‘Like if John Sayles directed Forrest Gump’: the incredible life of historian Howard Zinn

06. August 2026 um 10:00

The life of the hugely influential ‘people’s historian’ is explored in a wide-ranging new book that brings in everything from wars to civil rights to Matt Damon

Matt Damon may play a great hero in The Odyssey, but one of the star’s own heroes is also set for his time in the spotlight. In Massachusetts in the 1970s and 80s, Damon grew up close to Howard Zinn, now the subject of The People’s Historian, a biography by Dave Zirin.

“Frankly,” Zirin said, “the fact that he’s Matt Damon and oh by the way is now in the biggest movie perhaps since Titanic, it makes it a nice little bauble for the book that I got to interview him.

‘She showed love for everyone’: how did Daphy Michel end up frozen to death in a Pittsburgh bus shelter?

The Guardian

Von: Alba Asenjo Domínguez

02. August 2026 um 11:00

Haitian immigrant with mental illness found dead after ICE released her in 20F weather wearing summer clothes

Family to sue after woman released from ICE custody froze to death

On the night of 26 February this year, the Michel family in Pennsylvania expected to see their loved one, Daphy, again very soon.

After she had spent six months in jail, a judge had dismissed criminal charges against her and one of her brothers was told she would be released soon, probably the next day.

Magic circle: Stonehenge offers lucky visitors 20 minutes alone in monument

The Guardian

Von: Steven Morris

29. Juli 2026 um 05:00

Handful of ticketholders will be selected at random for up-close visits to ancient site throughout August

Trips to Stonehenge can be a little hectic. Tens of thousands of people turn up to celebrate summer and winter solstices and most other days the site is a place of bustle, excited conversation and selfie action.

But throughout August, English Heritage is offering visitors the chance to win some guaranteed solitude within the hulking stones.

Mary Beard on The Odyssey and how empires fall – Stateside with Kai and Carter

The Guardian

Von: Hosted by Carter Sherman Carter Sherman · produced by Anabel Bacon · engineered by Ivan Kuraev · executive producer Jonathan Menjivar

20. Juli 2026 um 21:45

Christopher Nolan’s new adaption of The Odyssey is an absolute monster of a hit, grossing $264m in its opening weekend. But celebrated classicist Mary Beard tells host Carter Sherman that while Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek epic poem comes with plenty of action-packed battle scenes, the film is missing the original's "elusive sexiness" – and its approach to women left her disappointed. Carter and Beard also explore why rightwing politicians – and people like Elon Musk – are so obsessed with co-opting the ancient world. They ask: who gets to own the classics?

Commentary and criticism about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey from the Guardian:

Zendaya faces backlash for wearing ancient Iranian jewellery at Odyssey event

The Guardian

Von: Ellie Violet Bramley

21. Juli 2026 um 16:01

Film star promotes Christopher Nolan film epic wearing gold artefacts dating back almost 3,000 years

The Odyssey is a story about a Greek king’s long journey home. But a pair of earrings worn on the new film adaptation’s press tour – and their long separation from their homeland – is sparking controversy.

At a photocall in London, Zendaya, who plays the goddess Athena in the Christopher Nolan film, wore a pair of earrings fashioned from Iranian artefacts dating back to 700BC.

Up All Night by Imogen Willetts review – a seductive history of going out

The Guardian

Von: Rebecca Nicholson

16. Juli 2026 um 07:00

From 18th-century pleasure gardens to Studio 54, the story of nightlife in all its hedonistic – and political – glory

In this fabulous alternative history of the modern world, the academic and “party historian” Imogen Willetts looks at the last 500 years of civilisation through the sometimes blurry lenses of its after-dark scenes, with fascinating results. She begins by trying to capture what it feels like to go on a big night out, focusing on a phenomenon that, in 1912, the sociologist Émile Durkheim labelled “collective effervescence”. In one passage, she explains this by referencing dancing as part of ancient tribal hunting rituals, listening to Charli xcx’s 365, or singing along to Sweet Caroline with tens of thousands of other people in a stadium.

This is no dry academic study, then, and its mix of historical research, critical theory and conversational references to pop culture makes for a bright and compelling read. What Willetts calls the “seemingly superficial act of getting gussied up to drink, dance, have fun and meet people” is, of course, much more than that, and she scratches away at the layers with skill. Nightlife can contain, or enable, rebellion, community, innovation, art, love, sex and political revolution. From Japan to France, from Shanghai to Germany, via many detours to the United States, she examines historical movements as they might be seen from dusk till dawn.

I sail the world in a replica 10th-century Viking longboat

The Guardian

Von: Lars Bill

10. Juli 2026 um 05:00

Every year I spend six to eight weeks on board – it has brought new friendships and showed me how generous people can be

When I was a teenager in Denmark in the 1980s, my older brother drove me to Roskilde, a city with five original Viking ships. We started working with the Viking Ship Museum of Roskilde as volunteers to build one of the first replicas. Since then, Vikings have been in my life.

Until my retirement four years ago, I worked at an IT company, and on the side volunteered for the Oseberg Viking Heritage Foundation, in Tønsberg, Norway, which promotes Viking ships and handicrafts. I became chair in 2023.

Inside Trump’s Ideological Fight With the Smithsonian

NYT > U.S. News

Von: Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

07. Juli 2026 um 14:33

Publicly and behind the scenes, the president continues to try to impose his own views of American history and culture, presenting an ongoing challenge to Lonnie Bunch, the institution’s leader.

President Trump and his allies have criticized what they call “improper ideology” in the Smithsonian’s presentation of American history and culture.

Carlo Ginzburg obituary

The Guardian

Von: John Foot

01. Juli 2026 um 17:43

Italian academic and author who challenged traditional approaches with his pursuit of microhistory

It would be no exaggeration to claim that the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who has died aged 87, revolutionised the practice and understanding of history. In particular, in a series of books published in the 1970s – above all, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976) – he embraced a new field of study called microhistory, which challenged traditional ways of understanding the discipline of which he was part.

Far from the overarching theoretical approaches of Marxism or liberalism, Ginzburg emphasised the edges, the marginalised, the detail rather than the bigger picture. The chance discovery of Inquisition trial documents in archives in Udine opened a way to an understanding of a society and culture through one individual previously ignored by history.

‘The landscape offers the same russet and ochre hues as the Bayeux tapestry’: walking the 1066 trail in East Sussex

The Guardian

Von: Pamela Petro

01. Juli 2026 um 07:00

With the British Museum’s blockbuster Bayeux tapestry exhibition opening soon, we follow in the footsteps of William the Conqueror and King Harold’s armies around Battle and Rye

‘Uh oh, look at these!” I call to my friends, Annie and Mike. “Ominous,” remarks Annie. Mike raises an eyebrow. We’re hiking the Pevensey Levels, marshland first drained in 772, home now to sheep and cattle, but also water spiders, living underwater in air-filled webs. The ground is pocked with endless impressions of horseshoes.

“It’s almost as if an army came this way,” I say.

The American myth always came at someone’s expense. Now, it’s all but collapsed

The Guardian

Von: Nikhil Pal Singh

28. Juni 2026 um 14:00

The main pillars of the founding narrative have fallen on hard times. Today, its meaning is up for grabs

Writing during the carnage of the first world war, the iconoclast intellectual Randolph Bourne described the American revolutionary inheritance as a squalid marriage between the town capitalist and plantation patriarch. Glittering generalities of freedom and democracy, Bourne observed, were indelibly marked by their long captivity to the money counters and owners of human chattel.

In the land lorded over by the likes of Donald Trump, leader of one of the most indecently corrupt, violently inept administrations in the country’s history, the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence would seem to affirm this judgment. Our moment, defined by the mobilization of market frenzy, machineries of war, deportation deliriums and nativist passions, echoes Bourne’s; it is a time of social fracture, moral failure and hegemonic collapse, with cynical reason ascendant.

UK’s museums and galleries left vulnerable to cyber-attack and theft, MPs warn

The Guardian

Von: Nadia Khomami Arts and culture correspondent

24. Juni 2026 um 05:00

Report by Commons committee says government has failed to make concrete changes after recent security failures

Britain’s museums and galleries are being left vulnerable to thefts and cyber-attacks that could put priceless collections at risk, MPs have warned.

A report by the public accounts committee (PAC) said big security failures in recent years, including the theft of thousands of artefacts from the British Museum and a devastating cyber-attack on the British Library, had exposed serious weaknesses across the sector, but that the government had failed to take a strategic approach to preventing similar incidents.

Kriegsverbrechen - Der Staat als Täter

ZDFheute

14. Juni 2026 um 22:45

Immer wieder geschehen schwerste Kriegsverbrechen, sei es im Irankrieg, im Nahostkonflikt oder im Kampf um die Ukraine. "Terra X History" fragt: Ist das Völkerrecht eine Illusion?

Rudi Völler: Eine deutsche Fußball-Legende

ZDFheute

07. Juni 2026 um 22:45

Er ist populär wie kaum ein anderer deutscher Fußballer: Rudi Völler, gefeiert als Stürmer, Trainer oder Manager. Selbst Ausraster verzeiht man ihm. "Terra X History" zeigt ein Porträt.

‘Of course we will give it back’: Bayeux tapestry set for secret journey across Channel

The Guardian

Von: Kim Willsher in Paris

03. Juni 2026 um 19:57

Operation will use specially built container to protect fragile 11th-century embroidery

As the Bayeux tapestry wends its way across the Channel in a top secret operation there will be no jolts, no bumps, no shakes or vibrations – unlike the voyage of William the Conqueror whose 1066 victory at Hastings the artefact recounts.

“Nothing has been left to chance,” Catherine Pégard, the French minister of culture, told a gathering to mark the historic loan, which will be physically achieved with the tapestry, which is really an embroidery, transported in a specially constructed cradle within a container, the minister said.

Obama’s former speechwriter Ben Rhodes examines the US through its 15 most defining speeches

The Guardian

Von: Martin Pengelly

28. Mai 2026 um 23:03

From Frederick Douglass to Obama, Ben Rhodes shares the speeches that explain the US in his new book, All We Say

Donald Trump “has proven Jeremiah Wright correct about a lot of things”, said Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter and deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama and still a close aide to the ex-president.

“If you look at the things that Jeremiah Wright was kind of canceled for, it was saying America was a nation founded on racism. Well, it’s a fairly common view these days. 9/11 was the chickens coming home to roost? I make versions of that argument every time I write for the New York Times: that American foreign policy has blowback.”

‘We can stitch together our past’: the AI-generated time-travellers vlogging from history

The Guardian

Von: Priya Bharadia

26. Mai 2026 um 11:00

The content creators behind channels like Chloe VS History are using AI tools to ‘bring history to life in a really visceral way’

“I have just arrived in Tudor London, 1536,” a young woman in a green puffer jacket tells the camera. “I’m going to check in at my room in the inn, get into the market. Then, later I am meeting the actual king – yep, Henry VIII – in person.”

On YouTube and other social platforms, users are flocking to watch AI-generated “history influencers”, characters that vlog their travels to historical settings.

100 Jahre Marilyn Monroe – Ihr wahres Gesicht

ZDFheute

24. Mai 2026 um 22:30

Marilyn Monroe ist die Kultfigur Hollywoods, bis heute. Doch wer ist die Frau hinter der Ikone? Zum 100. Geburtstag zeigt "Terra X History" das wahre Gesicht der gefeierten Schauspielerin.

Kriegstüchtig? 70 Jahre Bundeswehr

ZDFheute

21. Mai 2026 um 21:15

Die Bundeswehr blickt zurück auf 70 Jahre Geschichte, 1956 wurde die Wehrpflicht eingeführt. "Terra X History" fragt: Wie einsatzbereit war die Truppe seitdem – und wie steht sie heute da?

New Hungarian PM Opens Orban’s Office to the Public

Balkan Insight

Von: Edit Inotai

18. Mai 2026 um 11:11

Playing tour guide over the weekend to various buildings renovated using billions in taxpayer money, Magyar said his government will keep the building previously used as the Prime Minister’s Office open to the public.

Lese-Ansicht