I tried to post before - no luck.  Basically I said that I'm surprised Mary Coughlan is not a household name, though she DOES fill theatres.  I also said I had seen a while back the film "Magdalen Sisters" with a splendidly eerie Geraldine McEwan.  Ann-Marie Duff was in it too though I can't remember the actresses who played the other two (main) internees ["What's Google for?" do I hear you say?].  I also read an article in the 1990s that the last internees who were released (being somewhat advanced in years by then) from such institutions had difficulty adjusting in the outside world sometimes as they had become "institutionalised".

An Al Stewart song celebrating Hanno The Navigator (he who set off with a modest 29,999 others from Carthage in 500BCE to see how big Africa was)

And sticking with great explorers ...

Even The Moody Blues had a pop at explorers (polar bears in the antarctic, I ask you!)

Two rather different takes on Ireland's own explorer, the bould Kerryman, St Brendan.

While Guy Mitchell never felt more like singin' the blues when he got his teeth into Christopher Columbus.

So much American history is celebrated via folk music, especially when it comes to individuals. This is a shame since folk music today is (wrongly) misunderstood as a static minority medium. It is still one of the quickest mediums however when it comes to marking events of historical significance and for that aspect alone should be respected.

Two notable examples from the past, both involving pioneers of the air - one is a eulogy whereas the other is a scathing and scything commentary on a one-time folk hero who towards the end proved to be a nasty, showing just how versatile, immediate, discerning and effective this medium can be!

And just to show that most pioneers of the air got a look-in at the time, and not just from bluegrass musicians in the USA, this is Englishman Jack Hylton's Big Band tribute to that Kingston upon Hull-born record-breaking pilot Amy Johnson

Another from Al Stewart;

An insightful and thorough analysis of the career of Matthew Hopkins by a group of historians with the apposite name of Saxon.

What an absolutely dreadful noise they make.

Here's the beautiful original soundtrack.



The music and the images still have the power to unsettle me - after nearly half a century. I saw Witchfinder General in 1969 when I was far too young to see such things. Some of the sequences - like the slow burning of one of the women - haunt me still. The boyfriend who took me thought it was funny. He didn't last long, as I recall.  I seem to remember posting something somewhere about the director of the film, Michael Reeves, but I can't remember if it was here or on the BBC board. Reeves was enormously talented, but he died - actually in 1969 just after the film's release -  of a drugs overdose. He was only 25.

EDIT:
Playwright Alan Bennett was particularly repulsed by Witchfinder. In his regular column in The Listener, published eight days after the film's release, Bennett explained how he felt horror films should always be "punctuated by belly laughs" and attacked Reeves's completely humourless movie as "the most persistently sadistic and morally rotten film I have seen. It was a degrading experience by which I mean it made me feel dirty." Although Reeves was infuriated, his response indicated that he believed Bennett's reaction was proof that his decision to include such extreme violence was the correct approach to the material. In his letter published in The Listener, Reeves noted: "Surely the most immoral thing in any form of entertainment is the conditioning of the audience to accept and enjoy violence ... Violence is horrible, degrading and sordid. Insofar as one is going to show it on the screen at all, it should be presented as such – and the more people it shocks into sickened recognition of these facts the better. I wish I could have witnessed Mr Bennett frantically attempting to wash away the 'dirty' feeling my film gave him. It would have been proof of the fact that Witchfinder General works as intended."

But perhaps the war years of 1642 -1651 were "sadistic and morally rotten"? Wasn't that indeed the point? But the film remains - like Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) - not one I could easily watch again.

Did too much bad acid (man) ingested by both Reeves and Russell rather distort their view of history and consequently their presentation of witch-hunting in 17th century England and France (distort their view of everything, in fact)? Perhaps, but then again perhaps not. Living through a witch-hunt in your locality must have been a terrifying experience, even if you were not actually being "investigated". Men like Hopkins - and the tortures and punishments they imposed on vulnerable women (and, less often, men) - were indeed the stuff of nightmares. Interestingly, The Devils was based on the 1952 Aldous Huxley novel, The Devils of Loudun. Huxley too was a great dabbler (he famously received intramuscular injections of LSD as he lay dying, an experience which surely not many of us could contemplate with equanimity).

Gone off the music topic a bit, sorry, but anything's better than Saxon.

God Dethroned's account of poor Mary Mallon from County Tyrone who ended up the victim of a rather modern version of witch-hunting (seen here in a 1909 newspaper article casting skulls into the frying pan).



The panic whipped up about Mary at the time divided New Yorkers into two almost equally hysterical camps - those clamouring for her enforced ostracision and those for whom she became an icon of civil liberties issues. The former camp won.

More about her in this wiki article.

Not sure that this was the most accurate depiction of French history but my brother (who is 5 years younger than me) enjoyed it way back when 


as he did this one - I think it was a boys with their toys with the souped-up vehicle thing; all the lads would have liked an amphicar like Captain Zeppos 

I suppose it's okay to post about Captain Zeppos on a history website if it's from the nineteen-sixties.  It's sobering to think that when I was even younger than I am now The Beatles were a pop group for the younger (then my) generation and now in Liverpool they do guided tours about the Beatles.  I've a feeling there may even be a Beatles Museum but I'm not absolutely sure - yes, I know, I should "google" it to find out.

I'm not sure just how much art history can be learnt from this one but it's great fun!

I remember this one when it was new. It was originally a very poppy song from 1969 or thereabouts - this was the updated version by Sandra in 1990.

And this one of course - the Kent State University shooting happened 44 years ago. This song (and the beautiful B-side "Find The Cost of Freedom" by Stephen Stills) came out a year later in 1971. It is one of the few songs that all four of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young have included in their own solo repertoires.



This is a nice version of Stills' song, sung by Graham Nash with David Crosby and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd in 2007

You have possibly never heard of Captain Tobias Hume, I hadn't until very recently, but he's one of those talented eccentrics who should be better known, at least here in Scotland from which he hailed,
The facts are sketchy, he worked around the turn of the 17th century and his main occupation was soldiery, probably a mercenary, and travelled in Russia, Poland, Sweden and Denmark at least. He said of himself, "My Profession being, as my Education hath beene, Armes, the only effeminate part of me, hath been Musiche"

He wrote mainly for the viol and produced a range of work from complex pieces to raucous bawdy dance tunes including Tickle Me Quickly dedicated to Anne, Queen of Denmark.
Any lasting success however eluded him and he ended up in penury foraging for food.

Here's one of his numbers, the sentiments of which would doubtless appeal to Nasty Nigel.

.

Not quite what the OP intended I know ....

It's a BBC production and so you lot have probably already seen it. I've only just stumbled upon it, but I did think it was well done and it made me smile ... not that I'm a fan of rap music by any means:

This song starts 14 billion years ago;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrZkhvb35EY

(Unfortunately I can't find a version by Bill Caddick, who wrote this one)

Most of the history is fine, but Jack Judge had a number of contradictory stories about the writing of Tipperary, and Caddick ignores the fact that, by 1914, the soldiers were singing "modified" words, of which this is about  the only printable version :-



That's the wrong way to tickle Mary,
That's the wrong way to kiss.
Don't you know that over here, lad
They like it best like this.
Hooray pour Les Français
Farewell Angleterre.
We didn't know how to tickle Mary,
But we learnt how over there.

Today, 2nd of May, marks the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese themselves commemorate 30th April (the fall/capture of Saigon) while the US Department of Defense marks 15th May (the end of the Mayaguez incident) as the end of the war. That latter incident, however, involved Cambodia and was undertaken by US forces stationed in Thailand. In other words the Mayaguez incident was part of the wars in Indochina but not the Vietnam War.

What happened on 2nd May 1975 was that US Navy Task Force 76 finally left Vietnamese territorial waters ending more than 10 years of US military engagement in that country.



Released in 1985 to mark the 10th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, Paul Hardcastle's 19 is now itself 30 years old. Within the last few days Hardcastle himself has posted on that YouTube page complaining of its accreditation of Mike Oldfield and threatening us all with a '30th anniversary mix'. A 30th anniversary of his hit, perhaps, but a 40th anniversary of the end of the war of course.

At least Hardcastle gets the credit for the Rory Bremner parody of 19.

It's a while since we had one of these so:

Does prophetic history count on this thread? I can't decide if these should be here or on the Unwitting prophecy thread. On balance probably here. 

The year 1980 saw the seventh anniversary of Denmark, Britain and Ireland joining the EEC. It was also the first year of the first full decade of membership for the UK. One wonders how many people at that time knew how long or short that membership would last or even cared. 2 music videos from that year 40 years ago, however, seem perfectly to encapsulate the different moods in the Remain and Leave camps tonite.

For the Remainers:

 

For the Leavers:

Triceratops wrote:

We were in Hyde Park of Friday evening to see Billy Joel in concert. A super gig. The Piano Man was in fine form treating the audience to My Life, Allentown, She’s Always a Woman and It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me etc. One of the encores was We Didn’t Start the Fire. As he sang, a video to accompany the song was shown on the big screen with a finger swiping the images on a smartphone touchscreen as the words and names passed by:

We Didn't Start the Fire (Hyde Park 07/07/23)

Ironically his original video from 1989 featured very few still photos or footage of the people, events and places mentioned in the song:

We Didn't Start the Fire (1989)

Subsequently, others have made picture montages of varying quality some of them quite good such as that linked to by Trike and also these:

We Didn't Start the Fire (still photos)

We Didn't Start the Fire (moving images)

There have even been attempts to produce updated versions of the song to cover the years since 1989 such as:
 
We Didn't Start the Fire (2012)

We Didn't Start the Fire (2013)

We Didn't Start the Fire (2023)

What the creators of those updated versions don’t seem to realise, however, is that they’re being impatient. Since the original song covered the 40 years from Billy Joel’s birth in 1949 up to his 40th birthday in 1989, then a second instalment isn’t due until 40 years after that in 2029. That's still 6 years away.

nordmann wrote:

the Kent State University shooting happened 44 years ago. This song (and the beautiful B-side "Find The Cost of Freedom" by Stephen Stills) came out a year later in 1971.

From 10 years later another B-side about political violence in the U.S. - Seconds by The Human League (1981) concerning the assassination of President Kennedy 60 years ago:

Seconds (1981)

(warning: graphic content)