arabian Gulf'" during the 1960s, said The Guardian. Most recently, Iraq stirred anger when it named a 2023 regional soccer tournament the "Arabian Gulf Cup," to the ire of Iran

A massive trove of historic World War II documents has been unveiled, and it strikes at the heart of a generational issue in the Netherlands. On Jan. 2, the Dutch Central Archives of the Special Jurisdiction was publicly opened under the country's national archive rules. This archive contains information about 425,000 Dutch people who were accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the second world war.

These archives have been available to researchers for the past 70 years, but this marks the first time that members of the public can view their contents. It is estimated that the full portfolio of the Central Archives will be digitally accessible by 2027, according to the archive's website; for now, those wishing to see the documents must visit the physical archive in The Hague. Some descendants of those accused of Nazi collaboration say they are wary of what this public access might mean.

What do these archives contain?

The archive's pages measure about 2.3 miles long and are the "largest and most frequently consulted World War II archives in the Netherlands," said a press report. The pages contain "files about individuals suspected of collaboration with the German occupiers" during World War II, as well as information on "victims, resistance activities, hiding operations and much more."

The 32 million documents include information on Dutch people who were both tried as Nazi collaborators and those who were only suspected of such. This is what largely separates the Dutch archives from similar databases in other European countries. The "entire archive has been preserved, including people who were not convicted, only accused," Tom de Smet, the director of Archives, Services and Innovation at the Dutch National Archives, said to The New York Times. Once the files are digitized online, people will be "able to type in the name of a victim and discover who was accused of betraying them."

How are the Dutch responding?

Some descendants of the accused, as well as the Dutch government, are reportedly concerned over the publication of family histories, especially for those who were only accused. According to the Central Archives, only about a fifth of the people accused of collaboration were ever charged in court.

It is "a bit uncomfortable," Connie, whose family is in the archive, said to The Guardian. She does not "know what could come out of it eventually, if people Google our surname." But others believe that publicizing the archives will help the Netherlands heal from its connection with the Holocaust. The country is "only now coming to terms with" its role in the genocide, said The Guardian.

It is "part of the repression by the Dutch of their memories of collaboration, after we had punished our military and political collaborators," Johannes Houwink ten Cate, an emeritus professor of Holocaust studies at Amsterdam University, said to The Guardian. It is easy to "understand the children and grandchildren of collaborators now fear possible consequences, but my personal experience is that their feelings come to rest once they have seen the files. Making this open is an important step."

Officials are also taking steps to "digitize the files more carefully and slowly, because this is very sensitive for relatives of collaborators," according to Dutch newspaper Trouw. The archive will digitize the most well-known files first, including "more serious cases such as the betrayal of several people in hiding or the murder of resistance fighters, which made the newspapers." Archivists "arrived at this after discussions with the ethical council, which includes relatives of both collaborators and war victims," Edwin Klijn, the leader of the project, said to Trouw.

The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 is one of the most famous – and infamous – psychological experiments conducted, still discussed in classrooms and pop culture more than half a century on. But "everything you think you know about this study is wrong", filmmaker Juliette Eisner told Ars Technica.

Eisner is the director of National Geographic's recent three-part series "The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth", which features many of the study's participants speaking out for the first time. She "debunks" the experiment and investigates why it has "captured imaginations" for so long, despite being "riddled" with "lies" and "manipulation".

What was the Stanford Prison Experiment?

In August 1971, a group of students were "arrested" and hauled to "Stanford County Prison", which was, in reality, the basement of the psychology building of Stanford University, in California. The men had responded to an ad from Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo seeking volunteers for "a psychological study of prison life", said The New Yorker.

Twenty-four participants – all middle class, male college students – had been chosen for the study. A coin flip decided which of them would be prison guards and which would be prisoners. Rooms in the basement were turned into makeshift cells, with a janitor's cupboard acting as "the hole" for solitary confinement.

Although the men were willing participants, they had not been warned about the mock arrests or of the exact nature of the treatment they would face. The breaches in ethics had already begun, said Ars Technica, and they would not stop for six days, when Zimbardo called off the two-week study early.

What was Zimbardo trying to prove?

Zimbardo saw his study as a follow up to 1961's Milgram experiment, in which participants administered what they believed were powerful electric shocks to victims (played by actors) at the instruction of an authority figure. "Whereas Milgram’s research was all about the power of individual authority over an individual person, the Stanford Prison Experiment was all about the ability for a system to repeatedly create situations that strongly influence behaviour," Zimbardo said in a 2009 interview.

Based on his observations of interactions between the guards and inmates, Zimbardo concluded that holding a position of power could quickly "make normal people act like tyrants", said Time. An advocate for prison reform, the psychologist hoped to demonstrate that the prison environment encouraged this dehumanisation and brutality.

What happened during the experiment?

"Things became dark almost immediately," said Time. Guards, "drunk on power", tormented prisoners, denying then sleep, forcing some to strip naked, defecate in buckets and simulate sodomy, all while bombarding them with verbal abuse. Several prisoners left the experiment early, some reporting extreme emotional distress.

On day five, Zimbardo's then-girlfriend, Christina Maslach, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, visited the "prison". She was "so appalled" with the "lack of oversight" and "immoral" nature of the study, she convinced Zimbardo to end the experiment the next day.

Why was the experiment so controversial?

The study has long been criticised for a lack of ethical guidelines and, according to Ars Technica, is credited as the reason US universities had to "overhaul" their requirements for experiments involving human subjects.

French researcher Thibault Le Texier has been a major force behind debunking the experiment's methodology and conclusions. He argues Zimbardo's conclusions were "written out an advance" and the study was "carefully manipulated", a critique "largely confirmed" by National Geographic's series, said Ars Technica. For instance, the guards received "extensive instruction" on how to best dehumanise the prisoners, said Time.

Stanford prison's pop culture "cachet" relies on the misconception that the volunteers transformed into "submissive prisoners and tyrannical guards", said The New Yorker. However, only about a third of the guards displayed abusive behaviour and even that is far from indicative: several said their behaviour was play-acting, a conscious attempt to fulfil the role they believed they had been assigned.

The idea that the participants were putting on an act to satisfy the experiment organisers suggests "the opposite of Zimbardo's conclusions", journalist Jon Ronson wrote on X, "that evil lies within us".

Did the study have any value?

In 2002, psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher restaged the prison experiment in the BBC's "The Experiment". The set-up was closely modelled on Zimbardo's study, although the guards were not coached on how to behave towards the inmates. In the BBC study, the guards did not abuse their authority and prisoners ended up defying their captors and staging a revolt.

This very different outcome "sharpens and clarifies" the meaning of the Stanford Prison Experiment, said The New Yorker. The conclusion is not that "any random human being is capable of descending into sadism", but "that our behaviour largely conforms to our preconceived expectations". If "certain institutions and environments demand those behaviours" perhaps they "can change them", too.

Scientists have long agreed that early humans mated with Neanderthals, but a pair of recent studies have shed light on when exactly this DNA mixing occurred. Such a revelation could help geneticists learn more about our past — and crucially, our future.

The studies, published Dec. 12 in the journals Science and Nature, provide information about the timelines of Neanderthal and early human interactions, and reveal that ancient interbreeding left strands in modern DNA that can still be seen today. The fact that Neanderthals and early humans interbred has been known since the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, but these studies suggest the interactions happened more recently than scientists once thought.

What did the studies find?

Researchers for the Science study "analyzed genomes from 275 present-day and 59 prehistoric humans who lived between 2,200 and 45,000 years ago," said The Washington Post, determining that "Neanderthals and humans interbred for 7,000 years starting about 50,500 years ago." At the same time, researchers for the Nature study discovered a "new line of evidence by sequencing the oldest human genomes yet, bringing to life a 45,000-year-old human family."

By combining data from both studies, it was concluded that early humans and Neanderthals reached their peak interbreeding period around 47,000 years ago. The height of this interbreeding was not "exceptional trysts but a way of life," said the Post. Scientists "cannot time travel, but this data is allowing us to time travel and see what's happening 50,000 years ago in our history," Priya Moorjani, a senior author of the Science study and UC Berkeley professor, said to the Post.

During this peak, early humans "encountered Neanderthals, had sex and gave birth to children on a fairly regular basis," said CNN. It is estimated that 1% to 3% of people have DNA that can be linked to Neanderthals, and the studies also shed light on these genes. Some, like "those related to the immune system, were beneficial to humans as they lived through the last ice age, when temperatures were much cooler, and they continue to confer benefits today."

How is this information useful?

This updated timeline for Neanderthal-modern human interbreeding "shifts and narrows the possible range of time when humans spread to places like present-day China and Australia," said NBC News. These latest findings "line up with archaeological evidence that suggests Neanderthals and humans overlapped in geography as humans traveled out of Africa."

The new studies are also "much more of a direct estimate compared to the previous inference, which involved fitting a fairly complex statistical model that had a lot of uncertainty," Princeton University genomicist Joshua Akey said to NPR. These discoveries are "really important because it does constrain quite a few other things about human migration patterns," Benjamin Peter, a University of Rochester geneticist, said to the outlet.

The study also shows that we may have this interbreeding to thank for modern immunity. Neanderthal genes "may have been crucial to our success by protecting us from new diseases we hadn't previously encountered," said the BBC. This Neanderthal DNA might have given us "better adaptive capabilities outside of Africa," said Chris Stringer of London's Natural History Museum to the outlet. Early humans "had evolved in Africa, whereas the Neanderthals had evolved outside of Africa," and "by interbreeding with the Neanderthals, we got a quick fix to our immune systems."

When Band Aid recorded a single to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia, the supergroup famously sang: "Do they know it's Christmas time at all?"

But regardless of the much-critiqued lyrics, Ethiopia was one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity – before the UK. In 2019, a team of archaeologists in Ethiopia uncovered the oldest known Christian church in sub-Saharan Africa, near the modern-day border with Eritrea. They concluded it had been built in the fourth-century AD – around the time when Roman Emperor Constantine I legalised Christianity.

The discovery confirms that Christianity "arrived at an early date in an area nearly 3,000 miles from Rome", said the Smithsonian.

No Santa, no elves

Ethiopians follow the ancient Julian calendar, and like many other Orthodox Christians they celebrate Christmas on 7 January (or according to the Ge'ez Ethiopian calendar, the 29th day of Tahsas).

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church's celebration is known as Ganna, or Genna, and "celebrations last for weeks", said RoughGuides.

"Christianity is not new for Tigrayans, we are the first, no one is before us," one Ethiopian man who lives in Manchester told The Guardian. "But the way we celebrate Christmas is Orthodox," another added. "We don't celebrate Santa Claus and elves!"

A new outfit

Ganna is first and foremost a religious holiday; unlike in the West, Ethiopians do not typically exchange gifts. "Religious observances, feasting, and games are the focus of the season," said HowStuffWorks.

But one gift that children "eagerly await" is a new outfit to wear on Christmas Day, said World Vision. These are often shemmas – "a traditional dress made from thin white cotton with colourful embroidery and thread at the edges".

Ironically, when the Band Aid song was recorded during the 1983-85 famine, the nation was under a communist government that banned any religious festivals. So although Ethiopians very much knew it was Christmas when the song made waves around the world, they were not allowed to observe it.

'Am I my Spotify Wrapped? Spotify's algorithm makes me question its validity.'

Kofi Mframa at USA Today

Spotify Wrapped has seen "major success mainly because of our cultural obsession with self-discovery," says Kofi Mframa. But Spotify's "user-specific algorithm can create echo chambers that feed and refeed the same artists, songs, genres and overall 'vibes.'" When "our listening patterns are largely determined by algorithms" and the "echo chambers they create," Spotify Wrapped can "become less of a reflection of our own personal taste and more of a reflection of whatever Spotify allows in ear's reach."

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'Want to save your friendships? Take a page from the Founding Fathers.'

Alexandra Hudson at The Washington Post

The story of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams "illustrates the perils of allowing politics to supplant friendship and provides an important solution: taking political conversation off the table," says Alexandra Hudson. A "reasoned, spirited debate is central to a free and flourishing democracy," but "Jefferson and Adams learned the hard way that politics is not worth ending relationships over." So "this holiday season — and beyond — let's remember the secret to talking politics: Don't."

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'Trump should make Putin wince before they sit down to talk'

Mark Montgomery at Foreign Policy

Donald Trump "must change Putin's perspective that he has the upper hand, or Trump's diplomacy will backfire," says Mark Montgomery. Trump "should therefore formulate a maximum pressure campaign to convince Moscow to accept a good and lasting peace deal." By "keeping his promise to restore 'peace through strength,' Trump can give himself the best possible chance of stopping the bloodshed for good." But "any diplomatic effort will have to confront some unfortunate facts."

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'The UN has generations of Palestinian blood on its hands'

Zena Tahhan at The Nation

In the "case of Palestine, the U.N.'s role, contrary to what many believe, has been catastrophic," says Zena Tahhan. The U.N. has "historically operated as a tool for the imperial and colonial ambitions of the global powers that invented it." Palestinians are "fighting for their survival against an entire postwar global political order." The U.N.'s partition plan "served as the catalyst that set in motion the organized and systematic violent ethnic cleansing of Palestine."

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Ever since British archaeologist Howard Carter first peered into the tomb of ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, 100 years ago, the mystery of the boy king's death has captivated historians and amateurs alike.

That mystery recently "took another turn", said the Daily Express. Researchers propose that his eye-catching gold funerary mask may have been intended for someone else but the pharaoh's untimely death, less than 10 years after he ascended the throne aged 9, forced it to be quickly repurposed.

The earring holes on the mask suggest it may have been prepared for a "high-status" woman or child, according to the team at the University of York.

Two faces

Tutankhamun's death mask is "one of the most recognised images around the globe", said ArtNet. The artefact, "inlaid with a detailed mosaic of precious stones" and housed in Cairo's Grand Egyptian Museum, is "surely one of the world's most iconic objects" – and inextricably linked with the "Boy King".

But research suggests that the mask was intended for a "regal female burial" – perhaps Queen Nefertiti, his stepmother, who died before him. The theory "hinges" on the pierced ears.

The study puts forward the theory that the king "wouldn't have worn earrings beyond childhood", said Professor Joann Fletcher, in a documentary from 2022. When he died aged 20, he would "not have been portrayed with pierced ears". They were a "long-overlooked feature".

The gold used on his face is also "entirely different to the gold used on the rest of the mask". This suggests Tutankhamun's face was "effectively grafted on" to another mask of a previous, female ruler, said Fletcher, but the ears were left intact.

"I was sure the death mask was not specifically designed for King Tut," she said.

There are clues in the death mask about a "rushed" burial, said the Daily Mail. But archaeologists have also documented "blotches of paint" on the tomb wall, which point to it not having dried by the time the tomb was quickly sealed. The "lavish burial" was also much smaller than what would have been expected for such a pharaoh.

'No real basis'

The original burial place of Nefertiti has not yet been discovered but, in 2015, Egyptologist Aidan Dodson proposed that it lies behind a wall of Tutankhamun's tomb.

That would mean that the artefacts buried with her were "repurposed for Tutankhamun very early in his reign", Claire Isabella Gilmour, PhD candidate of archaeology at the University of Bristol, wrote in an article on The Conversation.

But remote-sensing investigations have since "debunked these claims". Analysis in the same year by a metal conservator showed the mask was made in two parts, but that was typical of how such masks were constructed. The analysis found "no trace of the face having been replaced". Other mummified kings also show pierced ears, so the ones on the gold mask "should come as no surprise".

I believe there is "no real basis for the York team's proposals", added Gilmour.

The fact there is such detailed debate proves that even a century after Tutankhamun's discovery, "the afterlife of the young king continues to inspire the public imagination and scholarship".