Jennifer's 20th Century History Blog January 2008 Archive

For over a year, the fate of the 200-year-old chestnut tree that stands outside of Anne Frank's window in the Annex has been contested. In her diary, Anne talks about ... Read More

In August 1954, the CIA began a project to dig a secret tunnel from West Berlin into East Berlin. It took 18 months to dig far enough to reach 900-feet ... Read More

A volunteer at the Vietnam veterans museum in Cumberland, Maryland noticed what appeared to be a live Mark I rocket. The rocket had been donated by a local veteran and ... Read More

Although Germany does not have an organization that keeps track of veterans, it is believed that Erich Kaestner was the very last living German World War I veteran. Kaestner died ... Read More

For 25 months, Anne Frank hid with her family in a secret annexe in Amsterdam in an attempt to escape from the Nazis. During her months in hiding, Anne Frank ... Read More

On May 29, 1953, New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Tenzing Norgay became the first to reach the top of Mt. Everest, the highest mountain in the world. They made ... Read More

Medical researcher Frederick Banting and research assistant Charles Best studied the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas of dogs at the University of Toronto. Banting believed that he could find ... Read More

It has long been debated whether or not the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to prevent further transports the the Nazi death camp during World War II. Although the U.S. ... Read More

The National Security Agency recently declassified a 500-page report on the Vietnam War. The report listed a number of instances where the communist North Vietnamese were able to fake radio ... Read More

When German soldiers died during World War II battles in Eastern Europe, such as at Stalingrad and Kursk, they were often buried in mass graves. Now, approximately one million German ... Read More

In an interesting and different format, you can now follow a World War I soldier's experiences in a blog. The letters are posted exactly 90 years after Private Harry Lamin ... Read More

In celebration for the centennial of the birth of Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books, the British mail service has issued 007 stamps. The stamps bear the ... Read More

In a new book, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret, author Seth Shulman reveals what he believes to be a deceptive plot regarding the invention of the telephone. ... Read More

On September 22, 1975, Sara Jane Moore raised a .38-caliber revolver and aimed it at U.S. President Gerald Ford in front of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Luckily ... Read More