Free Republic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqFBa9ePWpo

When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation – a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons. Scientific evidence – including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe – shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one...

Archives from Stalin’s secret police have become a flash point because of the rise of a movement that has sought to idolize Stalin as a leader who defeated Nazi Germany, spurred industrialization and made the Soviet Union a superpower. Last year, the Kremlin promoted a study guide for high school teachers that deems Stalin “one of the most successful leaders of the U.S.S.R.,” while describing his “cruel exploitation” of the population. Mr. Putin himself has acknowledged the losses under Stalin, but has said Russians should not be made to feel ashamed of them. “We do have bleak chapters in our...

Outside the walls of Kiev's stunning Mikhailov cathedral and monastery, history is being revisited through an exhibition of large black-and-white photographs. They show dead animals and corpses rotting in the fields and people, barely able to stand, dressed in ragged clothes. The pictures are from 1932-1933. In Ukraine's collective memory, those years are known as the "Great Famine" when the Soviet Communist Party under Stalin forced Ukrainian peasants to give up their land and join collectivized farms by confiscating all food. Anyone caught saving food or taking even a grain of corn was sent to Siberia or shot. Historians estimate...