This forest is the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia's arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.
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For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of WWII |... - 0 views
www.smithsonianmag.com/...of-World-War-II-188843001.html
via:packrati.us anthropology russian isolation Siberia archaeology history
shared by Daryl Bambic on 28 Mar 13
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iberia is the source of most of Russia's oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.
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omething from the middle ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow—"a low, soot-blackened log kennel that was as cold as a cellar," with a floor consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells. Looking around in the dim light, the visitors saw that it consisted of a single room. It was cramped, musty and indescribably filthy, propped up by sagging joists—and, astonishingly, home to a family of five:
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he daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. "When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing."
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a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century.
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Peter was a personal enemy and "the anti-Christ in human form"—a point he insisted had been amply proved by Tsar's campaign to modernize Russia by forcibly "chopping off the beards of Christians."
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Things had only got worse for the Lykov family when the atheist Bolsheviks took power. Under the Soviets, isolated Old Believer communities that had fled to Siberia to escape persecution began to retreat ever further from civilization. During the purges of the 1930s, with Christianity itself under assault, a Communist patrol had shot Lykov's brother on the outskirts of their village while Lykov knelt working beside him. He had responded by scooping up his family and bolting into forest.
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d neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their famil
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new there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them. Their only reading matter was prayer books and an ancient family Bible. Akulina had used the gospels to teach her children to read and write, using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink. When Agafia was shown a picture of a horse, she recognized it from her mother's Bible stories. "Look, papa," she exclaimed. "A steed!"
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They fashioned birch-bark galoshes in place of shoes. Clothes were patched and repatched until they fell apart, then replaced with hemp cloth grown from seed.
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A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch bark.
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stream. Stands of larch, spruce, pine and birch yielded all that anyone could take.... Bilberries and raspberries were close to hand, firewood as well, and pine nuts fell right on the roof."
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not until the late 1950s, when Dmitry reached manhood, that they first trapped animals for their meat and skins. Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion
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Old Karp was usually delighted by the latest innovations that the scientists brought up from their camp, and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites.
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"What amazed him most of all," Peskov recorded, "was a transparent cellophane package. 'Lord, what have they thought up—it is glass, but it crumples!
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Agafia's unusual speech—she had a singsong voice and stretched simple words into polysyllables—convinced some of her visitors she was slow-witted; in fact she was markedly intelligent, and took charge of the difficult task, in a family that possessed no calendars, of keeping track of time.
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many happy hours in its little sawmill, marveling at how easily a circular saw and lathes could finish wood.
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Karp Lykov fought a long and losing battle with himself to keep all this modernity at bay. When they first got to know the geologists, the family would accept only a single gift—salt
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but the sin of television, which they encountered at the geologists' camp, proved irresistible for them.... On their rare appearances, they would invariably sit down and watch. Karp sat directly in front of the screen. Agafia watched poking her head from behind a door. She tried to pray away her transgression immediately—whispering, crossing herself.... The old man prayed afterward, diligently and in one fell swoop.
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he Lord would provide, and she would stay, she said—as indeed she has. A quarter of a century later, now in her seventies herself, this child of the taiga lives on alone, high above the Abakan.
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An amazing story of a Russian Orthodox family who ran from Soviet persecution in the 1930 and survived in the wilderness of Siberia. The children had never seen other humans, developed their own dialect and lived on the perpetual edge of the world. Several family members were enthralled with technology, others were fearful but all were exceptionally intelligent.
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10 Things You May Not Know About William the Conqueror - HISTORY Lists - 0 views
10 Innovations That Built Ancient Rome - HISTORY Lists - 0 views
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Medieval Art and Art History - 0 views
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The medieval period of art history spans from the fall of the Roman Empire in 300 AD to the beginning of the Renaissance in 1400 AD
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he Catholic Church financed many projects, and the oldest examples of Christian art survive in the Roman catacombs, or burial crypts beneath the city.
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Medieval artists decorated churches and works for public appreciation using classical themes. For example, Roman mosaics made of small stone cubes called tesserae offered Christian scenery.
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Early Christian mosaics used muted colors like classical mosaics, but in the fourth century, mosaicists moved to brighter colors and patterns.
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Romanesque architecture symbolized the growing wealth of European cities and the power of Church monasteries.
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The Gothic style developed in the middle of the twelfth century and is named after the Goths who ruled France.
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Human forms such as the Madonna and Baby Jesus evolve from large heads on small bodies in Early Christianity to abstract forms in the Romanesque era. In the Gothic era, the Madonna and Child are more naturalistic with tall, bony figures.
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Winged Sandals: History: Athenian Politics and Government - 0 views
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Athens, however, every governmental decision had to be made by a big assembly of all eligible citizens who wanted to take part – in some cases, this had to be at least 6,000 citizens. This is called a "direct democracy".
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The Athenian assembly – which is the ancestor of a modern day parliament sitting – would meet in a large open-air area on the side of a hill in Athens called the Pnyx. Only male citizens over the age of 20 were allowed to take part. Women, children, slaves and foreigners were not permitted to participate in any part of Athenian democracy. Any member of the assembly could speak and make proposals (at least in theory), and everyone at the assembly voted on each issue by a show of hands. The assembly met at least 40 times a year. Sometimes, the authorities had trouble rounding up enough people to attend the assembly, so they would send out slaves carrying ropes dipped in red dye. Anybody that they hit would be fined, so people would run from the slaves to the Pnyx where they were safe and join the assembly.
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The Council of 500 The Athenians also had a council with 500 members (called the "boule"), which prepared the agenda for the assembly and carried out its decisions. This council also administered the state finances and a number of other state affairs. The members were chosen by lottery from the population of citizen men over the age of 30 and served for one year. A man was allowed to be a member only twice in his whole lifetime
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Juries in ancient Athens were also chosen by lottery drawn from any male citizens over the age of 30 who volunteered at the start of each year. Juries were made up of different numbers depending on the type of case.
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Witnesses were allowed, but unlike today, there was no cross-examination. Imprisonment was not used as a punishment following a conviction in ancient Athens – usually a person found guilty either had to pay a fine or was put to death.
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Battle of Saratoga - History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts - 0 views
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Benedict Arnold, his best infantry commander; Colonel Daniel Morgan and his crack regiment of Virginia riflemen; and two brigades of Continentals from the Hudson Highlands. They raised Gates's strength to about sixty-five hundred men
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Arnold poured in fresh regiments until the jittery Gates broke off the action, leaving the battered British in possession of the ground.
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Arnold joined the fighting and led an attack that captured key strong points, forcing the British to retreat to Saratoga (modern Schuylerville
HowStuffWorks "How the Spanish Inquisition Worked" - 0 views
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History student learns from her grandfather, makes his WWII story a senior project - Lo... - 0 views
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This story and others persuaded Klise to learn more about her 91-year-old grandpa and use his story for her Independent Study Senior Project at the College of Wooster.
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The 22-year-old spent the last school year meeting with him and researching his role in World War II for her thesis.
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Klise said she had only heard snippets of his war stories in the past. She said her questions would “jog his memory” and he would share more and more.
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And their story, just like Win’s, needs to be told so that we remember what war is truly about, the strength and will of the people who fight it.”
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History of Christianity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views
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Christianity was founded in the 1st century by the followers of Jesus of Nazareth who they believed to be the Christ or chosen one of God.
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Christianity spread initially from Jerusalem throughout the Near East. In the 4th century it was successively adopted as the state religion by Armenia in 301, Ethiopia in 325, Georgia in 337, and then the Roman Empire in 380. It became common to all of Europe in the Middle Ages and expanded throughout the world during Europe's Age of Exploration from the Renaissance onwards to become the world's largest religion.[1]
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as Paul of Tarsus who actively encouraged the founding of Christian communities or "churches" after his conversion.
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Christianity spread initially from Jerusalem throughout the Near East. In the 4th century it was successively adopted as the state religion by Armenia in 301, Ethiopia in 325, Georgia in 337, and then the Roman Empire in 380. It became common to all of Europe in the Middle Ages and expanded throughout the world during Europe's Age of Exploration from the Renaissance onwards to become the world's largest religion.[1]
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History of slavery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views
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The history of slavery covers slave systems in historical perspective in which one human being is legally the property of another, can be bought or sold, is not allowed to escape and must work for the owner without any choice involved. As Drescher (2009) argues, "The most crucial and frequently utilized aspect of the condition is a communally recognized right by some individuals to possess, buy, sell, discipline, transport, liberate, or otherwise dispose of the bodies and behavior of other individuals."[1] A integral element is that children of a slave mother automatically become slaves.[2] It does not include historical forced labor by prisoners, labor camps, or other forms of unfree labor in which laborers are not considered property.
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The history of slavery covers slave systems in historical perspective in which one human being is legally the property of another, can be bought or sold, is not allowed to escape and must work for the owner without any choice involved. As Drescher (2009) argues, "The most crucial and frequently utilized aspect of the condition is a communally recognized right by some individuals to possess, buy, sell, discipline, transport, liberate, or otherwise dispose of the bodies and behavior of other individuals." [1] A integral element is that children of a slave mother automatically become slaves. [2] It does not include historical forced labor by prisoners , labor camps , or other forms of unfree labor in which laborers are not considered property
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Cold War - History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts - 0 views
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President Harry Truman (1884-1972) agreed. “It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation…by outside pressures.”
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that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or "superbomb." Stalin followed suit.
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the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed poisonous radioactive waste into the atmosphere.
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ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards
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creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.
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U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, became the first man to set food on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans.
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forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these "blacklisted" writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade
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include anyone who worked in the federal government. Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify against colleagues and "loyalty oaths" became commonplace.
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military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south
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. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial "Third World" Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the re
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Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywher
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nstead of viewing the world as a hostile, "bi-polar" place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. At the same time, he adopted a policy of "détente"–"relaxation"–toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.
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, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the worl
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redefined Russia's relationship to the rest of the world: "glasnost," or political openness, and "perestroika," or economic reform
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the Berlin Wall–the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.
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The Space Race - History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts - 3 views
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crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile--seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space--made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.
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Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik
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fueled by the arms race and the growing threat of nuclear weapons, wide-ranging espionage and counter-espionage between the two countries, war in Korea and a clash of words and ideas carried out in the media.
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In 1959, the Soviet space program took another step forward with the launch of Luna 2, the first space probe to hit the moon
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In April 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth, traveling in the capsule-like spacecraft Vostok 1. For the U.S. effort to send a man into space, dubbed Project Mercury, NASA engineers designed a smaller, cone-shaped capsule far lighter than Vostok; they tested the craft with chimpanzees, and held a final test flight in March 1961 before the Soviets were able to pull ahead with Gagarin's launch. On May 5, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space (though not in orbit).
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Later that May, President John F. Kennedy made the bold, public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. In February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, and by the end of that year, the foundations of NASA's lunar landing program--dubbed Project Apollo--were in place.
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After landing successfully on July 20, Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon's surface; he famously called the moment "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
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By landing on the moon, the United States effectively "won" the space race that had begun with Sputnik's launch in
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ublic's attention was captivated by the space race, and the various developments by the Soviet and U.S. space programs were heavily covered in the national media. This frenzy of interest was further encouraged by the new medium of television. Astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes, a
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Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.
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Soyuz vehicle. When the commanders of the two crafts officially greeted each other, their "handshake in space" served to symbolize the gradual improvement of U.S.-Soviet relations in the late Cold War-era.