bigsis222:

Allegiance closed five days before the anniversary of this #DayOfRemembrance.

whosafraidofcharlottewolff:

Happy birthday, Janusz Korczak- you would have been 134 today. 

For anyone who does not know who he is, please keep reading. He is by far my favorite historical figure, and perhaps one of my favorite people ever to have existed. Few great people are also good, but he was. 

There is no one in the world I admire more. Before World War II, he was known in Poland as a doctor-turned-teacher who was the first to advocate the belief that children were worthy of respect, their feelings were as valid as the feelings of adults, that they deserved to be talked to instead of being talked down to.  He spent his life radically changing  and modernizing the Polish education system, teaching at almost every level, and writing children’s books and books of educational theory (the latter he mostly denounced, saying that you shouldn’t ‘try to become teachers overnight with educational theory in your head and psychological bookkeeping in your heart’).  He was quirky and awkward around adults - there are many hilarious  accounts of his dealings with most people- but no one understood kids better.  In his old age, he opened orphanages and implemented his ideas there. 

When World War II started, as a Jew, he was no longer allowed to work in Gentile orphanages. So instead he ran a Jewish one in Warsaw. At the beginning of the war, he practiced active resistance,  running down streets with giant flags of Polish and Jewish pride at eighty years old, and refusing to wear the Star of David. Only out of concern for what his children would do without him, did he stop. Once he and the orphanage were forced into the Warsaw ghetto, he resisted by making the orphanage the happiest place in the ghetto, full of life and theater and love, as he tried to make life as normal as possible- and at the same time, try to prepare the children for the worst.

When the worst came and the children were to be rounded up to be killed, despite many attempts by the Jewish Underground to rescue him, and despite not having to go himself as an adult, he went with them to their deaths, giving up his life so that he could give them a few last moments of comfort before they died. Observers say that the children were calm and even happy as they walked, because of Korczak.

You are my hero, Janusz Korczak. Rest in peace.

“One does not leave a sick child at night, and one does not leave children at a time like this.” - Janusz Korczak

unhistorical:

February 19, 1942: Franklin D. Roosevelt authorizes Executive Order 9066.

The presidential executive order, issued in the wake of the United States’ official entry into World War II, granted to the Secretary of War the authority to “prescribe military areas… from which any or all persons may be excluded” in order to provide “every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage.” It formed the basis for broad racial policies that imposed curfews, restrictions, and eventually internment on approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans (70,000 of them citizens) living on the West Coast. Certain restrictions and internment also applied to several thousand individuals of German and Italian descent, but support for the indiscriminate removal of these groups lacked the hysterical vigor with which the government - and ordinary citizens - accused Japanese-Americans of espionage and treason.

This was not a spontaneous act; the FBI and military intelligence had, by the 1930s, already begun to compile lists of potentially dangerous civilians, many of whom were detained in the months between Pearl Harbor and the executive order. Executive Order 9066 granted these efforts expansive and systematic dimensions by way of murky wording which made no explicit reference to any ethnic group, but nevertheless existed to provide authority for the wholesale removal of entire populations from their homes. Washington and many American citizens likely shared WDC Commander John DeWitt’s shrug that “A Jap’s a Jap.” The Supreme Court agreed as well; it affirmed the constitutionality of curfews in Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) and later the entire order in Korematsu v. United States (1944). In Korematsu, dissenting justice Frank Murphy labeled the majority ruling a “legalization of racism.”

Nevertheless, the government soon shipped over a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans to different prison camps across the country. The most widely-known of these camps is Manzanar, where, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, some 10,000 prisoners lived, and maintained their own prison, for three years. After the end of the war, the War Relocation Authority allocated to each incarceree travel money providing for their return home, but by that time many had suffered irreplaceable material loss (of abandoned property) and profound psychological harm. 

Executive Order 9066 was repealed in 1976, and a 1980 government study concluded that the internment had little legitimate security rationale, that its reasoning instead lay on grounds of “racial prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership.” Reparations payments and apologies to surviving internees began in 1990.

eretzyisrael:

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

January 27 marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. 

In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD), an annual day of commemoration to honor the victims of the Nazi era.

From 1940 to 1945, more than 1.1 million men, women and children were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp. 90% of them were Jews. All were innocent. Today, we remember

Never Again.

tonystarking:

Agent Carter addresses the postwar fate of the female workforce:

During the Second World War, women proved that they could do “men’s” work, and do it well. With men away to serve in the military, women made airplanes and warships, munitions and tanks, working in technical and scientific fields for the first time. They enjoyed the work, the good pay, the opportunities for advancement, and the excitement of working with other women and men on important jobs.

Most wanted to continue working after the war ended, yet women’s employment was only encouraged as long as the war was on. Once the war was over, federal and civilian policies replaced women workers with men. Many were fired from their jobs so the returning veterans could be re-employed. (x + x)

thesylverlining:

glockgal:

madlori:

Women firefighters douse flames during the Pearl Harbor attack.

Oh hay look women of colour were an integral part of the ‘cool’ part of history too, how about that.  They were like. Doing stuff that supposedly only heroic white dudes had done. That makes women valid participants in collective history now, right? Right? This is in high school history books now, right? Right? Huh?

It reminds me of that one famous painting/sculpture of the soldiers raising the flag

I like this one a lot better.

gregferrell:

maleinstructor:

In the heat of battle, photographer Horace Bristol captured one of the most unique and erotic photos of WWII.

Bristol photographed a young crewman of a US Navy “Dumbo” PBY rescue mission, manning his gun after having stripped naked and jumped into the water of Rabaul Harbor to rescue a badly burned Marine pilot. The Marine was shot down while bombing the Japanese-held fortress of Rabaul.

“…we got a call to pick up an airman who was down in the Bay. The Japanese were shooting at him from the island, and when they saw us they started shooting at us. The man who was shot down was temporarily blinded, so one of our crew stripped off his clothes and jumped in to bring him aboard. He couldn’t have swum very well wearing his boots and clothes. As soon as we could, we took off. We weren’t waiting around for anybody to put on formal clothes. We were being shot at and wanted to get the hell out of there. The naked man got back into his position at his gun in the blister of the plane.”

“And well, there was his butt, and I had a camera. I mean I AM a historian.”

Common terms of modern US military history as applied to the generations who fought our wars.

petermorwood:

The aftermath of battle on the Eastern Front, 70+ years on. Left alone, Nature absorbs (mostly Russian) helmets and weapons into itself…