Back in December of 1980, Mark Hammill was just about doing everything he could to promote “The Empire Strikes Back”. From taking pictures in Holland… to singing in German in this bizarre 1980 Star Wars Parody: How do you say “may the force be with you” in German?
MC Escher: 10 Things You Should Know About The Artist of Impossible Worlds
His artwork has been reproduced countless times in pop culture and you’ve probably seen it somewhere even if you have never heard of MC Escher. Maurits Cornelis Escher was an artist with a unique perspective and a keen sense of geometry and mathematics which he used to create impossible worlds and three-dimensional optical illusions. Despite…
April 21 1918: The Notorious Red Baron is Killed in Action
In the skies above the Somme River in France, The Red Baron is killed by Allied fire on April 21, 1918. The notorious ace-of-aces of the first world war had 80 air combat victories and was considered invincible. His name was Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen. Watch Real film footage of the Red Baron (Manfred…
April 20, 1980 – Fidel Castro Lets 125,000 Cubans Emigrate to the U.S.
On April 20, 1980, Fidel Castro Announced that anyone who wanted to leave Cuba and emigrate to the U.S. could do so. This resulted in the Mariel Boatlift, a mass migration with the use of boats from port Mariel in Cuba to the United State. By the time the U.S. and Cuban government reached an…
How a Harlem Hellfighter spread the ‘Jazz Germ’ throughout Europe after WWI
In the afterglow of the armistice in 1918 that ended World War I, Europe, and particularly the city of Paris, exhibited a wild exuberance. In mid-January 1919, future civil rights pioneer and American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) officer Charles Hamilton Houston encapsulated the mood and sounds of European joy: “Paris is taken away with [jazz] and…
Nikos Kazantzakis: The author who caused chaos three decades after his death courtesy of Martin Scorsese.
By James A. Haught In 1988, fundamentalist Christians in several nations vented rage and violence because a movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” portrayed Jesus as a wavering human, lusting for the prostitute Mary Magdalene. A Parisian theater showing the film was firebombed, sending 13 people to hospitals. Another at Besancon, France, suffered a similar…
James Baldwin: America’s Greatest Black Writer Was Once a Preacher Who Renounced Religion as a Sham
By James A. Haught James Baldwin, arguably America’s greatest black writer, was a popular Pentecostal preacher in Harlem at age 14 — but at 17 he renounced religion as a sham. Years later, he described his boyhood transformation in an essay titled “Down at the Cross,” first published in The New Yorker, then reprinted in…
Was Winston Churchill a Racist?
Was Winston Churchill a racist? British resource shows the dark side of Churchill’s legacy and exposes him as a genocidal racist. In 1943, Winston Churchill, then prime minister, was speaking to the British Cabinet about the famine that was raging through Bengal, India. Churchill told the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery, that the…
The Statement made to the FBI by activist John Lewis regarding Selma’s “Bloody Sunday”: March 8, 1965.
Between 1961 and 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) held a voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, a town known to suppress African American voting.
74 Seconds After Liftoff, Challenger Explodes: January 28, 1986
The space shuttle Challenger exploded in a ball of fire shortly after it left the launching pad, and all seven astronauts on board were lost. The date was January 28, 1986 The worst accident in the history of the American space program was witnessed by thousands of spectators who watched in wonder, then horror, as…
