How a Long-Lost Perfume Got a Second Life After 150 Years Underwater – Atlas Obscura

A team of divers and archaeologists discovered the 19th-century fragrance in a shipwreck off the coast of Bermuda.

AFTER AN INTENSE STORM PUMMELED Bermuda in February 2011, the island’s custodian of historic wrecks  Philippe Max Rouja went to do a coastal survey and spotted a partially exposed bow of a boat. The bow belonged to the Civil War blockade runner Mary Celestia, which was en route to North Carolina’s Confederate forces when it sank in 1864.

Source: How a Long-Lost Perfume Got a Second Life After 150 Years Underwater – Atlas Obscura

The Choctaw Nation’s Extraordinary Gift to Ireland – Turtle Bunbury

In the summer of 2015, Kindred Spirits, a sculpture by Alex Pentek was unveiled at Bailic Park in Midleton, County Cork, to commemorate the Choctaw Nation and their kindness to the Irish. The beautiful work comprises of an empty bowl made from nine giant stainless-steel eagle feathers. Gary Batton, present chief of the Choctaw Nation, attended the unveiling and declared: “These are great healing moments. A great moment for us to show our respect back to them as nation to nation. A chance to stand up and say, ‘A, Chata Sia.’ ‘Yes, I am Choctaw.’”

Source: The Choctaw Nation’s Extraordinary Gift to Ireland – Turtle Bunbury

The “wrong” sort of survivor?

rebel notes

The controversies that emerged this week, over the  harsh words about Israel uttered by

Marek Edelman

a Holocaust survivor at a meeting eight years ago, have made me think about Marek Edelman, the last surviving member of the command group who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  He died in 2009. I was fortunate and privileged to meet him briefly at a conference in Warsaw in 1997. In the current “debates” I have no doubt that in some people’s warped minds he too would be derided and disdained as the “wrong kind of Holocaust survivor”.

Edelman was a Bundist (Jewish socialist) – a lifelong anti-nationalist and internationalist,

Mustafa Barghouti

and opponent of Zionism. He remained in Poland – his homeland – after the war, fought against the post-war Stalinist regime from a left-wing and democratic position, and continued to struggle for a better and more humane world. His work in this…

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Thank You, David: One ugly woman’s message to David Starkey – F Yeah History

THIS WEEK HISTORIAN DAVID STARKEY, WAS QUOTED AS SAYING: ‘
‘THE ONLY CHANCE I HAVE OF BEING ON TV AGAIN IS IF I WERE VERY UGLY. I THINK ONLY OLD, UGLY WOMEN CAN GET ON TV. LIKE MARY BEARD,’
What a delight!…

via Thank You, David: One ugly woman’s message to David Starkey – F Yeah History

B-17 Wreckage Discovered in English Channel Forces Rerouting of Undersea Cable

The 1GW Nemo cable being placed at the bottom of the English Channel will need to be rerouted after the discovery of a World War II bomber.

As the Belgian transmission operator, Elia, announced, the US bomber was discovered during preparation for the 140 km link. The team was using multi-beam echo sounders, side scan sonar and…

via B-17 Wreckage Discovered in English Channel Forces Rerouting of Undersea Cable

Elisabeth Eidenbenz

Elisabeth Eidenbenz  ( 1913 – 2011 ) –  Was a Swiss nurse who set up a maternity home for pregnant Spanish refugee mothers in SW France. She also flouted Swiss neutrality and risked her life to offer a haven to Jewish mothers escaping the Nazi Gestapo…

via Elisabeth Eidenbenz |

Maya Angelou, Malcolm X & Cuba

It was 1965 in Accra, the capital city of Ghana. Maya Angelou had been set up there for a few years working as a journalist. It was a long way from her birthplace in St Louis (Missouri), but she enjoyed life in Africa.

One day in January, her son, Guy, got home from school to find a feast of fried chicken – his mum’s speciality – laid out. But that wasn’t the most striking thing in…

via Maya Angelou, Malcolm X & Cuba

Anti-Brexit historians must dare to be political | THE Opinion

As a child of 1980s West Germany my prevailing personal memories of growing up are of positive change: the rejection of fascism and the advancement of democracy and equality.

Yet I see today that those advances are nowhere near as deeply rooted in Western societies as I had come to assume.

From Brexit to Trump to current developments in Poland, hard-won progress is…

via Anti-Brexit historians must dare to be political | THE Opinion

Mary Wilkins Ellis – solentaviatrix

If you watched RAF at 100 with actor Ewan McGregor and his former RAF pilot brother Colin on BBC1 at the weekend, you will have seen the siblings interview this indomitable lady alongside the late Joy Lofthouse. She is a year older than the RAF. And she lives a few miles down the road from me on the Isle of Wight.

Mary Wilkins Ellis in ATA uniform 1941

Mary Wilkins grew up in a farming family in Brize Norton, Oxfordshire. She learned to fly at Witney and Oxford Aero Club, where the directors were Mrs. Beatrice Macdonald and Mr. K. E. Walters.

On 15th March 1939, she flew B.A. Swallow G-AFGE for the first time. She flew it again…

via Mary Wilkins Ellis – solentaviatrix

This Battle of Britain pilot is set to fly a Spitfire again at the age of 96

As the Royal Air Force prepares to celebrate its centenary, Second World War Spitfire ace Allan Scott tells Dean Kirby why he is still flying high at the age of 96.

At his bungalow in the heart of rural Shropshire, Squadron Leader Allan Scott is gazing at a portrait of himself as a young man wearing the distinctive blue uniform of the Royal Air Force.

The face that beam’s back at the 96-year-old is…

via This Battle of Britain pilot is set to fly a Spitfire again at the age of 96 – The i – iweekend #26

Obituary: Millie Dunn Veasey, pioneering sergeant turned rights activist – BBC News

6888TH MONUMENT COMMITTEE Millie Dunn Veasey and her unit’s contribution to WW2 was “huge”, one expert said

via Obituary: Millie Dunn Veasey, pioneering sergeant turned rights activist – BBC News

All in the details – A visit to Haddon Hall II

Other than the Elizabethan connection, we really had, at that point, no idea why we had felt the need to visit Haddon Hall. We knew little about the place, apart from the legend of the romantic elopement of Dorothy Vernon and the fact that ‘ye harmytt’ of Cratcliffe Crags had supplemented his hermit’s income by supplying rabbits to…

via All in the details – A visit to Haddon Hall II | Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo

A visit to Haddon Hall | Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo

The Vernons mentioned are my forbears!

Every time we had driven past Haddon Hall, I had the feeling we needed to go there. The feeling bugged me a bit, as stately homes have not really been part of our research. We tend to be drawn to the landscape and sites things five thousand years old, rather than five hundred, so I could not see why…

via A visit to Haddon Hall | Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo

Military morality: the problem of scruples. – SeanMunger.com

One of the blogs I read, day in and day out, is Padre Steve’s. Steve is a military chaplain with 30+ years experience who has served in Iraq and knows the real face of war inside and out. He is also a historian who has studied and written extensively on Germany in the Weimar and Nazi periods, especially about its military establishment. Very often–in fact, in almost every article–Padre Steve sounds a clear historical warning that the United States is going down exactly the same road of totalitarianism that Germany experienced in the 1920s and 1930s. Steve appears to be a voice in the wilderness, sounding…

via Military morality: the problem of scruples. – SeanMunger.com

Untold Stories of England’s Militant Suffragettes – Atlas Obscura

Emmeline Pankhurst’s hunger-strike medal. © MUSEUM OF LONDON

Almost a hundred years ago, in February 1918, English women were granted the right to vote. To celebrate…

via Untold Stories of England’s Militant Suffragettes – Atlas Obscura