Fascinating History

mikemac1

There is a clock tower on St Nicholas Church in Galway. There are four clocks, one for each side of the tower. The clock facing west is blocked off. The COI did this spitefully so the residents of the Catholic convent on Nuns Island couldn't read it

You can still see the entrance to the railway tunnel in Galway if you walk along that pathway from the station to Renmore. The embankment is in the city too as well as the columns for the bridge over the Corrib.

Christopher Columbus spent time in Galway and there is a plaque to him near the docks. This was in his early days before he crossed the ocean

Where the cathedral now stands was once the city jail. By all accounts a horrendous place and a fair chance you'd die from disease in there.

So the story goes they couldn't find an Englishman to execute Charles I, himself being appointed by God after all. So they found two Galwegians who travelled over and did the deed. One retired and opened the Kings Head pub

There is a headstone in the graveyard down by the docks for 300 beheaded Spaniards who washed up after the Spanish Armada failed and some got shipwrecked on the west coast. No Geneva convention for prisoners of war back then I tell ya.

Mayor Lynch in Galway showed he didn't play favourites when it came to the law. Hanged his own son who had murdered a Spaniard. Just one of the theories where lynching came from.

The fire station is on Father Griffin Rd. This is named after Catholic priest Michael Griffen who had republican connections during the War of Independence. He was picked up one night, taken away for questioning, shot through the head and found in Barna by a cattle farmer.

Let the west awake! :cool:

DEFTLEFTHAND

When the New Yards Birds opened for The Who they asked a drunken Keith Moon how they did, they were session musicians trying to start a new band. Moon said "you went down like a Led Zeppelin".

DEFTLEFTHAND

DP

shuffles88

An File wrote: »

Sounds like you've been reading The Oatmeal! http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day

No I hadn't actually seen that, I was reading a book on American History but the Oatmeal certainly got to the point a lot faster. He's also absolutely right Columbus deserves a national holiday about as much as Jim Jones does.

Funny enough, I've just noticed that the book I was reading was actually the Oatmeals source on that piece

Bassfish

Abraham Lincoln only had a beard for the last two years of his life.

Areyouwell

Steamed Hams wrote: »

What events in History fascinate you?

Hard to chose but WW2 would probably just pip it for me.

kingchess

Also forgotten today is how close the Mongol Empire came to over running Europe, we were saved only by the death of the khan in Mongolia as the armies had to return to elect a new khan. Under the incredible General Subutai they destroyed the armies of Poland AND of Hungary and experts reckon that no army in Europe was capable of stopping them,but lucky for us they had to return to Mongolia to settle the succession of the Khan.

iguana

As we're coming up to the 25th anniversary of the beginning of it's end, I've been thinking a lot about the Berlin Wall. Such a fascinating piece of recent history. The idea of a wall going up, pretty much overnight and cutting off one part of a city from the rest is almost too bizarre an act to contemplate. What's especially bizarre is that the 'West' was actually a small area of the first world inside the iron curtain. It was really West Berlin that was walled off and separated from it's surrounding regions. I can't quite get my head around how people lived such free lives while surrounded on every side by the 'East.' On some level it must have been quite scary.

I was nearly 11 when the gates were opened up and I remember watching the scenes on the news and crying as I watched it. It was the first time I remember crying at a happy event but the scenes were so overpoweringly emotional that even a child couldn't help but feel it. Such utter joy, an amazing sense of history happening but also heartbreak at all the years wasted apart for so many families on opposite sides of the wall.

Balmed Out

iguana wrote: »

I was nearly 11 when the gates were opened up and I remember watching the scenes on the news and crying as I watched it. It was the first time I remember crying at a happy event but the scenes were so overpoweringly emotional that even a child couldn't help but feel it. Such utter joy, an amazing sense of history happening but also heartbreak at all the years wasted apart for so many families on opposite sides of the wall.

Was a child too during that era, was amazing watching momentous events unfold. Amazing watching events unfold in Poland, Hungary, Germany etc. The two that I remember most was the wall coming down and the Romanian revolution with the execution of Ceaucescu(?) and his wife, for ages afterwards there were more and more stories of their lavish lifestyle.

suicide_circus

Balmed Out wrote: »

Was a child too during that era, was amazing watching momentous events unfold. Amazing watching events unfold in Poland, Hungary, Germany etc. The two that I remember most was the wall coming down and the Romanian revolution with the execution of Ceaucescu(?) and his wife, for ages afterwards there were more and more stories of their lavish lifestyle.

Yeah they didnt fook around with tribunals or lengthy sessions in The Hague, basically just had a quick show trial in a little room, took them out the back and opened fire.

Galwayguy35

I remember watching a programme about the SS, ordinary men before the war holding down normal jobs who then turned into murderers who spent all day shooting whole villages of people dead and throwing them into a pit.

The lifestyles of the Roman Emperors is interesting as well.

Wibbs

kingchess wrote: »

Also forgotten today is how close the Mongol Empire came to over running Europe, we were saved only by the death of the khan in Mongolia as the armies had to return to elect a new khan. Under the incredible General Subutai they destroyed the armies of Poland AND of Hungary and experts reckon that no army in Europe was capable of stopping them,but lucky for us they had to return to Mongolia to settle the succession of the Khan.

Aye, but they faced another problem in Europe that they hadn't faced before. Namely lots of little states that had been infighting and/or been allies depending on the wind for centuries. They conquered a place like China because it was very centralised. Take the centre, chop off the incumbent head and you have the country pretty much.

Europe? Not nearly so much. So you beat the Poles and the Hungarians, then you've to face the Prussians, while the Italians of various warring states are to your flank and you have the Russians behind you, then you have to take on the French, the most successful land army in European history. That's before the Dutch, Scandinavians, Spanish, Portuguese and the British get stuck in. Oh and you have the Islamic world thinking "don't even look at us pal". Never mind that their supply lines were getting very thin. What the Mongols acheievd is incredible, but I reckon taking Europe would have been just a step too far. After all, in the entire history of Europe only one bunch succeeded in creating an empire out of the place(or most of it) and that was the Italians and the effort involved was consistent, monumental and in near yearly danger of being overthrown by some nutcase or other


The Apollo missions always fascinated me. I watched the last one leave when I was kid. The technology involved, well most of the technology hadn't even been invented yet when Kennedy made his go to the moon speech. Little details like the spacesuits were tailored by retired seamstresses who were masters at their craft(mostly learned at bra factories. Bras have a mixture of materials in their construction). Today LOL means Laugh Out Loud, but back then one nickname for the suits and those women who made them was LOL suits. Little Old Ladies. The flight computer for the landing module was the first to use integrated circuits(chips) and had a grand total of 2kb of active ram and 32kb of rom(read only) the latter stored as rope memory that was woven. Oh and once they had to patch the OS in flight and did so in under an hour. As you do. Mad stuff.

The Saturn V rocket that got them there was about the single most powerful and largest machine humans have made. They expected hundreds of component failures with each launch but still they passed off without disaster. On one mission they were hit by lightning which tripped the main busses(blew the trip switch as such) and they got through that, reset the main bus and up she came good as gold. It could even be flown manually. Ohh the temptation. Sticking a manual control on a Saturn V with pilots is like Father Dougal and the big red button... To quote astronaut Gene Cernan ""You almost wished you had a guidance failure at liftoff. Because I knew I could've flown that big Saturn V into orbit goddamn near as good as the computer." :pac: Of that I have zero doubt.

The lunar lander has been the only pure spacecraft humans have built so far. Never designed to operate in atmosphere. They had to invent a way to throttle the rocket too so that was a first. The skin of the craft wasn't much thicker than tinfoil. Even so, by the end of the all too short Apollo missions it had nearly doubled its weight and had a car too! Which was partially inspired by a kids toy. Needless to say the guys manually flew the Lander when they could.

That whole mission is a wealth of stats and technology and sheer bloody wonder and all happened within the span of a lifetime of someone who could have watched the Wright brothers first flight.

Even to this day the data from those nutters that bounced about up there is still being poured over and analysed. Only twelve blokes. Twelve FFS. Probes are great, I love probes, but get the Mark 1 Human Eyeball on the ground and you can do more in a different direction and inspire the humans watching you do it.

Oh and at the time back in Europe humans were building a plane that could travel twice the speed of a rifle bullet while you could inside in leather seats sipping chilled champagne with Joan Collins. As you would like. And built it to do this on a daily scheduled way for twenty years plus. Indeed some of the Apollo dudes reckoned that Concorde was in some ways a harder engineering task.

Wibbs

Galwayguy35 wrote: »

I remember watching a programme about the SS, ordinary men before the war holding down normal jobs who then turned into murderers who spent all day shooting whole villages of people dead and throwing them into a pit.

The "ordinary" man and woman is the most dangerous of all. They are all too easily led by the minority of truly evil bastards and opposed by an equal minority of those who rebel against evil. Most people just go with the tide of the time.

kingchess

Is there not some famous study where people were convinced to give mild electrical shocks to other people who answered questions wrongly ??ordered to do so by actors dressed as doctors??(will have to google it later).

shuffles88

kingchess wrote: »

Is there not some famous study where people were convinced to give mild electrical shocks to other people who answered questions wrongly ??ordered to do so by actors dressed as doctors??(will have to google it later).

It's the Milgram experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Insect Overlord

kingchess wrote: »

Is there not some famous study where people were convinced to give mild electrical shocks to other people who answered questions wrongly ??ordered to do so by actors dressed as doctors??(will have to google it later).

That would be Stanley Milgram's experiment. Absolutely fascinating/terrifying.

See also Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment.

Smidge

kingchess wrote: »

Is there not some famous study where people were convinced to give mild electrical shocks to other people who answered questions wrongly ??ordered to do so by actors dressed as doctors??(will have to google it later).

I think you're thinking of The Simpsons episode

steddyeddy

Go back fifty thousand years and we lived along side maybe up to four different species of "human" (I use the word human loosely). It's so strange to me that we lived along side 4 other of the most intelligent species on the planet and it's only us now.

Merrion

steddyeddy wrote: »

It's so strange to me that we lived along side 4 other of the most intelligent species on the planet and it's only us now.

Yes -I think it is very likely that we killed them.

steddyeddy

Merrion wrote: »

Yes -I think it is very likely that we killed them.

Well we interbred with denisovan and neanderthal so they're still alive to some extent. I think the others likely hid from us and we out competed them.

RobbingBandit

Princess Diana and Sir William Churchill were related.

I've spent the last few nights reading through European 19th century history and while I knew our current concept of nation-states that's ingrained in us is new, I feel it actually somewhat hinders the understanding of history more than 100 years ago. The lack of familiar discrete units makes things harder to get one's head around IMO.