The History Book Club discussion

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A Submerged 7,000-Year-Old Discovery Shows the Great Potential of Underwater Archaeology

Stone tools scattered on the seafloor mark the oldest underwater site ever found on the continent.



Australia has a deep human history stretching back 65,000 years, but many of its oldest archaeological sites are now underwater. In an encouraging sign that Aboriginal artifacts and landscapes may actually be preserved offshore, archaeologists have discovered a 7,000-year-old site submerged along Australia's continental shelf, the first of its kind. Their discovery is outlined today in the journal PLoS One.

At the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, when glaciers melted and sea level rose, waters inundated one-third of Australia’s habitable land. As part of a project called Deep History of Sea Country, Jonathan Benjamin, a professor of maritime archaeology at Flinders University in Adelaide, led a team that searched for submerged sites off Murujuga (also known as the Dampier Archipelago), a dry and rocky coastal region in northwestern Australia.

This area has a wealth of inland archaeological sites, including more than one million examples of rock art. About 18,000 years ago, the shoreline of Murujuga would have extended another 100 miles further than the current coast. But Benjamin and his colleagues had little to go on when they began to search the offshore territory.

Remainder of article:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...

Source: Smithsonian

More:
https://www.express.co.uk/news/scienc...
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-aborigi...
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-aborigi...
https://theconversation.com/in-a-firs...

by Sarah Colley (no photo)

Very sad.

(Articles, videos and images follow but are not posted due to graphic details - though contained within the articles - this is a warning)

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 75th anniversary of atomic bombings
Published - 20 hours ago

It is 75 years since the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August, leading to the end of World War Two.



The article contains graphic images and details some people may find upsetting.

The recorded death tolls are estimates, but it is thought that about 140,000 of Hiroshima's 350,000 population were killed in the blast, and that at least 74,000 people died in Nagasaki.

The nuclear radiation released by the bombs caused thousands more people to die from radiation sickness in the weeks, months and years that followed.

Those who survived the bombings are known as "hibakusha". Survivors faced a horrifying aftermath in the cities, including psychological trauma.

The bombings brought about an abrupt end to the war in Asia, with Japan surrendering unconditionally to the Allies on 14 August 1945.

But critics have said that Japan was already on the brink of surrender.

Following the end of the fighting in Europe on 7 May 1945, the Allies told Japan to surrender by 28 July, but the deadline passed without them doing so.

An estimated 71,000 soldiers from Britain and the Commonwealth were killed in the war against Japan, including more than 12,000 prisoners of war who died in Japanese captivity.

On 6 August 1945 at 08:15 Japanese time, an American B-29 bomber plane named Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Remainder of article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-...

More:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-can...

Sources: BBC News

This week marks the 75th anniversary of World War Two formally coming to an end.

We will post some commemorative articles, videos, etc.

Mishal Husain: My grandfather’s war


Mishal Husain and her grandfather - BBC News

A crucial part of Britain’s war effort came from the soldiers of its empire – particularly the Indian Army, which by the end of the war had provided more than two million men. BBC presenter and journalist Mishal Husain’s grandfather was one of them.

Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-540...

Source: BBC News (article and image)

Cyril W. Spiegelhoff of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee leads a group of kneeling American soldiers in prayer in Cologne, Germany, in April 1945.Credit...Margaret Bourke-White/The Life Picture Collection, via Getty Images

BEYOND THE WORLD WAR II WE KNOW

We Are Still Living the Legacy of World War II

Act III of the war — After the War — is now simply part of our daily reality, in America and globally, writes Tom Hanks.

By Tom Hanks
Sept. 2, 2020

For our “Beyond the World War II We Know,” documenting lesser-known stories from the war, and to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of the war, we asked the actor Tom Hanks to write about the complicated narrative of the conflict — and its aftermath.

In the spring of 1939 — “Before the War,” as folks of that generation would say — the New York World’s Fair began a gloriously naïve celebration of “Mankind’s Progress” and visions of America’s future. President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the fair in a ceremony that was, no lie, broadcast on television. In fact, there were early versions of TVs on display at the fair, along with state-of-the-art railroad trains, airplanes, ocean liners, Crosley radios, a giant typewriter and the new Ford sedans fairgoers could drive themselves on the “Road of Tomorrow” — an upbeat adieu! to the Great Depression, to what was the first act of many American lives.

If you are a Boomer, born in, say, 1956, the adults you grew up around all framed their lives in a three-act structure, told like a biopic, narrated by an All-Knowing Chorus who bids us to, please, clear our minds of all we have seen and learned since 1945. To comprehend the full experience of World War II we must forget all we know.

In Act I (Before the War) most families did without — without enough food, without an extra pair of shoes, without going to a dentist. A father’s job, if he had one, might allow a life within modest means when modest means was an accomplishment.

Act I was characterized by a quest for progress: huge dams were built; federal programs improved lives; mass communication was as simple as listening to a radio; and the art and technology of motion pictures provided a cheap but wonderful escape.

At the same time, a child with a common cold could die of pneumonia in a few weeks.

Before the war, Americans faced one-thing-after-another-obstacles as the country was crippled by widespread poverty, overt racism and institutionalized discrimination. And yet, the 1939 fair proved that we the people remained bent on forming a more perfect union — and a better world.

As in all drama, bad omens abounded. At the 1939 fair, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had halls of their own. The Japanese hall — a replica of a Shinto Shrine — was “Dedicated to Eternal Peace and Friendship Between America and Japan.” Poland was represented, but within five months of the fair’s opening, its borders had been redrawn by Germany and the U.S.S.R.; by the end of the fair, there was no Polish pavilion because there was no longer a Poland.

By then, Germany had been operating its concentration camps for years. With Italy’s help, the nations of Europe and whole peoples were enslaved by Nazi terror. Imperial Japan had established a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” a cleaned-up name for what was actually an imperialist undertaking that included horrors like the Rape of Nanking.

Act II (During the War) began on a day of infamy just before Christmas, 1941, when Americans learned our Navy had a base at Pearl Harbor (in Hawaii, the dispatches felt obliged to add) which had been devastated by attacking Japanese planes. The pledge of eternal peace and friendship with America proved to be as permanent as what it was at the fair — writing on a wall.

“Well, you have to understand,” says the Chorus, “that was During the War, when time stood still in the hang-fire of stasis. Our equilibrium was swamped by civil strife. Americans were relegated to purgatory, between a victory and Heaven or a defeat and Hell.”

No questions posed in Act II had answers. How far would the field of battle extend? How many people were going to die, by starvation, by freezing, by drowning, by cannon or bomb — and who would those unfortunates be? If Pearl Harbor (in Hawaii, you say?) can be attacked, will Seattle be next? Or San Diego? If London can be set afire by Nazi bombers at night, imagine the flames when Boston is raided.

Conscientious, able-bodied Americans enlisted in the armed forces “for the duration of the war, plus six months,” as the draft messaging had it. The War Department had estimates for the number of casualties, schedules for how many weeks battles would go on, and long-term strategies for how the war would be won, but those were ballpark figures. By Christmas of 1943, the fighting was raging on both sides of the planet. The sayings that emerged were indicative of just how hazy the conflict’s end was: “Out of the sticks in ’46”; “Not done ’til ’51”; and even “Keep alive til ’55.”

Information came by newsreels and ever-changing maps, the dispatches of war correspondents, and, via the radio, the words of a calm, informed president. Luxuries were rare; commodities were rationed.

A common saying, to anyone selfish enough to complain, was “Don’t you know there is a war on?” which got a guffaw at the filling station where there was neither fuel nor tires. Hanging above factory shop floors were warnings that “He who relaxes is helping the Axis.” “Do your part” was a duty that most people lived up to.

That might all sound cute to modern ears, but the war years were anything but. Black markets sprang up. Japanese-Americans — U.S. citizens — were forced into detention camps at the cost of their livelihoods, freedom and dignity. The segregation of the armed forces was so systemic that violence against Black soldiers by white soldiers was not uncommon, though often hushed up.

Boys who had just graduated from high school — the classes of ’41-’44 — died in North Africa, in the mountains of Italy and on the coral reefs at Tarawa. Death-by-telegram came knocking at your neighbor’s door, if not yours.

From our seats in 2020, we know how this Second Act ends. We’ve seen the movie; it’s no surprise that Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains team up in the fog at the Casablanca airfield. But for those who tell of it — who survived the Second World War — the end of their second act was never scripted.

Three and a half years after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Allies had ended the Nazi reign, razed city after city, killed many Germans and exposed the barbarity of National Socialism. For millions, V-E Day — May 8, 1945 — was a dream come true, a joyful roar in a grand moment for humanity, a day of parades and peaceful flyovers with sailors kissing nurses in the streets.

If only V-E Day had been the conclusion to Act II. But to the thousands of Americans still slugging it out in the Pacific Theater (and their families back home), V-E Day warranted but a few paragraphs in Stars and Stripes, the armed forces newspaper. There was, still, a war going on in places with more of the unfamiliar names Americans had to search out in the World Atlas, more tiny specks of black ink in a blue map. Where, exactly, is Okinawa? Why is there a battle at some place called Balikpapan?

“For the duration” muted the ebullience of V-E Day, even as magazines and newspapers carried ads for TVs and new fashions. War bonds were still being advertised to “Help Finish the Job!” opposite pages with a puff piece extolling the charms of a recent debutante. Pretending the war was over was imagining it would miraculously disappear.

In the winter of 1944 and ’45 and spring of ’45, America’s new B-29 bombers dropped incendiaries on Japanese cities that ignited maelstroms of fire, burning to death thousands of men, women and children in hellscapes straight out of Dante. Plans for the invasion of Japan had been drafted that would dwarf the D-Day landings at Normandy the previous spring. American troops — many of them veterans from the battlefields of Europe — were being assembled on the West Coast. As late as the first week of August 1945, the end of World War II was but a patch of clear sky on the horizon. From hell to heaven in ’47? Maybe.

Without notice, in a moment beyond the comprehension of ordinary people, a most hideous week brought the war to a shocking, sudden end. In the blink of an eye, something reduced the city of Hiroshima into a landscape of molten glass, disappearing tens of thousands of its inhabitants, leaving no trace of them but their shadows. Three days later the city of Kokura would have suffered the same destruction, but smoke obscured the bomb drop, so Nagasaki, the backup target, was annihilated instead.

Days later, the Japanese emperor announced the end of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Just like that, the war was over, though upheaval continued in various parts of the globe. Though peace came much too late for millions of souls, the cue was called for the Act II curtain.

Japan agreed to surrender on Aug. 15, 1945. Everyone who remembers V-J Day carries the emotional baggage and physical muscle memory of the war like so many stones in their pockets. What they saw, how they served, their luck and good timing, the miracles and daily drudgery of those years, why they survived when so many didn’t, remain traced in their synapses.

Act II ended 75 years ago in a defining moment of unconditional surrender. Most of the victors are gone now, all those sailors and soldiers, airmen and nurses. Younger eyewitnesses to the war are passing on. Those of us alive now acknowledge, sadly, that Act III — After the War — which began before the ink was dry on the Articles of Surrender — will never end, not in any equal measure of satisfaction. Disinformation is now a weapon and a currency. Tyrants reign around the world. Wars are waged in stalemates. Seventy-five years ago, it seemed that a grand contract had been agreed upon by all the nations of the world, that our common efforts had created a common purpose, born of the horrible lessons learned in World War II.

The Times’s World War II project is, in part, about both Act II, the culmination of it, anyway, and Act III, the war’s endlessly complicated aftermath. There are too many actors competing for the role of that all-knowing Chorus. The cast of characters is far too large, for it includes everyone reading these words.

Source: The New York Times

The U.S.S. Missouri and Allied planes in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945, the official day of the Japanese surrender. Credit...National Archives

Sources for the above (52 and 53): The New York Times, National Archives

Massive mystery holes appear in Siberian tundra — and could be linked to climate change

By Katie Hunt, CNN
Updated 1:10 PM ET, Fri September 4, 2020




In August 2020, the RAS Institute of Oil and Gas Problems, supported by the local Yamal authorities, conducted a major expedition to the new crater. Skoltech researchers were part of the final stages of that expedition. Second photo is aerial view. Credit: Evgeny Chuvilin

Link to article:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/04/world/...

Source: CNN

Could anyone recommend a good book that would give an historical context to the current Russia/USSR and Ukraine conflict that is ideally 1) widely available, 2) readable by a non-historian, 3) 400 pages or less, 4) written within the last 10 years, and 5) not written by a Russian citizen at the time of writing?

I have reviewed the Russia thread and have noted a few of those books that seem most relevant to today's conflict. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Evan wrote: "Could anyone recommend a good book that would give an historical context to the current Russia/USSR and Ukraine conflict that is ideally 1) widely available, 2) readable by a non-historian, 3) 400 ..."
Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution by Victor Sebestyen is not about Ukraine, but shows us that the current Russian aggression is not unique to Ukraine. The book includes many instances, thoughts and quotes from 1956 that are taking place and being said today about Ukraine.

Thank you Howard for your response to Evan regarding his inquiry about a book giving historical context to the current conflict in the Ukraine. The book you suggested sounds quite interesting.

Just remember to include the book cover and the author's photo to be consistent with our guidelines for citations, like so:

by Victor Sebestyen

Howard wrote: "Evan wrote: "Could anyone recommend a good book that would give an historical context to the current Russia/USSR and Ukraine conflict that is ideally 1) widely available, 2) readable by a non-histo..."
Six books recommended by The Economist in its March 19 edition are: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy; Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine by Anna Reid; The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution by Marci Shore; Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum; Death and the Penguin by Andrey Karkov, translated by George Bird; Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel.

Thank you for your response to Evan regarding books on the Ukraine, Danae, all very interesting selections.

Again, please make sure that your book citations are consistent with the guidelines as follows:

by Serhii Plokhy
by Anna Reid (no photo)
by Marci Shore
by Anne Applebaum
by Andrey Kurkov

Thank you.

Lorna wrote: "Thank you for your response to Evan regarding books on the Ukraine, Danae, all very interesting selections.

Again, please make sure that your book citations are consistent with the guidelines as f..."

Sorry Lorna. I forgot the guidelines. It is the first time that I have recommended books.

Not a problem, Danae. And thank you again for your excellent suggestions.

Thank you so much, Howard and Danae! I greatly appreciate your recommendations. I will add them to my reading list.

Ah yes, I think we need a thread concerning the current conflict. As sad as that is.

Thank you everyone for your posts here.

Everyone - I enjoy the conversation back and forth.