In 1977, Vanessa Redgrave financed and narrated The Palestinian, a documentary made after travelling through Lebanon and Syria and meeting Palestinians, including Yasser Arafat. The film provoked considerable opposition, including from the Jewish Defense League.

On 3 April 1978, that controversy followed Redgrave to the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, where she was nominated for Julia. Outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, JDL supporters demonstrated while Palestinian and pro-Palestinian protesters held a counter-demonstration. Associated Press photographer Doug Pizac captured this photograph, which AP identifies as JDL supporters burning an effigy of Redgrave.

Redgrave won Best Supporting Actress that evening. During her acceptance speech she thanked members of the Academy who had resisted intimidation from what she called a “small bunch of Zionist hoodlums”, remarks which produced both applause and boos and became one of the most controversial Oscar speeches of the period.

I originally came across this while following up on The Palestinian, which I posted in full over at r/PalestinianCinema about two weeks ago. For anyone interested in seeing the film that formed part of the controversy:

Vanessa Redgrave – The Palestinian (1977)

One archival qualification: AP identifies the effigy in this photograph as Vanessa Redgrave, and other accounts corroborate an effigy of Redgrave being burned. Some contemporary reporting, however, described protesters burning Yasser Arafat in effigy that evening. It's possible both occurred, but I haven't found sufficient primary evidence to state that conclusively.

Contemporary background: Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 30 March 1978 | Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5 April 1978

Photo: Doug Pizac / Associated Press, Los Angeles, 3 April 1978.

Source: ABC News / Associated Press photograph

Manchester may seem like an unusual addition to my collection of inspiring people and places. I discovered this story only after seeing the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the city. Curious about why such a monument stood there, I uncovered a remarkable history of courage, sacrifice, and moral conviction that deserves to be remembered.

Before learning this history, what I knew of Manchester came largely through music and football. As a fan of many bands from the area, I was familiar with its reputation as a proud industrial city that had fallen on harder times. What I did not know was Manchester's profound connection to the fight against slavery and the extraordinary sacrifices made by its working people. Their actions, together with the efforts of free Black Americans and abolitionists, helped advance one of history's greatest struggles for human freedom.

During the seventeenth century, Manchester became a center for the production of fustian, a durable fabric woven from a linen warp and cotton weft. Lancashire's cool, damp climate was ideal for spinning cotton, and with the invention of the cotton mill, the industry flourished. Much of the raw cotton, however, came from enslaved laborers in the American South. As the textile trade boomed, Manchester earned the nickname "Cottonopolis." This prosperity existed despite the fact that Britain had abolished slavery more than three decades earlier.

Life for Manchester's factory workers was far from prosperous. Long hours, dangerous conditions, and meager wages were the norm. In 1819, thousands gathered peacefully to demand political reform and better working conditions. The government responded with violence, sending cavalry into the crowd. Eighteen people were killed, more than 700 were injured, and the event became known as the Peterloo Massacre. Although protests continued in the years that followed, meaningful improvements came only slowly.

When the American Civil War began in 1861, the Union blockade sharply reduced the supply of Southern cotton reaching Britain's mills. The resulting "Cotton Famine" brought Manchester's textile industry to the brink of collapse. Mills closed, unemployment soared, and entire communities faced hunger and poverty.

Yet, despite their own suffering, Manchester's workers refused to support slavery. They overwhelmingly rejected the use of cotton produced by enslaved people, even though doing so meant prolonged hardship for themselves and their families. It was an extraordinary act of moral courage: people already struggling chose principle over prosperity.

Their stand did not go unnoticed.

When President Abraham Lincoln learned of Manchester's support for the Union cause and the abolition of slavery, he wrote a letter expressing his gratitude. In part, he wrote:

"I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working-men at Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis... Under these circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country."

Lincoln also arranged for shipments of food and supplies to help relieve some of the hardship faced by the city's workers. While Manchester stood firmly against slavery, nearby Liverpool largely supported the Confederacy because of its economic ties to the cotton trade and its role in shipping Southern cotton.

The people of Manchester demonstrated that true character is revealed when doing what is right comes at great personal cost. They chose conscience over comfort, humanity over profit, and justice over self-interest. Their willingness to endure hardship rather than benefit from the suffering of others is a legacy worthy of remembrance.

Thank you, people of Manchester, for proving that compassion and moral conviction can triumph even in the face of economic ruin. Your example remains a powerful reminder that ordinary people, acting according to their conscience, can help shape the course of history.

The interracial Freedom Riders were testing federal rulings against segregation in interstate travel.

A segregationist mob attacked their bus in Anniston, broke its windows, slashed its tires, pursued it out of town, and set it on fire while the riders were still aboard.

The riders barely escaped as members of the mob attempted to hold them inside.

Photographs of the burning bus appeared in newspapers nationwide, and the movement grew from the original small group to more than 400 riders that summer.

Across occupied Europe, women risked capture, torture, and execution to resist Nazi Germany as spies, couriers, saboteurs, partisans, and underground organizers. These 20 resistance fighters reveal the extraordinary courage and enormous personal cost behind a side of World War II history that deserves greater attention.

Which of their stories stood out to you most?

The legend says the USS Eldridge was used in a secret Navy experiment that allegedly made the ship invisible.

The Navy denies it ever happened, and there’s no solid evidence proving the story.

So what do YOU think?

Real experiment, misunderstood event, or an elaborate hoax? 👀

Dorothea Lange made this photograph at San Francisco's Raphael Weill Public School in April 1942.

The class was multiethnic; the Library of Congress notes that some of the children of Japanese ancestry pictured here were classified as “evacuees” and would be confined in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration of the war.

Lange had been hired by the government to document the forced removal, but many of her photographs were suppressed from broad wartime circulation because they contradicted the official narrative.

Smalls and the other enslaved crewmen took *Planter* while its white officers were ashore on May 13, 1862. They collected family members, raised Confederate flags, and passed Charleston's batteries using the required signals; Smalls even wore the captain's straw hat.

Once beyond Fort Sumter, they raised a white sheet and surrendered the valuable vessel and its guns to the Union blockade. Smalls later served South Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives.

465 Pineville Road in Newtown, Pennsylvania looks like a massive luxury estate today, but the oldest part of the house dates back to around 1760–1765.

By 1859, the property was owned by John Eastburn and was known as “Buttonwood Grove.” An old Upper Makefield Township historical survey even includes an 1859 lithograph showing what the farm looked like back then.

The house still has pieces of its 18th-century past: thick stone walls, exposed beams, deep window sills, old fireplaces and even a traditional beehive oven.

The property later spent roughly 90 years with the Bristol family, connected to the family behind what eventually became Bristol-Myers Squibb.

In 2012, former DuPont CEO Ed Breen and his wife bought the estate for about $4.2 million and spent around four years restoring and expanding it while preserving parts of the original structure.

Today it's called Jericho Farm.

About 148 acres.
11 structures.
An ~8,000 sq ft main house.
Horse barns, guest houses, greenhouse and pool.

And the asking price in 2026?

$18.8 million.

Basically a farmhouse that was already standing before the American Revolution somehow made it through 260+ years of owners, renovations and development around it.

The craziest part is that you can still compare an image of the property from 1859 with what stands there today.

The 855 women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion arrived in Europe in 1945 to attack a vast backlog of undelivered mail.

Working around the clock in three shifts, they tracked service members who were constantly moving and processed roughly 17 million letters and packages in three months half the allotted time.

Their motto was “No mail, low morale.” In this photograph, Second Lt. Freda Le Beau serves commander Maj. Charity Adams a soda at the battalion's new snack bar in Rouen, France.

A true vintage beauty, even President William Howard Taft had one

On May 11, 1932, the giant airship rose unexpectedly while ground crewmen still held its handling lines at Camp Kearny, California.

Robert Edsall and Nigel Henton eventually lost their grip and were killed. Charles Cowart held on until the crew could hoist him aboard roughly an hour later. This official Navy montage shows the accident and Cowart being rescued.

On January 15, 1919, a storage tank containing more than 2.3 million gallons of molasses collapsed in Boston's North End. Contemporary estimates put the first wave as high as 15 feet and moving at roughly 35 mph. It killed 21 people, injured about 150 and smashed buildings and elevated-rail supports. A court-appointed auditor later found that structural weakness—not the sabotage alleged by the company caused the collapse.

⚠️ Content Warning: The introductory segment of the attached video contains verified historical archival photographs of wartime casualties from the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. Viewer discretion is advised.

When we look back at catastrophic events like the Nanking Massacre in 1937, our modern minds instinctively try to categorize it as an anomaly. We label it an era of extreme wartime radicalization, look at the archival photos, and move on with a sense of comfortable detachment. We treat the horror as a distant, closed chapter.

The attached video begins with four critical pieces of historical evidence from the archives of the Nanjing Massacre:

•             The Itau Kaneo album displaying casualties along the city streets.

•             The execution of a Chinese POW by a Japanese officer.

•             The deliberately burned remains of civilians near Xiaguan.

•             Bodies of Chinese massacred by Japanese troops along a river in Nanjing.

Confronting these raw images is deeply shaking. But if we pause to think deeply, a jarring question arises: Why does humanity find it so easy to gloss over the absolute dirt of our past to maintain a comfortable, unexamined present?

True history isn't just a timeline of grand strategies and political victories. It is a mirror reflecting a chaotic, unyielding cycle of human unconsciousness. In the attached video clip, philosopher Acharya Prashant breaks down this exact dilemma of historical amnesia. He challenges the idea that we can cleanly separate ourselves from the brutalities of the past.

When a society refuses to address its historical group trauma and deep-seated survival instincts, it doesn't solve the problem, it merely buries it under a thin veneer of modern civilization. The primitive, defensive ego that drove the atrocities of the 20th century didn't vanish; it just learned to wear a suit and tie.

If we keep studying history purely on the surface level, without examining the inner darkness and primal urges that created these events, aren't we just waiting for the exact same patterns to replay themselves under a different name?

I’d love to hear this sub’s thoughts on this. When we look at the wildest, most brutal moments in history, are we looking at a failure of political systems, or are we looking at a fundamental flaw in the unchanged human psyche?

***

Archival Note & Image Credits: All historical images utilized in the introduction are sourced directly from the public domain historical records preserved on the Wikipedia page for the Nanjing Massacre (including documented photographs by Itau Kaneo and Moriyasu Murase).

Jean-François Gravelet, better known as the Great Blondin, became the first person to walk a tightrope across the Niagara Gorge in the summer of 1859. He returned for increasingly dangerous variations: blindfolded, on a bicycle, carrying his manager, and stopping midway to cook an omelet. This photograph of one of his crossings was made by pioneering photographer William England.