Jump to content

The History Thread

Dindeleux

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 207
  • Created
  • Last Reply
Dindeleux

Dindeleux

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Had to do my usual 1 line open post but this is a thread for people to talk about history.  I am a bit history fan but really only from about 1850 up to the end of the cold war.  Anything further back than that I tend to lose interest in as I find it hard to really think of what life was like.

My favourite historical period is the 1945-1990 political challenges after WW2 and of course including the cold war.  Appreciate that this is quite modern history.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo

Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, Dindeleux said:

Had to do my usual 1 line open post but this is a thread for people to talk about history.  I am a bit history fan but really only from about 1850 up to the end of the cold war.  Anything further back than that I tend to lose interest in as I find it hard to really think of what life was like.

Ten to seven was only a couple of hours ago.

ETA: Scandinavians everywhere interests me. Amazing to think the shit they were up to 1000 plus years ago.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
chomp my root

chomp my root

Posted
Posted

Who's going to run the book on how long this thread gets hijacked by some Che fecker.

To ensure its not me I'll toss in that I'm also a big fan of modern history, with hindsight a lot of it was inevitable but that's the beauty of hindsight I guess. History is written by the winners anyway.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Silverton End

Silverton End

Posted
Posted

I find some of the Cold War stuff interesting, in 2009 we were in Berlin for the 30th anniversary of The Wall coming down.

Huge celebrations.

There was a concert and fireworks @ Brandenburg Gate in the evening, before that though, a line of huge 'sections of wall' like large dominoes, designed by schools, youth clubs etc & painted or with messages on them snaked through the city, where the original Wall stood & at the appropriate time they fell in sequence, like dominoes.

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
NotThePars

NotThePars

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Dindeleux said:

Had to do my usual 1 line open post but this is a thread for people to talk about history.  I am a bit history fan but really only from about 1850 up to the end of the cold war.  Anything further back than that I tend to lose interest in as I find it hard to really think of what life was like.

My favourite historical period is the 1945-1990 political challenges after WW2 and of course including the cold war.  Appreciate that this is quite modern history.

 

My History dissertation is likely going to be on US drone warfare so I wouldn't worry about the Cold War being too modern. :lol:

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Shotgun

Shotgun

Posted
Posted

I really wish I'd paid more attention to history in school, particularly in the later years when we studied 20th Century history up to almost the present day (at the time - mid/late 70's.)

You could pretty much connect the dots from WWI to WWII, to the Cold War and on from there. With the benefit of hindsight it was so easy to see the inevitability of it all. Santayana's quote about "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." is very true and it's frustrating to see so many modern politicians and commentators refusing to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Aye, let's just drop some bombs on the middle-east. That'll sort things out.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
chomp my root

chomp my root

Posted
Posted
55 minutes ago, Shotgun said:

I really wish I'd paid more attention to history in school, particularly in the later years when we studied 20th Century history up to almost the present day (at the time - mid/late 70's.)

You could pretty much connect the dots from WWI to WWII, to the Cold War and on from there. With the benefit of hindsight it was so easy to see the inevitability of it all. Santayana's quote about "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." is very true and it's frustrating to see so many modern politicians and commentators refusing to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Aye, let's just drop some bombs on the middle-east. That'll sort things out.

 

Sometimes the 'dots' are fed to us with that good old hindsight. Up to WW2 the winners got a big load of compo from the losers in one way or another. WW2 tried something else and while it didn't directly affect my (or I'm guessing most the generations that post on here) it cost a b*****ding fortune to fight and we got hee-haw from it while building up the countries we had just spent that fortune to phuq over. Roll on a few years and Germany and Japan are financial powerhouses, Italy, well its still Italy. I suppose we've not had a European war of any significance (to 'us') which is good but  it was certainly an avant garde (but not surprising considering the Germans reaction to WW1) approach to the whole warry thing. Took the UK  a long time to pay off the debt, I think we flogged our gold reserves to do it under Gordon Brown as the Chancellor but I'm not a hundred percent on that. 

Loads of "look how silly they were back then" moments, we (the UK) gave a working example of the Jet engine to the Russians to try and sell them some, they reverse engineered it and came up with the MiG19 which caused havoc in Korea. We didn't mean it though, just trying to drum up a bit of business, still, some will judge us for it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Herman Hessian

Herman Hessian

Posted
Posted

i fucking love history; the best thing that's happened to me this year is finally getting hold of volume one of a four-book set of very studious, analytical tomes about the hundred years war - i've had the other three for a while but - obviously - couldn't read them without the first one; just waiting until i have about six weeks free to plough through the three and a half thousand pages of intensely-researched, deeply tedious, immaculately presented stuff - marvellous

mrs h was a bit perplexed when she asked me what i'd do if we ever dropped a shit-load of money on the lottery - like, a few million quid; unfortunately for her aspirations of a life of cossetted luxury in the bahamas, i'd rather underwrite a proper archaeological research project to establish *exactly* where the Battle of Hastings took place; staggers me that the location of the single most influential battle in  english/british history is still open to conjecture; thousands of men were butchered and yet no-one knows where the burial pits are - amazing; look at the excavations around the funereal pits at the site of towton and the knowledge that has been forthcoming from the analysis there - forensic archaeology revealing exactly what sort of vicious pointy metal shit killed who, and how it happened; the discovery of Richard III under a car park in Leicester - how amazing is that - the burial place of an english king who was killed in battle - f**k's sake !

i totally get the devoted following that stuff like lord of the rings and whatever has around the world with the dramatic storylines and the heroes and the battles and stuff, but we had that sort of shit going on right where we live - from bannockburn to halidon hill and neville's cross, real people, big axes, bits chopped off, longbows, all of which made us what we are today - just extraordinary !

and - breathe.......

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Tony Ferrino

Tony Ferrino

Posted
Posted
18 minutes ago, Herman Hessian said:

i fucking love history; the best thing that's happened to me this year is finally getting hold of volume one of a four-book set of very studious, analytical tomes about the hundred years war - i've had the other three for a while but - obviously - couldn't read them without the first one; just waiting until i have about six weeks free to plough through the three and a half thousand pages of intensely-researched, deeply tedious, immaculately presented stuff - marvellous

mrs h was a bit perplexed when she asked me what i'd do if we ever dropped a shit-load of money on the lottery - like, a few million quid; unfortunately for her aspirations of a life of cossetted luxury in the bahamas, i'd rather underwrite a proper archaeological research project to establish *exactly* where the Battle of Hastings took place; staggers me that the location of the single most influential battle in  english/british history is still open to conjecture; thousands of men were butchered and yet no-one knows where the burial pits are - amazing; look at the excavations around the funereal pits at the site of towton and the knowledge that has been forthcoming from the analysis there - forensic archaeology revealing exactly what sort of vicious pointy metal shit killed who, and how it happened; the discovery of Richard III under a car park in Leicester - how amazing is that - the burial place of an english king who was killed in battle - f**k's sake !

i totally get the devoted following that stuff like lord of the rings and whatever has around the world with the dramatic storylines and the heroes and the battles and stuff, but we had that sort of shit going on right where we live - from bannockburn to halidon hill and neville's cross, real people, big axes, bits chopped off, longbows, all of which made us what we are today - just extraordinary !

and - breathe.......

 

+1

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Cardinal Richelieu

Cardinal Richelieu

Posted
Posted

Best quote about history comes from Alan Partridge's book Nomad. 

Quote

Technically, "thank ye" is Elizabethan but most people will understand it, with the possible exception of tradesmen and those, if any, who deny the existence of history

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...