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Forgotten History

The story of the H.L. Hunley finally explained:

How A Confederate Submarine Crew Died At The Hands Of Its Own Weapon

During the latter stages of the American Civil War, the H.L. Hunley made history by becoming the first combat submarine to sink an enemy ship. The Confederate crew never returned from its mission, sparking a mystery that's lasted for over 130 years. An exhaustive new analysis suggests these pioneering submariners didn't drown or suffocate as commonly believed, but instead died from the shockwave triggered by their very own weapon.
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Source: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/08/...ine-crew-died-at-the-hands-of-its-own-weapon/
 
Descendants of the last-emancipated slaves in 19th century America have (for now) won their right to citizenship - in the Native American tribe that enslaved them ...

COURT: CHEROKEE FREEDMEN HAVE RIGHT TO TRIBAL CITIZENSHIP
Descendants of black slaves, known as freedmen, who once were owned by members of the Cherokee Nation have a right to tribal citizenship under a ruling handed down by a federal court in Washington, D.C.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan ruled Wednesday in a long-standing dispute between the Cherokee Freedmen and the second-largest tribe in the United States which claims more than 317,000 citizens.

"The Cherokee Nation can continue to define itself as it sees fit," Hogan wrote in the ruling, "but must do so equally and evenhandedly with respect to native Cherokees and the descendants of Cherokee Freedmen."

Freedmen have long argued that the Treaty of 1866, signed between the U.S. government and the Tahlequah, Oklahoma-based Cherokees, gave them and their descendants "all the rights of native Cherokees." There are around 3,000 freedmen descendants today. ...

If the ruling stands, Cherokee Freedmen would have all the rights that tribal citizens have, including the right to run for office, vote in elections and receive benefits, including access to tribal health care and housing. ...
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SOURCE: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-08-31-15-42-32
 
Lost Languages Discovered In One Of The World’s Oldest Libraries

At the foot of Mount Sinai, the mountain atop which God is said to have given Moses the Ten Commandments, lies St. Catherine’s Monastery, one of the world’s oldest continuously running libraries. St. Catherine’s is home to some of the world’s oldest and most valuable books and manuscripts, and the monks that watch over them.

These texts are largely manuscripts and are filled with mostly Greek and Latin. However, recently scientists have uncovered new languages in the manuscripts — and some that haven’t been used since the Dark Ages.

The only catch — the languages can’t be seen with the naked eye.
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Source: http://all-that-is-interesting.com/lost-languages-discovered
 
Maybe not forgotten, but probably little known:

Soviet Union detonates nuke underground to put out three year fire in archive footage from 1966

This was as a last resort - they'd tried other means to no avail.

The Russians were forced to detonate an underground nuclear charge to extinguish a huge fire at a natural gas field in Uzbekistan

The stunning video shows the huge flame burning as the unlimited gas supply at the Urta-Bulak well fuels it continuously.

Eventually, on September 30, 1966, the area was cleared and a large nuclear bomb lowed into the ground in a brave attempt to cut off the source of the gas forever.

Boreholes were drilled to a depth of about 1500 metres, and a 30-kiloton nuclear explosive lowered into the borehole just 35 metres from the shaft of the gas well.
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The fire had been burning for 3 years. Fire doesn't do it justice - it's a big jet of flame shooting up under pressure. Hard to get the scale of it from this but the video makes it clearer.

PAY-Peaceful-Nuclear-Explosion.jpg
 
In a similar vein, this one from 1965 near the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan.

Nuclear bomb used to create reservoir

A nuclear bomb was detonated underground near a river, creating a crater which was then connected by a channel to fill it. Called Lake Chagan, it's reportedly still radioactive. Short video at link.

The crater

PAY-Nuclear-Lake.jpg


And here's the Minister of the Medium Machine Building Ministry [sic] preparing to swim in it.


PAY-Nuclear-Lake.jpg
 
Well, that was dumb! A radioactive reservoir.
 
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I knew about the British intervention in the Russian Civil War but hadn't heard about this Concentration Camp before.

'Death Island': Britain's 'concentration camp' in Russia

When British soldiers were sent to Russia after the Russian Revolution their main enemies were the Germans - their opponents in World War One - but they also found themselves fighting and imprisoning Bolsheviks. In the process they opened what Russians regard as the first concentration camp in their country. ...


With few washing facilities and no change of clothes, inmates soon became infested with lice. Typhus spread like wildfire. Overall, about 1,000 people were imprisoned here and up to 300 died - either as a result of disease, or because they were shot or tortured to death.

When we visit it is a muggy summer afternoon and the air is thick with midges. I dread to think what it would be like here during an Arctic winter when temperatures can reach -30C (-22F). Signs from the now abandoned museum point out the "ice cells", left open to the elements, where rebellious prisoners were punished and either perished or lost limbs to frostbite.

Pavel Rasskazov, a radical journalist, spent several months on Mudyug. In his Prison Memoirs, which became a well-known and much-studied text in the Soviet era, he documented the appalling conditions and the lack of food.

He describes how, when dried bread was distributed in the morning, "starving, angry men with greedy eyes crawled all over the filthy, damp floor, full of spit, picking up each and every crumb".
Soon after the Allies docked in Arkhangelsk on 2 August 1918, they began locking people up. "They didn't know who to trust or the difference between the Reds and Whites - so they decided to incarcerate anyone who seemed suspect," says Liudmila Novikova, a Moscow-based historian who has become an expert on the post-revolutionary period in the Russian north.

Since the main prison in the town was overcrowded, potential troublemakers were shipped to the island of Mudyug, 70km (45 miles) away. The first batch of inmates had to build their own prison camp in this desolate, windswept place. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-41271418#
 
Thanks, @ramonmercado , that's a fascinating link, albeit grim reading. New to me, too, although I've spent a fair bit of my life reading about Russia. I don't wish to underplay British responsibility for this, and at the same time I am struck by the sheer scale of double-think whereby the victims of imperialist cruelty are commemorated by a Soviet museum, while that self-same Soviet system imprisoned millions of its own people in equally inhumane conditions.

There's a Fortean detail in the text:
BBC said:
Under some fir trees Marina has found a commemorative plaque to the men killed trying to escape. As she places two red carnations on the crumbling stone, a cloud of mist swirls through the trees and a soft rain falls.

"Perhaps it was just a coincidence," she says later. "But it seemed like a greeting from the past, and maybe those prisoners who suffered here, who tried to survive, could see that they were being remembered."
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An interesting character but also a proper tulip: a nazi & a collaborator with the Japanese. She did like cats though.

Savitri Devi: The mystical fascist being resurrected by the alt-right
  • 29 October 2017
Savitri Devi, a mystical admirer of Hitler and a cat-loving devotee of the Aryan myth, seemed destined to fade into obscurity after her death 25 years ago. But thanks to the rise of the extreme right, her name and her image now crop up online more and more, writes Maria Margaronis.

In 2012, browsing the website of Greece's Golden Dawn party for an article I was writing, I stumbled on a picture of a woman in a blue silk sari gazing at a bust of Hitler against a blazing sunset sky.

What was this apparently Hindu woman doing on the site of an openly racist party devoted to expelling all foreigners from Greece? I filed her as a curiosity at the back of my mind, until the rising tide of extreme-right politics in Europe and America threw up the name "Savitri Devi" once again.

It isn't hard these days to find discussions of Savitri Devi's books on neo-Nazi web forums, especially The Lightning and the Sun, which expounds the theory that Hitler was an avatar - an incarnation - of the Hindu god Vishnu, and Gold in the Furnace, which urges true believers to trust that National Socialism will rise again. The American extreme-right website Counter-Currents hosts an extensive online archive of her life and work.

Her views are reaching a wider public audience, too, thanks to American alt-right leaders such as Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon, former Trump chief strategist and chair of Breitbart News, who have taken up her account of history as a cyclical battle between good and evil — a theory she shared with other 20th Century mystical fascists.

Dark metal bands and American right-wing radio stations also roar about the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hindu mythology, which Savitri Devi believed that Hitler was once destined to bring to an end. ...

You can listen to the Radio 4 documentary Savitri Devi: From the Aryans to the Alt-right on the BBC iPlayer

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-41757047#
 
This is also a sort of attempt to rewrite history. Kevin Spacey has lost some work recently, such as House of Cards. However now he is going to replaced by another actor in a movie that was already finished. Also keep in mind Spacey has been accused but so far neither charged nor convicted.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41925767
 
Xanatic* said:
This is also a sort of attempt to rewrite history. Kevin Spacey has lost some work recently, such as House of Cards. However now he is going to replaced by another actor in a movie that was already finished. Also keep in mind Spacey has been accused but so far neither charged nor convicted.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41925767
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He has apologised though, and you don't tend to do that if you're innocent. It'll probably make the film better, because judging by the trailer Spacey's makeup made him look like something out of The Dark Crystal.
 
GNC said:
He has apologised though, and you don't tend to do that if you're innocent.
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It was a weird apology. Spacey reckoned he didn't remember what'd gone on because he'd been drunk. That's so creepy.
 
GNC said:
Judging by the stream of accusations Spacey made Oliver Reed look like Julie Andrews.
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Being drunk is an old-fashioned excuse, not that it's ever stood up in court. Maybe as part of a 'Portsmouth defence' but that's about it.
Getting so drunk that you think it's OK to carry an underage boy to a bed 'like a bridegroom carrying a bride' (as alleged) yet still being steady enough to do it, and yet so drunk that you forget it ever happened? Bollocks.
 
GNC said:
Judging by the stream of accusations Spacey made Oliver Reed look like Julie Andrews.
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On the R4 just now they were discussing how to remove Spacey and use Christopher Plummer instead in the new fillum about Howard Hughes. Apparently it can be done by just digitally replacing Spacey's face with Plummer's in the scenes where Hughes appears.

This really made me laugh. Reminds me of the old joke about the undertaker who mixes up the two dead mens suits.
 
They actually did that with Oliver Reed in Gladiator.

Though not to make him look like Julie Andrews.
 
Xanatic* said:
They actually did that with Oliver Reed in Gladiator.

Though not to make him look like Julie Andrews.
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I remember that, it seemed a grim do. It was only a matter of time before Reed popped his clogs, being what is politely known as a 'hell raiser', i.e. troublesome alcoholic. We saw the fillum and I couldn't tell which bits were him 'live' and which were grafted in.

The same thing happened with an episode of The Sopranos, where the actress who played the Don's mother died and a scene was bodged together with a CGI head on someone else's body. I've seen that too and it looked OK to me but others have said it was poorly done and obvious.
 
Gladiator is a good example of CGI done right. There are several things I thought was real untill I watched the behind the scenes stuff.
 
I'm not sure we can count Rogue One as forgotten history. I have a feeling it was made up.
 
escargot said:
On the R4 just now they were discussing how to remove Spacey and use Christopher Plummer instead in the new fillum about Howard Hughes. Apparently it can be done by just digitally replacing Spacey's face with Plummer's in the scenes where Hughes appears.

This really made me laugh. Reminds me of the old joke about the undertaker who mixes up the two dead mens suits.
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Getty, not Hughes, but yeah, they could CGI him a new face, though I seriously doubt they would because the film would still feature Spacey's dirty, dirty body. Plummer is about a foot taller than Spacey (and Getty), so we'll see when All The Money in the World is released if he's looking shorter. He was director Ridley Scott's first choice anyway, apparently, but the studio thought Spacey in a rubber fright mask would be more lucrative. He's just cost them millions more on the budget. Still, you have to laugh (?).
 
GNC said:
Getty, not Hughes, but yeah, they could CGI him a new face, though I seriously doubt they would because the film would still feature Spacey's dirty, dirty body. Plummer is about a foot taller than Spacey (and Getty), so we'll see when All The Money in the World is released if he's looking shorter. He was director Ridley Scott's first choice anyway, apparently, but the studio thought Spacey in a rubber fright mask would be more lucrative. He's just cost them millions more on the budget. Still, you have to laugh (?).
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Oh yeah, how remiss of me to mix up two old billionaires. :conf2:

(There'a already at least one fillum about Hughes. I remember him still being alive, living in his apartment with his germ-phobia.)

How'll they do it then, one wonders? CGI Plummer into every scene, only shorter? They can't re-shoot it all. It's due out in weeks.

Back in the Golden Days of Hollywood the studios kept a close eye on their stars and worked hard to prevent scandals. An actor living with a partner without being married or their being openly gay would have been too dangerous for the public to find out about it. Drug-taking was out too, although everyone seemed to smoke and troublesome alcoholics were indulged as 'hell-raisers'.

The 'Casting Couch' and the general sexual exploitation of vulnerable young hopefuls though, they were too filthy to talk about, even though they were an open secret inside the industry.

Looks like things haven't changed. Spacey has being accused of various assaults over many years but has only now been dropped.
It's not about keeping people safe, it's how things look. How hypocritical.
 
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