Past is Present: History in the News

Even amid the chaos of the uprising’s first hours, Manuel’s capture was a priority. In his small village of Villarroya de la Sierra, Manuel was beloved for his work as the town veterinarian, but he was also the founder of the local chapter of an anarchist labor union. It was evidence enough for a priest, Father Bienvenido Moreno, to condemn Manuel as “the cause of all the evil that has come to the people.”

San Felipe or San Phillip, whatever your choice, is more than just a Sealy suburb. The historic hamlet was home to the Father of Texas, Stephen F. Austin and the seat of Texas government for most of the Texas Revolution. If your detour into San Felipe were to take you into a time warp, you'd likely encounter everybody who was anybody in early-day Texas...

On April 30, 1945, as Allied forces converged on the capital of Nazi Germany, Hitler killed himself inside his Führerbunker. Days later, his remains were captured by the Red Army and were subsequently locked behind the Iron Curtain for decades.

This proved fodder enough for conspiracy theorists, who wanted to argue that Hitler did not die in the bunker, but rather managed, somehow, to escape like other high-ranking Nazi officials...

An artificial intelligence network has designed new levels for the original Doom video game. The technique could be used to create future video games, more quickly and less expensively, researchers said.

A history of geography and cartography with an emphasis on the development of geographical ideas and mapmaking from antiquity to the modern era.

Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.

In 1545, freshly refitted to carry a greater number of heavy cannon, the warship Mary Rose sailed into battle against a French fleet north of the Isle of Wight. The debate over what happened next is still heated, but the most accepted version is that the added weight of the cannons made the Mary Rose sit almost a meter lower in the water than before. When the ship made a sharp turn—or perhaps when a sudden gust of wind caught the sails—water poured into open gunports, flooding the ship. Nets in place over the deck, meant to repel enemy boarders, ended up trapping more than 500 sailors aboard as the ship went down.

In the powerful, perestroika-era film Repentance, the corpse of a Stalin-like local official mysteriously appears again and again, despite efforts by locals to bury him and turn their backs on the consequences of his crimes.

Now the town of Kusa in Chelyabinsk Oblast is experiencing something eerily similar, with the specter of the late Soviet dictator appearing unexpectedly from the past and tearing open old wounds.