Beyond the Wall: What Life Was Really Li...

In 1832, a New Bedford whaleship called the Mentor struck a reef in the remote Pacific archipelago of Palau. The tiny, 100-foot-long ship began sinking immediately, and the 22 men who made up its crew were thrown into one of the most extraordinary survival ordeals in American mar ... Show More

The Nobel family (which are the namesake of the Nobel prize), had a rags-to-riches story bigger than the Rockefellers or Morgans. The Nobel patriarch Emanuel fled debtor’s prison in 1837. He then travelled east and built a foundation for the largest oil empire in Russian history. ... Show More

The thirteen colonies that became the United States were just half of the British colonies that existed in the 18th century. The empire stretched from New England, south to Georgia and Florida and the islands of the West Indies, east to India, Scotland, and Ireland, and south aga ... Show More

This year marks the 30th anniversary of one of the most historic moments of the 1990s. On October 3, 1990, East and West Germany were reunited after 45 years of cold war separation. The reunification process was set in motion a year earlier when border crossings along the Berlin ... Show More

The East German authorities built the Berlin Wall in 1961 to keep their people in. Thousands had been streaming westwards. But a few people went the other way. Frauke Naumann was one of them. She grew up in West Germany but fell love with her cousin who lived on the other side of ... Show More

In the early 1980s, thousands of young people in communist East German became punks, attracted by the DIY culture and anti-establishment attitude.But the East German secret police the Stasi believed the subculture represented an existential threat to the state and tried to crush ... Show More

<p>In August 1961, communist East Germany began building the Berlin Wall, which divided the city for nearly three decades and became a symbol of the Cold War. We hear the memories of Germans from both sides of the Wall and tales of daring escapes. Plus, what life was like in the ... Show More

The German Democratic Republic was born in the ashes of the Second World War, and described itself as a socialist “workers’ and peasants’ state”. The country struggled for much of the latter half of the 20th century, relying on economic support and political backing from the USSR ... Show More

<p>1989 was a seismic year in world history and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the clearest symbol of the Cold War. But it was a series of events across Europe that added to the momentum. We journey back through Poland, Hungary and East Germany ahead of that historic m ... Show More

In his new book, East German Intellectuals and the Unification of Germany: An Ethnographic View (Palgrave 2017), Dan Bednarz, Assistant Professor at Bristol Community College, examines the impact of German unification on East German intellectuals. Through a series of interviews c ... Show More

February 22, 1962. The city of Berlin is cut in half by a concrete and barbed wire wall. On the west side, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy is giving a rousing speech when suddenly, what look like balloons explode above the crowd, revealing Soviet-red flags. “The Communists w ... Show More

If Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. You don’t just draw a line and tell people that it’s now the “border,” for in order f ... Show More

60 years ago this month, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) began building a barrier that divided the city of Berlin. It stood until 1989 and came to symbolise the front line of the Cold War. Iain MacGregor, author of "Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall ... Show More