Harry’s Place

In a recent post about paleoconservative Pat Buchanan’s latest book– about Churchill, Hitler and World War II– I noted with some puzzlement his opinion that a hands-off policy by Britain and the US toward Hitler’s aggression in eastern Europe could have prevented the Holocaust.
I wrote:
[G]iven that the vast majority of Europe’s Jews were in Germany […]

If you have a DVD player, get “Persepolis.”

Despite having actual memories of 1968– one or two of them even fond– I’m going to pass on this celebration of that year’s utter grooviness.
Co-authors of Beyond the Fragments, Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright are reunited at the ‘Long Hot Summer Night of 1968 Inspiration’ party to revisit the birth of a revived […]

I didn’t read Pat Buchanan’s anti-non-white-immigration screed of two years ago. And I have no intention of reading his latest opus Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.
But Stephen Colbert’s rather amusing interview with a fulminating Buchanan probably tell us all we need to […]

Union City, the email newsletter of the Washington, DC, labor council, reminded me that Monday was the 71st anniversary of one of the landmark events in American labor history– the Battle of the Overpass.
Actually it wasn’t much of a battle. A group of United Auto Workers union organizers– including future union president Walter Reuther– gathered […]

Veterans of the famous Dam Buster mission will meet for what may be the last time to mark the 65th anniversary of their daring and complicated WWII mission.
My grandfather was in the RAF during the war, and though he died shortly after I was born, I grew up with tales of wartime dering-do courtesty of […]

As Michael Ezra’s rather masterful guest post “The Atomic bomb and Hiroshima: the least abhorrent choice” has sailed over the edge of the world and into the Harry’s place archives with at least four people still hotly contesting the issues (which have basically grown into a philosophical discussion) I felt that we should have an […]

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a fascinating (and timely) online exhibit about the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the events surrounding it.

Guest post by Michael Ezra
Few events in the history of the United States have been more controversial than President Harry S. Truman’s decisions in 1945 to use the atomic bomb against Japan. On August 6 of that year an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later another bomb fell on Nagasaki. These cities […]

That’s right. Saturday was the thirtieth anniversary of the first recorded email spam message.
To mark the occasion, you are invited to tell of your amusing (or otherwise) experiences with spam, to describe your no-doubt futile efforts to block it, to recount how you earned millions of dollars by helping the widow of an African dictator […]