Her photo is one of thousands snapped by Alphonse Bertillon, a police clerk in Paris who revolutionized detective work. Not only was Bertillon the first to photograph a crime scene, but he also streamlined the use of mugshots. By 1884, his groundbreaking new criminal codification method helped catch 241 repeat offenders in Paris. At first glance, the faded 1903 photograph of Mme Debeinche’s bedroom, bound in the yellowed pages of an early 20th-century album, shows what looks to be an unremarkable middle-class Parisian apartment of the time. The overstuffed room brims with floral decoration, from the wallpaper and heavy swag curtains to the carpeting, chair upholstery—even the chamber pot. A large reproduction of Alexandre Cabanel’s voluptuous 1863 painting, “Birth of Venus,” hangs on the wall. A sizeable unmade bed with a hefty carved-wood frame dominates the scene. But on closer look, there is something unnerving about the tableau. The Venus is crooked. A spindle chair lies on its si...
It did not start in 1619 when the first slaves came to Jamestown. It existed before then. It did not start in 1492 when Columbus discovered the New World. In fact, when the intrepid explorer landed in the Bahamas, the native Taino tribe hoped he could help them defeat their aggressive neighbors, the Caribs. The Caribs enslaved the Taino and, on occasion, served them for dinner. Slavery existed in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The word “slave” actually comes from the Slavs of Eastern Europe. Millions of them — all white by the way — were captured and enslaved by Muslims in the ninth century and later by the Ottoman Turks. Slavery existed when the Roman Empire controlled the Mediterranean and most of Europe from the 1st through the 5th centuries. Slavery existed when Alexander the Great conquered Persia in the 4th century BC. It was so common that Aristotle simply considered it “natural.” The slave/master model was just how the world operated in the great philosophe...
This image is titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa", the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier The Vinnytsia massacre was a mass execution of (mostly ethnic Ukrainian) people in the Ukrainian town of Vinnytsia by the Soviet secret police NKVD during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge in 1937–1938. Mass graves in Vinnytsia were discovered during the German occupation of Ukraine in 1943. The investigation of the site first conducted by the international Katyn Commission coincided with the discovery of a similar mass murder site of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn. Because the Germans utilized this evidence of Communist terror to discredit the Soviet Union internationally, it became one of the better researched sites of the politically motivated NKVD massacres among many in Ukraine. Much as in the case of other massacres of people considered enemies of the people by the communist regime of Russia, the victims bu...
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