They sat tensely in their wagons and buckboards, or on horseback, thousands of settlers reining in excitable, whinnying mounts whose hooves pawed the ground in anticipation, waiting for the moment when they could be unleashed into a madcap gallop that would vibrate the ground, sending up dust clouds on the plains that stretched before them. It was a minute to 12 noon on Monday, April 22, 1889, and the bargain hunters were out in force, ready to stake their claims to two million acres in Indian Territory that had been parcelled-up by the US government into 160-acre plots – free to anyone who wo ..read more

The Irish polar heroes who battled their way through certain death and into history It’s Easter 1916, April 24, and some desperate Irishmen are about to launch a bid for freedom against overwhelming odds, but this struggle doesn’t have Dublin’s General Post Office as a backdrop, nor the British Empire as the enemy. No, this is an epic battle between Mother Nature and six brave men – three of whom were Irish and went by the names of Shackleton, McCarthy and Crean. The feat which they undertook on the very day that the first salvos were fired in their homeland against British forces during the&n ..read more

History repeating itself. That’s the phrase du jour; a way to try to understand what is happening in Ukraine. Enigmatic Putin, and the parallels with Hitler taking over the Sudetenland and all the invasions that followed on from that, reverberate like an echo from history. The past is repeating itself, but then it always does. Think back to the attack on Pearl Harbor, on 7/12/41- an out-of-the-blue challenge to American might that was repeated almost 60 years later on 9/11/2001 when planes went crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Once again, America was challenged, and it re ..read more

Przemysłowa Street and the surrounding area in the Polish city of Lodz, is a narrow, tree-lined, grass-verged thoroughfare with low-rise, utilitarian, multi-coloured, apartment blocks. On a sunny day, though it looks like it might be a pleasant enough place to stroll through, with the leaf-dappled shadows of the trees making patterns on the concrete paths. There’s Seventies’ feel to it, but a remnant of the past still lingers among the more modern concrete – nothing special mind, just some lacklustre buildings that are now also used as accommodation. They would be insignificant to any unknowin ..read more

As Dan ‘Yorkie’ Kelly stood on the scaffold in the Wild West town of Tombstone in March of 1884, his thoughts must shave strayed back to Queenstown (now Cobh), in Cork, from where he had set sail just three years earlier to make his fortune in America. But the closest 24-year-old Dan had come to achieving the wealth he’d dreamed of was at the point of a gun, and that hadn’t worked out too well given that he now stood with the hangman’s noose around his neck for jewellery. ‘Let her loose,’ he told his executioner before the trap door lever was pulled and Dan Kelly took the long drop to eternity ..read more

They say desperate times call for desperate measures, but you’d wonder how desperate things would have to be in order to do what Elizabeth Sugrue did to keep bread on the table. Elizabeth’s name may not now be famous enough to shake the very pillars of history, but back in her day, ‘Lady Betty’ as she was known certainly gave good cause for people to quake in their boots. Her story is so extraordinary it teeters towards the fanciful, and some parts may be just that; however, there’s more than a dollop of truth to it, too. Oscar Wilde’s father, Sir William Wilde, wrote about ..read more

Love means different things to different people. Circumstances shape it and turn people towards each other in the most unexpected of places. Sometimes it’s fleeting, other times deeply felt. Yet, there are times when ‘love’ is a means to an end, a peculiar, complex thing that tests our very understanding of emotion. Sometimes, and for good reason, ‘love is blind’… And that’s the only way I can describe the story of Helena Citronova and Franz Wunsch, who found themselves living through the horrors of Auschwitz, where Death’s pall hung in the air like incense… a place where the very pits of ..read more

It’s 1914 and US Navy Ensign Fitzhugh Green is freezing, exhausted, and on foot in the frigid, icy wilderness of the Arctic, watching in frantic despair as his only companion, an Inuit hunter called Piugaattoq, climbs astride a dog sleigh and heads off into the distance. Green calls after him to come back, then fires a warning shot from his rifle, but he’s ignored. He takes a bead on the retreating figure and fires again. The shot hits Piugaattoq in the shoulder, knocking him from the sleigh. Green hobbles forward on aching feet and then finishes off the Inuit with a bullet to the head. T ..read more

Among the dunes of Zuid-Kennemerland, on North Holland’s west coast, the silvery-green leaves of sea buckthorn are buffeted by the Atlantic’s salty breezes and fearsome gales. You’ll find the shrub on coasts across Europe, and all the way to Mongolia and northwestern China. Also known as sandthorn, sallowthorn, or seaberry, it is a hardy plant that can withstand temperatures as low as -43 C.  The foliage and orange berries are used in certain skincare products. It has thrived in Zuid-Kennemerland, 38sqkm of national park, located near Haarlem and Zandvoort. The park is home to deer, squir ..read more

The Oppau factory disaster of September 1921 Quite what the citizens of Mannheim, Germany, made of the lumps of metal that hurtled through the air and landed in their environs on September 22, 1921, is anyone’s guess. The fact that the metal had been blown from the town of Oppau 20km away, probably didn’t immediately register. What may have, though, was the sound of the explosion that propelled the machinery there in the first place. Centenaries of major events are pretty big deals, particularly when they mark disasters that affected thousands of lives, but we had one last week and not a pee ..read more