It turns out that a bunch of the bodies in Viking burial sites that were categorized as male because they were buried with swords, etc, are actually female if you look at the bones. More details.
posted by rmd1023 on Jul 23, 2011 - 52 comments

Freya von Moltke died on New Year’s Day at age 98. She and her husband led the Kreisau Circle, an intellectual salon which became an important part of the German resistance in WWII. They planned a coup, one of over forty-two separate plots to kill Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime. Freya von Molte was not portrayed in Valkyrie, the 2008 film that depicted the assassination attempt, but she, along with the other members of the resistance (Deutscher Widerstand), "did not bear the shame."
posted by tizzie on Jan 5, 2010 - 20 comments

Among the body of conspirators in the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler and seize the German government, few were as ambivalent as Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, head of the Berlin police. Although sympathetically (if briefly) portrayed in a recent film about the plot, von Helldorf was a definitely more enigmatic figure. [more inside]
posted by Skeptic on Feb 16, 2009 - 12 comments

You know the trouble with Historically-Based Movies? Unless you're an uneducated, ignorant moran, you know how they're gonna end. At least that's the argument of this Premiere article on 10 Movie Endings Spoiled By History. Of course there are ways to avoid that problem, as Cracked.com's (yeah, them) 11 Movies Saved by Historical Inaccuracy declares. Books have been written about Historical Movies' accuracy or inaccuracy, and everybody has an opinion on what the Best Historical Movies are, but if you want your History purely entertaining, there's only one mandog you can count on: here are Mr. Peabody, Sherman and the original Wayback Machine dropping in on Cristopher Columbus, Pancho Villa and Francisco Pizarro and the Incas (sorry, no USA History episodes on YouTube). [more inside]
posted by wendell on Jan 6, 2009 - 36 comments