History Stuff below the fold

Forget Indiana Jones, the movie should have been made about Mary Calverly...

musician, artist of Egyptian treasures, archeologist, nurse, ethnologist who helped the British counter the Nazi propaganda after Hitler met with the Mufti of Jerusalem, and journalist who documented the fight for freedom (against the communists in Greece, so I guess she doesn't count).
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Black history month remembers the Black loyalists.

Not mentioned: In Pox Americana, Fenn pointed out that most were not immune to small pox, and the Brits didn't insist that locals joining them be vaccinated as Washington had done, so thousands who joined the British died of that disease.

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More forgotten history: Romania's one million men who fought with the Germans against southern USSR.
One wonders how many of them ended up in the Gulag...

...Although, technically, German prisoners of war were under the jurisdiction of GUPVI (Main Directorate for POW and Internee Affairs), they were nonetheless used no differently than other Gulag inmates. ... Comparatively few German were taken alive before Stalingrad.Most were shot out of hand, many of them mutilated. Of the 95,000 German POWs captured at Stalingrad, only 5,000 survived to return home.

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The worst Maritime disaster wasn't the Titanic...
the Wilhelm Gustloff sank after being torpedoed by a Russian sub, killing over 9000 of the ten thousand civilians being evacuated from Eastern Prussia to avoid being captured by the Soviet Army...

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20 years ago today, the secret police were disbanded in the new Czechoslovakia.

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it took Lancet 12 years to retract the fake MMR vaccine causes autism research.

That study generated all sorts of conspiracy theories, while the real story about measles vaccine gets unreported:
measles deaths worldwide fell by 78 percent between 2000 and 2008, from an estimated 733 000 in 2000 to 164 000 in 2008.