In 1933, Hitler ordered the photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, to destroy all images of him wearing lederhosen, because he considered it "beneath one's dignity." Hoffman however, secretly kept them and they later appeared in his memoir, a decade after the end of the war. He had been Hitler's personal photographer since 1921.

In May 1945, Allied forces jailed Hoffman for “war profiteering”, and the bulk of his work was seized by the US Army.

This documentary contains original footage captured by Allied forces immediately following the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. These films were recorded to document the atrocities of the Nazi regime and to preserve them for future generations, ensuring that these crimes can never be denied.
Content Warning: This film contains extremely graphic, disturbing, and brutal historical footage of Holocaust atrocities. Please watch with caution and take care of your well-being.

Jan, 1928:
- The Creek Nation endorses Curtis for President, calling him "the logical choice"
- Governor Paulen (KS) speaks in New York City: “[He’s] the man of the people,” this “race track jockey” who came such an incredible way to become what he was
- Delegate Teddy Roosevelt, Jr. at a Kansas Day dinner: “[Curtis] always measured up to the highest ideal of Americanism”

Feb., 1928:
- Kaw Nation endorses Curtis for President
- The press says: Curtis is a man of "distinction," and one who is "frank, open, serious, virtuous, capable and honorable"
- A New York City HQ opens to support his campaign on the east coast

Mar., 1928:
- Albert "Doc" Newman becomes Curtis' Missouri campaign manager
- Senator Pine (R-OK) endorses him
- He is called a "100% American," meaning the only candidate with truly American roots due to his Kaw heritage

Apr., 1928
- The "Washington Evening Star" notes that Curtis was the economical choice, because he wouldn't have to scratch his initials into the White House furniture, since Cal Coolidge surely already put a C.C. there
- Curtis' daughter, Leona Knight, wins a delegate seat to the Convention from Rhode Island

To see more posts like this, I post weekly on LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-curtis-biography-project-b82762297/recent-activity/all/

From 1945 to 1955 a hospital called Vipeholm ran a sugar study on patients with intellectual disabilities. It started as a legitimate vitamin trial, then in 1947 got switched to testing sugar instead, including a specially made sticky toffee designed to cling to teeth as long as possible, given between meals specifically because that's when it would cause the most damage. Some patients went from healthy teeth to severe decay by the end, with no real consent involved anywhere in the process.

What makes this one stand out is the science itself wasn't junk or later disproven. It genuinely established the link between sugar frequency and cavities, and that research still shapes dental advice worldwide today. There's even a Swedish tradition, kids only getting candy once a week, that traces directly back to this study.

The scandal that actually erupted at the time wasn't even about the patients though. It was about the sugar industry, which partly funded the study, allegedly delaying the results for years once it became clear how damaging they'd be. The ethics of experimenting on disabled people without consent didn't get seriously discussed until decades later.

Made a full documentary on the complete story, YouTube link's in my profile bio if anyone wants to go deeper into it.

In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men in police uniforms rang the intercom at a side entrance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. They said they were responding to a disturbance. The guard at the watch desk was Richard Abath, twenty three years old, a musician working nights.

The museum had a protocol for exactly this. Do not open the employee entrance for anyone claiming to be police. Make them show a badge through the window first, and call it in. Abath opened the door.

Once inside, the two men told him there was a warrant out for him and asked him to step away from the desk to be searched. He stepped away. The desk held the button that would have sent a silent alarm straight to the Boston police. Nothing was ever sent. He and the second guard on duty were handcuffed, taped, and left in the basement.

The thieves stayed eighty one minutes. They cut canvases out of their frames, took thirteen works, and left the empty frames hanging on the walls, where they still hang.

What gets me is that none of the failures were technical. The alarms worked. The building did what it was built to do. A young man on a night shift was asked to do something that sounded reasonable by two people wearing the right clothes, and he did it, and that was the whole breach.

Abath said for the rest of his life that he had nothing to do with it. He died in 2024, never charged. Investigators never agreed on whether he was a dupe or something else, and I have never read a version of this that settles it.

If someone has gone through the case material more closely than I have and thinks the guard question is actually settled, I would like to hear why.

Warriors. Wanderers. Poets. Gods. They ruled the frozen north long before anyone wrote their names down, shaped the cosmos out of a giant's corpse, chained a wolf they knew would eventually swallow the sun, and built an entire cosmology around the fact that it all ends. Not as a warning, just as a given.

That's the part that pulled me in the most while putting this together. Most pantheons hedge, an afterlife, a reward, some version of things working out. Norse mythology just doesn't. Valhalla isn't a finish line, it's a training camp for a battle everyone already knows they lose.

Mapped out the full lineage, the primal forces before creation, the Aesir and Vanir, the giants they're constantly at war with and related to, all the way through to Ragnarok itself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stiOlhC4IR0

Curious how people here read the fatalism at the core of it, cultural realism from a hard environment, or something closer to an actual theology of doom?

The same year, he wrote a famous letter to newspaper editor Allen N Ford, defending himself after his opponents had claimed he was opposed to religion.

"I believe it is an established maxim im [in] morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him."

It's crazy to think that this now-180 year old photo, which used the earliest form of photography, was taken at a major milestone in his political career.

Allied forces conducted strategic air raids on Japan from late 1944 to 1945, causing extensive destruction to the country's cities and killing between 241,000 and 900,000 people

on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, constitute the single deadliest and most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history.

Sixteen square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless

The Peng brothers, along with their wives and sons, were originally descendants of wealthy landlords who nevertheless became communist fighters, believing that 'only landlords truly know how evil landlords are.' They launched a peasant uprising in their hometown to establish the Haifeng Soviet regime. After the revolution failed, eight family members—the Peng brothers, their wives, and their sons were tortured and killed by the Kuomintang.

In 1840, a young Frenchwoman named Marie Lafarge sat in a dim courtroom, accused of resolving her unhappy marriage by stirring a mysterious white powder into her husband's chocolate cakes. The powder was arsenic, the undisputed "king of poisons." In this era, chemical detection was so primitive that murderers could slip lethal doses into food with near-total impunity, leaving doctors to guess whether the agonizing death was cholera, food poisoning, or cold-blooded murder

To bring order to this chaos, early pioneers had to treat the human body as a closed chemical system. The French chemist Mathieu Orfila, often regarded as the father of forensic toxicology, published his groundbreaking treatise in 1814. He demonstrated that poisons do not merely vanish into the body; they are absorbed, transported through the blood, and deposited in specific organs like the liver and kidneys. Through meticulous animal experimentation, Orfila proved that chemical reagents could isolate these substances even after death-setting the stage for a revolution in the courtroom

By the 1830s, the fatal flaw in prosecuting poisoners was that arsenic could not be easily presented to a jury in a physical, undeniable form. This changed entirely in 1836, when a Scottish chemist named James Marsh developed the first reliable method for detecting minute traces of arsenic in stomach contents and tissues.

The Marsh test relies on a simple yet elegant chemical reaction. The suspect material is placed in a flask with zinc and acid, generating hydrogen gas. If arsenic is present, it reacts to form arsine gas. This gas is directed through a heated tube, where it decomposes to leave a highly visible, dark, metallic-looking mirror of pure arsenic on a cold porcelain plate

During the trial of Marie Lafarge, Mathieu Orfila was summoned to perform this exact test. When local doctors failed to find arsenic, Orfila used Marsh's method to isolate a distinct, dark metallic deposit directly from the victim's exhumed tissue. It was a watershed moment in legal history:

"The science of chemistry has spoken. The metal you see before you is arsenic, extracted from the stomach of the deceased."

Mathieu Orfila, 1840

This test stripped poisoners of their anonymity. The physical proof was undeniable, shifting the burden of forensic evidence toward absolute chemical certainty.

In the decades following the Marsh test, toxicologists realized that simple chemical precipitation was not enough. As the pharmaceutical industry expanded, synthetic drugs, alkaloids, and complex organic poisons emerged. To isolate these compounds from blood or organs, scientists developed a technique that separates a mixture into its individual components: chromatography.

Today, the golden standard of the forensic lab is Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS). This technique works in two elegant phases. First, the gas chromatograph vaporizes a liquid sample and sweeps it through a long, coiled capillary column. Different chemical compounds travel through this column at different speeds based on their physical properties, separating them completely

In the 1860s, Horatio Robley served with the British Army in New Zealand, where he became fascinated by Māori facial tattoos, or moko. Traditionally, when a high-ranking person died, their head was preserved — the eyes and brain removed, the face boiled, smoked, and treated with shark oil — to honor their social standing. Families would keep the heads in carved boxes and bring them out during ceremonies.

However, European colonists transformed this sacred custom into a lucrative trade. Robley eventually acquired at least 35 of these heads, which he later sold to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for £1,250 after the New Zealand government refused to buy them.

See more here: The Disturbing Story Of The Mokomokai Heads Of The Maori Tribesmen