A Day In History brings to you the unsaid, weird, and ugly parts of history that are not taught in textbooks, along with some more hopeful sections of our pa…
13:5916K views · 1w ago · 13:59
They went hiking, sang around campfires, and made friends. For millions of girls in Nazi Germany, the League of German Girls offered a chance to get away from home and feel part of something. It also taught them who mattered, who didn’t, and why loyalty to Hitler came before everything else.
19:32162K views · 3w ago · 19:32
When Kim Il Sung took power in North Korea, the biggest threat to him wasn’t an army. It was the small group of people who could read, write and think for themselves. In 1945, fewer than one in a hundred Koreans held a college degree. These were the economists, engineers, teachers, journalists and writers you would need to build a new country. Kim saw them as rivals.
25:07154K views · 3w ago · 25:07
At first, things went well. Eventually, thousands of people—many of them small, hungry, scared children, were going to make noise. There will be confusion. And then there is the enemy, always watching and listening. The breakout attempt was a long shot. Soon, confusion broke out among the Greeks. Someone allegedly yelled, “GO BACK!” Some froze; others went forward; others tried to get back into the city.
20:0866K views · 1mo ago · 20:08
Even after the fall of the communist government in 1991, when more information became available, Ethiopia's "Red Terror" became one of the least-known atrocities of the 20th Century. The violence, like violence everywhere, did not emerge out of nowhere.
17:0447K views · 1mo ago · 17:04
In Cambodia in the late 1970s, this man would have attracted immediate suspicion. He spoke fluent French, had studied engineering in Europe, and had spent his youth surrounded by intellectuals, reading foreign political books and debating revolutionary theory. Under the Khmer Rouge, those were exactly the kinds of things that could get someone arrested. There was, however, one important difference. The authorities could not arrest him because he was the authority.
18:0037K views · 1mo ago · 18:00
Che Guevara is remembered as one of the most recognizable revolutionary figures in modern history. But before the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, guerrilla warfare, and the famous photograph that turned him into a global icon, Ernesto “Che” Guevara trained to become a doctor.
23:46123K views · 1mo ago · 23:46
In 1957 China, millions of intellectuals learned the same lesson, though with far more serious consequences. After encouraging criticism of the Communist Party and promising that honest opinions and ideas would be welcomed, Mao abruptly reversed course.
25:1111K views · 1mo ago · 25:11
It started as an investigation into modified guns. 51 days later, 76 people were burning alive. The Waco Siege of 1993 is one of the most infamous events in American law enforcement history for all the wrong reasons. The government blamed the radical religious group, the Branch Davidians, and their leader David Koresh for resisting arrest and setting the fire to destroy themselves.
16:19183K views · 2mo ago · 16:19
By 2011, Muammar Gaddafi had ruled the huge North African country of Libya with an iron fist. That October, the Libyan dictator was found hiding in a drainpipe near his hometown of Sirte and beaten to death. The killing was captured on video for the world to see – to know that the hated dictatorship was over.
18:20554K views · 2mo ago · 18:20
In the late 1990s, I had the good fortune to have met a man who had piloted a P-47 Thunderbolt in Europe after D-Day, and he told me his story: Sometime in the fall/early winter of 1944, as the Allied armies in Europe waited for a break in the weather to advance into Germany, my friend survived a mid-air collision with a German fighter plane. Bailing out, he saw he was going to be in trouble when he landed.
19:1035K views · 2mo ago · 19:10
The war between Iran and Israel has never been fought only with missiles, drones and soldiers. For years, another war has been taking place in the shadows. Assassinations, sabotage, cyberattacks, stolen nuclear documents, intelligence networks and suspected Mossad operations have turned Iran into one of the most dangerous espionage battlegrounds in the world.
21:4940K views · 2mo ago · 21:49
For centuries, the Ottoman Empire was one of the most powerful forces on Earth. It controlled Constantinople, dominated huge parts of the Mediterranean and Balkans, and ruled over millions of Christians. But behind the palaces, military victories and famous sultans is a much darker history.
17:5514K views · 2mo ago · 17:55
On the night of December 26th, 2020, a decorated Green Beret with a flawless twelve-year record walked into a bowling alley in Rockford, Illinois and opened fire on strangers. He later said he had no idea where he was. His name was Duke Webb, and his story is one of five in this video that share the same invisible cause.
Topics: Ryan Larkin: The Silent Killer · Floyd Thompson: Nine Years in Captivity · Duke Webb: The Injury Untreated · Billy Lavigne: Operator Syndrome · The Fort Bragg Epidemic
58:3711K views · 3mo ago · 58:37
Che Guevara was shot in a Bolivian schoolhouse in October 1967, and the soldiers cut off his hands to prove he was dead. Muammar Gaddafi was pulled out of a drainage pipe outside Sirte in 2011 and killed by the crowd that found him. Nicolae Ceaușescu was condemned by a one-hour trial on Christmas Day 1989 and shot against an infirmary wall in Târgoviște before the paratroopers were given the order.
16:445.5K views · 3mo ago · 16:44
The United States built weapons it had never used, and then needed to know what they would do to a human being. So it used its own soldiers to find out. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, tens of thousands of American servicemen were exposed to nerve agents, blister gases, live bacteria, psychoactive drugs, and real nuclear detonations, often without being told what they were being given or what it would do to them.
Topics: Desert Rock Exercises · Edgewood Arsenal · Mustard Gas Experiments · Operation Whitecoat · Project SHAD
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