This December, we’re taking a look back at the many fascinating history books that published this year. From axe murderers to the history of rope, from the biography of Mt. Rushmore to a diverse array of WWII stories, the 2025 Holiday Gift Guide has a book recommendation for every history lover. Organized by general topic, don’t blame us if you find yourself adding both gifts and books to keep to your shopping cart!
History of a Singular Subject
Two-time National Outdoor Book Award-winning author Buddy Levy’s thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship―and the men who sacrificed everything, including their lives, for science, country, and polar immortality. Named one of Amazon’s Best History Books of 2025!
A brilliant and bloody examination of the axe’s foundational role in human history, from prehistoric violence, to war and executions, to newspaper headlines and popular culture.
A unique and compelling adventure through the history of rope and its impact on civilization, in the vein of single-subject bestsellers like Salt and Cod.
From the Pulitzer finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red, The Zorg is the astonishing yet little-known true story of the most consequential slave ship that ever crossed the Atlantic. Named one of Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s Best History Books of 2025!
From the bestselling co-author of Apollo 13 comes the thrilling untold story of the pioneering Gemini program that was instrumental in getting Americans on the moon.
Just in time to celebrate the monument’s 100th anniversary, A Biography of a Mountain combines history with reportage, bringing the complicated and nuanced story of Mt. Rushmore to life.
For readers of Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, and Jared Diamond: A bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future.
After decades of silence, the last surviving World War II spy operating in the deadly world of Nazi France, reveals the real, untold story of her time as a secret agent.
From New York Times bestselling author of Les Parisiennes and That Woman: A Life of Wallis Simpson, this is a powerful and vivid portrait of the women who came together to form an orchestra in order to survive the horrors of Auschwitz.
From New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin comes the true story of the deadliest submarine in World War II and the courageous captain who survived torture and imprisonment at the hands of the enemy. Named one of Barnes & Noble’s Best History Books of 2025!
Timed for the 250th anniversary of America’s revolution and founding: Paul Revere’s heroic ride, newly told with fresh research into little-known aspects of the story Americans have heard since childhood but hardly understood. A USA Today bestseller and one of Barnes & Noble’s Best History Books of 2025!
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters comes the story of a courageous young Imperial Grand Duchess who scandalized Europe in search of freedom.
From the New York Times bestselling Kennedy historian and author of Jackie: Public, Private, Secret comes the other side of the story—her husband’s: JFK: Public, Private, Secret. Named one of Amazon’s Best History books of 2025!
New from the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Nine, a “narrative of unfathomable courage” (Wall Street Journal) about the two women who fell in love in the Ravensbrück concentration camp at the risk of their lives.
The first literary biography of Tim O’Brien, the preeminent American writer of the war in Vietnam and one of the best writers of his generation, drawing on never-before-seen materials and original interviews.
In Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy it, author Samuel Miller McDonald offers a bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future. Read on for a featured excerpt in which McDonald deconstructs a letter written by former U.S. president to show the idea of progress.
A history of the ancient world, 1904. Courtesy of Wikimedia. Public Domain.
“Let the philosophical observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains eastwardly toward our seacoast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association, living under no law but that of nature . . . He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals . . . and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day. And where this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration, and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth.”
This passage is from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1824, two years before his death and forty-one years after the end of the American Revolutionary War. Jefferson was the United States’ third president and one of the country’s most important Founders. This short text illuminates both the spiritual foundation of the country and the idea at the heart of this book. So let’s deconstruct it.
If you were to travel from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Atlantic coastline in the east, Jefferson suggests, the land you would pass through and the buildings dotted along your road would appear as they had at earlier points in human history, as if you were traveling along not just miles but centuries. Your journey would reflect the passage of time, the progress made by European settlers since they reached the East Coast of North America. In other words, by “savages . . . living under no law but that of nature,” Jefferson means that at the Rockies there would be ancient wilderness housing violent fur-clad people without society who foraged for food and shelter, and dangerous beasts, representing life in humanity’s earliest years. By the time you reached what are now the Midwestern states, you would find early agricultural societies, flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, and rows of corn and wheat surrounding simple towns and villages. Finally, reaching the end of your mirror-image quest of American westward frontier expansion, arriving in Washington, DC, New York City, or Boston, you would find the as-yet “most improved state” of human beings and their societies: laws, dense cities, bustling trade, and sophisticated technology. There, you could rest assured that such developments would continue into a bright future. What Jefferson is sketching out is a grand narrative in a specific tradition that can be best captured in one word: progress.
Pick up any crime novel and you are likely to find a narrative formula. The details may change from story to story, but the general structure stays the same: a crime is committed, a detective begins the process of finding and piecing together clues, and the story culminates with the crime solved and the criminal brought to justice. Like crime novels, narratives of progress follow their own formula. This excerpt from Jefferson’s letter offers an ideal distillation of that formula. Though the details have changed through time, from culture to culture, the formula’s essential elements have remained remarkably consistent over not just centuries, but millennia.
The formula starts in the dark and wild beginning of humanity and moves forward and upward into a superior, more refined present, through changes that compound over time, culminating in some still vague, ever-future paradise. The story always parcels its characters into a binary, splitting those deemed civilized from the savage, the heathen from the blessed, the wild from the domesticated, the developed from the undeveloped. There is almost always some kind of frontier space, physical or metaphorical, into which the blessed must enter. The salvation awaiting in the future is set aside for the chosen, but only if they remain obedient to this quest, or, rather, to those leading it.
This narrative formula has served as the intellectual foundation on which Western civilization itself has grown and spread. The American sociologist Robert Nisbet, the last author to publish a broad historical account of the idea of progress, wrote of the concept in 1980: “No single idea has been more important in Western civilization for nearly three thousand years.”
The narrative formula of progress has been important for even longer than that, across many geographies and cultures. It has been important to how countless people over the last five thousand years have understood their place in the cosmos, the timeline reaching back to the beginning of all things and forward to the end of all things. It has been important to how armies are motivated, slaves and peasants are placated, gods invented, and emperors unleashed. The formula has been foundational to those who have made major scientific discoveries or peeked beyond the planet’s atmosphere, but also to those who have waged world wars and enslaved masses. Tracing the lineage of this narrative, we can not only see the evolution of an idea, but also understand more clearly the process that created a certain kind of society that we call civilization, an anomaly that was sparked first in one place, and has since burned across time, peoples, and far stretches of the earth. Though two hundred years old now, Jefferson’s letter appears in the latter part of this history. His worldview was grown out of a lineage that stretched back nearly five millennia, to the world’s earliest civilization in Mesopotamia. But that tradition did not end with Jefferson. The progress formula still occupies a central place in societies and minds all over the world. It remains the default, subconscious framework by which most of us understand our place in our species’ history and our societies’ trajectories through time, and thus by which policies are decided and enacted. It remains the foundation on which we are currently building the future.
Samuel Miller McDonald is a geographer focusing on human-ecology, theory, and history. He holds a doctorate from Brasenose College, University of Oxford and degrees from Yale University and College of the Atlantic. He has written essays and analysis for The Nation, The Guardian, The New Republic, Current Affairs, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and has contributed interviews to BBC Ideas, VICE News Tonight, and various radio and podcast programs. Progress is his first book.
The post Featured Excerpt: Progress appeared first on The History Reader.
Named by Time Magazine as one of the most anticipated books of fall 2025, Gemini by Jeffrey Kluger reveals the thrilling, untold story of the pioneering Gemini program that was instrumental in getting Americans on the moon. Read on for a featured, introductory excerpt!
Like every man who had ever orbited the earth before them, Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin knew their lives depended on their retrorockets. The very purpose of the rockets was in the retro part of their name—to accelerate their spacecraft not forward but, in effect, backward, slowing the ship down and bleeding off speed, which was essential if Lovell and Aldrin were going to live another day after the ninety-four hours they’d already spent in space.
Orbiting the earth, after all, is effectively an act of falling around the earth—flying high enough and fast enough that even as your spacecraft speeds forward and downward, the surface of the planet curves away from you, meaning that while you fall and fall and fall and fall, you never, ever reach the ground. Like the moon, you become a stable satellite of the earth, staying aloft long after your water and air and power give out. So while Lovell and Aldrin had happily gone to space aboard their Gemini 12 spacecraft—the last of the Gemini program’s ten manned missions—they very much looked forward to turning their ship rump forward, firing their four retro-rocket motors, and subtracting enough speed from their 17,500-mile-per-hour velocity that gravity would have its way with them and they would begin a controlled plunge through the atmosphere.
On the afternoon of November 15, 1966, the men began the homecoming maneuver, facing their ship backward and bracing for the lifesaving engine burn.
“We are now one minute and eighteen seconds to retrofire,” announced Paul Haney, the voice of NASA, to the millions of Americans following the maneuver on live television. Eighteen seconds later, he added, “One minute on my mark. Mark!” Then, “Thirty seconds, mark!”
In the spacecraft, Lovell and Aldrin felt four hard bumps and heard four loud bangs as the engines lit, slamming them with more than ten thousand pounds of thrust squarely in their backs.
“Retrofire!” Lovell, the commander, echoed.
“Holding it steady,” Aldrin answered.
The engines fired for just five seconds, but the physics and the arithmetic governing the maneuver meant that that was enough to send the astronauts on a controlled high dive through the steadily thickening air, which would cause temperatures of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit to bloom across the heat shield at the bottom of their capsule. Less than half an hour later, they splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, seven hundred miles southeast of Cape Kennedy in Florida, within sight of the prime rescue vessel, the USS Wasp.
“Son of a gun!” Aldrin exclaimed as the spacecraft slammed into the choppy Atlantic waters.
“Boy! Boy! Boy!” Lovell responded.
“Gemini 12, Houston,” called astronaut Pete Conrad, the capsule communicator in mission control, as TV cameras picked up the sight of the spacecraft. “Smile! You’re on the tube!”
Astronaut Jim Lovell is photographed inside his Gemini spacecraft during the Gemini-12 mission. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia.
For the historical record, Lovell did smile and Aldrin did smile and America smiled too. Because with the successful splashdown of Gemini 12, the twenty-month Gemini program, which had seen the US launching men into space at the rate of one mission every eight weeks, during a stretch in which the much-feared Soviet Union had not succeeded in sending any cosmonauts aloft at all, had come to its triumphant end. In that twenty months, NASA and America had learned how to walk in space, to fly long-duration missions in space, to navigate in space, to rendezvous and dock with another vehicle in space—in short, to do every little thing it would be necessary to do if the US were going to meet the pledge the martyred president John Kennedy had made more than five years before: to have American boots on the moon before the end of the decade.
The gripping and glittery tale of the Gemini program—one defined by its successes, yes, but also by its tragedies and losses and deaths and near deaths—has never been fully told before. Americans know well the story of the Mercury program, when such Mount Rushmore names as John Glenn and Al Shepard and Gus Grissom and Wally Schirra made the nation’s first journeys in space. And the nation surely knows of the Apollo program, when human beings first ventured moonward.
But we know less about the story of the Gemini program—which gave us the likes of Lovell and Aldrin and Conrad and Neil Armstrong. That is not as it should be.
Over the arc of the last three generations, the adeptness of Gemini, the capabilities of Gemini, the mechanical genius of Gemini, not to mention the sublime skills of the men who piloted the Geminis, have had an outsize and often unappreciated impact on geopolitics, technology, and the fundamental science of space travel itself. It was the Gemini, certainly, that gave the US the cosmic edge over the Soviet Union in the original space race, contributing to a cascading series of economic, engineering, and political victories that helped bring the original Cold War to a peaceful end, with the West ascendant and the former Soviet Union consigned to history.
It was the Gemini program that provided the glimmers of good—indeed, often dazzling—news during some of the darkest periods in America, in the midst of the bloody and riven 1960s, bringing not just the public but politicians together in the shared goal of making America the dominant power off the planet.
It was the Gemini program, too, that helped give rise to the global cooperation in space that exists today with NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, and more than fifteen nations collaborating not just aboard the International Space Station but in the new Artemis program, which aims to have boots back on the moon by the end of the 2020s. Every docking a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft makes with the space station, every space walk any astronaut from any nation takes, every step an Apollo astronaut took on the lunar surface, every one of the 135 space shuttle missions, every scientific experiment conducted aboard any active spacecraft flows directly and indirectly from lessons learned more than half a century ago when the very first Geminis with their very first astronauts made their very first flights into the void.
America and the world have overlooked Gemini too long, have forgotten its achievements too easily, have wrongly assigned it to the spot of forgotten middle sibling in the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo troika. But Gemini was one of the most thrilling and harrowing and uplifting exercises ever attempted in the history of space travel. I and others have told the story of the Mercury program. I and others have told the story of the Apollo program. With this book, I aim to tell an equally powerful story of the Gemini program and, in doing so, help complete the historical record.
PROLOGUE
Space Walk at the Brink: June 5, 1966
The last thing Tom Stafford wanted to do was cut Gene Cernan loose in space. Stafford liked Cernan; he had trained hard with Cernan. For more than a year, the two of them had worked together to get ready for their three-day flight of Gemini 9, and now, in early June 1966, they were actually aloft. But the business of cutting Cernan loose was all at once a very real possibility.
Stafford, the commander of the mission, was inside the spacecraft, buckled into his left-hand seat. Cernan, the junior pilot, was outside, dangling—actually spinning, tumbling, and flailing—at the end of a long umbilical cord, completely unable to control his movements, much less make his way back to the small open hatch on his side of the spacecraft and maneuver himself inside.
It was Deke Slayton, the head of the astronaut office, who first raised the possibility of what Stafford should do in a situation like this—and for Gemini 9, the warning seemed especially important, since the flight had been snakebit from the start. Just four months earlier, two good men—rookie astronauts both—had died a fiery death trying to get the mission off the ground. The next month, two other good men—Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott—had nearly lost their lives when their Gemini 8 spacecraft spun out of control 186 miles above the earth’s surface. Now it was Gemini 9’s turn, and NASA’s run of bad luck seemed to be continuing.
The Gemini 9 crew member Eugene A. Cernan. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia.
Twice, at the end of May, Stafford and Cernan had suited up and climbed into their spacecraft in preparation for liftoff, and both times, technical problems had caused the launch attempt to be scrubbed. It was before the second of those attempts, when Stafford and Cernan were still in their long johns, preparing to climb into their pressure suits, that Slayton appeared in the suit-up room. Completely ignoring Cernan—not even making eye contact with the rookie astronaut—he addressed Stafford.
“Tom,” he said, “I need to have a few words with you in private.”
Cernan looked at Stafford with a questioning expression, and Stafford merely shrugged in response. That hardly appeased Cernan. Yes, he was a first-timer in space, while Stafford had flown just six months before on the successful flight of Gemini 6. But the two men were now one crew, and anything that was said to the commander ought to be said to the pilot as well. That wasn’t what Slayton wanted, however. He escorted Stafford out of the room and in quiet tones laid down what was NASA’s life-and-death law.
Only once before, on the flight of Gemini 4 just a year earlier, had an American astronaut walked in space, and that had been merely a twenty-minute float outside the cabin door, with pilot Ed White slightly maneuvering himself this way and that with a handheld zip gun before hurrying back inside and sealing the hatch. Cernan’s space walk would be much more ambitious, lasting hours, with the astronaut climbing all over the spacecraft to deposit and collect experiment packages before making his way to the rear end of the ship where an astronaut maneuvering unit—an air force–built jet pack known as the AMU for short—was stowed. Cernan would be expected to climb into the backpack and fly free in space, connected to the ship only by a long, thin, nylon tether.
The entire exercise posed enormous risks, and Slayton was well aware of the mortal math involved in that.
Up to now, NASA had launched twelve crews of men into space—six aboard the one-man Mercury spacecraft, and six more so far on the first six Gemini flights, from Gemini 3 to Gemini 8—and all twelve of those crews had come home safely. NASA wanted to keep those numbers as close to perfect as possible. Sending two men into space aboard Gemini 9 and bringing two men home was the objective, of course. But if something happened to Cernan when he was free-floating outside—if he became incapacitated, unconscious, or was otherwise beyond rescue—Slayton would not stand for Stafford playing the hero, remaining in space with the cabin door open and dying along with his crewmate. In such a situation, Stafford was to disconnect the umbilical cord that linked his junior astronaut to the spacecraft, seal the hatch, and come home alone, leaving Cernan, a thirty-two-year-old naval aviator, to become nothing more than a lifeless satellite of the earth.
Cut him loose, Slayton said to Stafford. If it comes to that, cut him loose.
Stafford nodded his understanding, left Slayton, and returned to the suit-up room.
“What was that all about?” Cernan asked.
“Everything’s fine, Geno,” Stafford answered. “No big deal.”
But now, one week later, with the third attempt of the Gemini 9 launch having at last succeeded and the crew in orbit 194 miles above the earth, it was a very big deal indeed—with Cernan in very big trouble.
Certainly, Gene Cernan was accustomed to taking chances—especially when he was a younger man, living the hot-rod aviator life that every rookie naval pilot lived. Nine years earlier, in 1957, he was practicing bombing runs at Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego, California. The drill called for him to buckle into the cockpit of his FJ-4B Fury with a dummy warhead strapped to the bottom of the jet.
His target was a 40-foot space on the ground, barely wider than the Fury’s 39.1-foot wingspan, marked on either side by 10-foot wooden poles driven into the earth. The goal: Approach the target at 300 knots—or 354 miles per hour—drop the simulated bomb near the ground, and then haul ass up and away at 500 knots—or 575 miles per hour—escaping the imaginary blast the dummy explosive would have unleashed if it had been real.
Cernan had flown the maneuver countless times, always successfully, but on one especially exuberant day, he decided to take his chances—flying faster and lower and more hotdoggedly than he ever had before.
His reasoning was simple: In a real shooting war, the faster and lower he flew, the less chance the Soviet enemy would have of spotting him on radar. So Cernan took off, and Cernan flew low and Cernan flew fast—so low and so fast that when he approached that 40-foot space, his 39.1-foot-wide airplane clipped one of the wooden poles, shaking and jolting the plane and emitting a loud cracking sound. The plane still flew, and Cernan managed to land it safely, but the moment he did, the ground crew rushed out to meet him. One of the plane’s gun turrets was filled with a solid cylinder of wood that had been jammed into it from the post. Worse, the plane had been torn open along its starboard side, with a long gash running from the nose all the way down to the wing. A little more ripping, a little more tearing, a little more violence from the hot dog flying, and Cernan would not have made it home at all that day. Later, he and his squadron mates joked about it over beers, but it was a shaken Cernan who drank and laughed that night. It was the last time the young flier would ever depart from flight rules and strict training protocols.
In preparing for his space walk, Cernan maintained that playit-straight attitude, spending scores of hours training in NASA’s weightlessness-simulating jet—a KC-135 cargo plane nicknamed the “vomit comet” because it would take trainee astronauts on flights that amounted to a long series of roller-coaster-like parabolic loops, with twenty seconds or so of zero-g occurring at the top of each parabola.
The drill involved practicing a spacewalking task in the twenty seconds of weightlessness you got, waiting out the next minute of full gravity as the plane dove to the bottom of its trajectory and climbed back up, then continuing your zero-g rehearsals in the next twenty seconds of over-the-top free float. It was a slow and painstaking way to learn to maneuver in weightlessness—and plenty of men did not make it through the day without the vomit part of the vomit comet name having its way with them. Cernan, once an aviator who liked taking risks, would be nowhere near as cavalier in practicing for what was only America’s second space walk—and its first truly ambitious one.
On Sunday, June 5, 1966, at 5:30 a.m. Houston time, two days after launch, Cernan began his space walk, or what NASA preferred to call, in the agency’s arid argot, his extravehicular activity—or EVA. The precise timing of the EVA was in some respects arbitrary, since there actually was no morning or night in spaceflight; the astronauts circled the planet every ninety minutes, experiencing sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets per day. So to keep things tidy, they set their watches by the time it was in Houston, where mission control was located. If it was 5:30 a.m. in southeast Texas, it was 5:30 a.m. aboard Gemini 9.
Cernan would need a long time to prepare for his EVA. The ground crew equipped him with an eleven-page checklist that covered everything from donning a chest pack, which would provide him with oxygen, power, and communications; to unstowing the twenty-five-foot umbilical cord that would keep him safely attached to the Gemini spacecraft; to pressurizing the modified EVA space suits both he and Stafford were wearing. Gemini astronauts who were flying missions in which no EVA was taking place could afford to wear lighter suits, since the cabin itself was pressurized, surrounding them with artificial atmosphere. But once the hatch was opened and Cernan exited, both men would be exposed to the hard vacuum of space, and that required more robust suits—seven layers thick.
Even before pressurizing his suit, Cernan found the umbilical cord almost impossible to manage in the weightless environment of the spacecraft. The infernal thing floated and twisted and tangled itself, resisting all of Cernan’s efforts to keep it rolled and controlled.
“Canary,” Stafford radioed down to the Canary Island tracking station, “you can inform Houston we’ve got the big snake out of the black box.”
Once Cernan and Stafford inflated their suits, things became even more difficult, involving both the challenge of maneuvering the snake and the simple matter of moving at all. As the suits were inflated to a pressure of 3.5 pounds per square inch, they hardened and stiffened, making maneuvering in them almost impossible. It took all of an astronaut’s strength merely to bend an elbow or flex a knee. For Stafford, this would present little problem, as he would remain seated inside the spacecraft throughout the EVA. For Cernan, who was supposed to maneuver balletically around the Gemini 9 spacecraft, it would be a different matter entirely.
Stafford depressurized the cockpit, matching the vacuum inside to the vacuum outside so that the hatch would not blow open and fly free from interior air pressure when it was unlatched. Then Cernan reached up to the hatch’s handle and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Man, the hatch is stiff,” he informed both Stafford and the ground.
Using both hands, and already struggling against the bulk and unmaneuverability of the suit, he managed to push the handle inch by inch—millimeter by millimeter, it seemed—until at last the hatch opened and the trace amount of air that remained inside the spacecraft breathed itself out and away. Before Cernan even exited the ship, he and Stafford had to deal with the routine business of throwing out a bag of trash—mostly empty food wrappers—that they’d accumulated during the two days they’d spent in space so far. Stafford passed the bag to Cernan, who heaved it weightlessly outside the open hatch.
“Okay, we’ve gotten rid of the garbage,” Stafford told the ground.
Now Cernan tentatively raised himself up, placed his feet on his seat, and stood in the open hatch. He gaped at what he saw. The twin windows in the Gemini spacecraft measured only six inches by eight inches, affording the astronauts enough of a view to conduct some narrow photo reconnaissance of Earth and maneuver their spacecraft throughout their orbits. But that peephole field of vision was nothing compared to what Cernan now had. Gemini 9 was flying over Baja California, and Cernan could see the blue of the water against the green-brown spit of land and the rusty red surface of the desert southwest stretching in all directions.
“Hallelujah!” Cernan exclaimed. “Boy, is it beautiful out here, Tom.”
“It sure looks pretty,” Stafford said, taking in the minimal view his little window afforded him.
“I’ll grab my Hasselblad and take a picture of that,” Cernan said, photographing the scene with the camera attached to the front of his suit.
Cernan’s first jobs, before he even emerged fully from the spacecraft, were to attach a movie camera on an external mount to film the EVA and install a mirror to the exterior of the ship so that Stafford could see him as he maneuvered around the spacecraft and retrieved a micrometeorite experiment that had been attached to the Gemini to measure the impact of microscopic space dust.
That job done, Cernan emerged fully from the spacecraft and prepared to make his way along its flank to its aft end, where the AMU was stowed and waiting for him. The journey along the Gemini, which measured only eighteen feet and five inches from bow to stern, proved to be well-nigh impossible. NASA and Cernan may have had their own ideas about how to maneuver at the end of a twenty-five-foot umbilical cord—and Cernan’s training in the vomit comet might have left him thinking he knew what he was doing—but Isaac Newton had his ideas too, and those prevailed. Every physical action Cernan took produced an equal and opposite reaction in the snake; if Cernan moved out, the snake pulled him in; if Cernan moved left, the snake flung him right.
The out-of-control motion radiated down to the spacecraft itself, which began yawing and pitching in response to the force. Such unwanted motion would have normally called for Stafford to fire his thrusters and stabilize the ship, but he dared not do that with Cernan outside, where the thruster exhaust could burn through his suit.
Instead, it was up to Cernan to stabilize himself. He grabbed for Velcro patches NASA had attached to the exterior of the spacecraft to help him gain his purchase, but the whipsawing of the umbilical cord proved more powerful than the hold the Velcro could provide. He also reached for handholds that had been installed on the exterior of the ship, but they had been placed multiple feet apart—the thinking being that Cernan would have an easy glide alongside the spacecraft and the handholds would be necessary only in an emergency. Instead, he continued flopping around at the end of the umbilical cord, utterly helpless to control his own motions. “You’re kind of rocking the boat,” Stafford radioed to Cernan from within the jerking Gemini. He then glanced at the mirror Cernan had installed and was alarmed at what he saw. “Looks like you’re upside down and have all sorts of snake around you,” Stafford said.
“I can’t get where I want to go,” Cernan answered. “The snake is all over me. It’s pretty much a bear to get at these things because the handrails are so far back.”
Finally, through a combination of extreme exertion, Newtonian dynamics, and no small amount of sheer dumb luck, Cernan managed to swing in the direction of the spacecraft, slam into its flank, and grab hold of one of the handrails. Now, at last, he got some additional help.
Toward the back end of the craft, NASA had attached a long cable running the rest of the way to the end of the craft that Cernan could grab on to, hand over hand. That, too, was exhausting work, as he could move only a few inches at a time before stopping and gathering in the snake to prevent it from yanking him away from his tenuous hold on the cable.
Cernan had been outside for more than an hour now, enough to move from the daytime side of Earth, where the temperature on him and the spacecraft was a blistering 270 degrees Fahrenheit, to the nighttime side, where it was a frigid -270 degrees Fahrenheit, and back to the sunlit side. His space suit was designed to keep the heat and cold within a survivable range, but all it took was a few degrees above or below that limit to cause him to feel a sweltering heat or a chilling cold. Sweat now began to pour down his face and sting his eyes—though he was helpless to wipe them since he was sealed inside his suit and helmet. Worse, his visor began to fog up from the dampness of the sweat, obscuring his vision.
On the ground, at a console in Houston, flight surgeon Charles Berry read Cernan’s heart rate at 155 beats per minute, or about what it would be if he were running up 120 stairs each minute.
Tom Stafford inside Gemini IX spacecraft. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia.
“How are you doing now, Gene?” Stafford asked.
“Okay,” Cernan answered. “I’m going to slow down and take a rest.”
Cernan allowed himself to catch his breath and, he hoped, slow his heart, and then inch by inch, his visor running with condensed moisture, made his way semi-blindly to the back end of the spacecraft, where the AMU, which the air force engineers still expected him to don and fly, waited for him. But when he reached the aft of the ship, he encountered a nasty—and potentially deadly—surprise. That end of the spacecraft had been the part that was attached to the Titan II rocket that had blasted the crew into space; when the rocket separated just before the Gemini capsule reached orbit, it left a sawtooth, razor-sharp spear of metal behind, an obstacle Cernan would have to climb around without slicing open his suit and suffering an instant and fatal depressurization.
He reported the problem to Stafford and then, ever so carefully, negotiated that knife edge. When he had gotten past it, he tumbled gratefully into a recessed area at the back of the ship, where, with all his exertion, he fought his rigid suit and bent it into a position that would allow him to sit. He looked to his right, where the AMU was stowed— and he sighed at what lay ahead.
Flying the AMU meant more than just donning the backpack, firing it up, and taking off. Attached to the unit was a thirty-five-item checklist, each step of which had to be completed, in sequence, for the thing to fly. The first chore was to switch on the lights attached to the unit so that he could read the checklist. He threw the proper switch and only one of the little lamps worked. Squinting through the dim illumination and his sweat-covered visor, he did his best to follow the checklist, but the work of strapping into the contraption and configuring its controls was exhausting, and Cernan began to pant. On Berry’s screen in Houston, the astronaut’s heart rate now read 180 beats per minute.
Next, according to plan, Cernan disconnected from the umbilical cord that attached him to the ship and clipped on instead to one that was connected to the AMU. Immediately, to the flight surgeon’s alarm, the signal from the astronaut to the ground flickered out. Cernan’s heart could accelerate to the level of cardiac arrest and the Houston doctor would never know it. And his heart was accelerating indeed as the unfiltered sun poured over him and the recessed metal skillet that was the rear of the spacecraft.
“We’re really cooking back here,” Cernan gasped.
From Stafford’s window, he could see that Gemini 9 was approaching another sunset. “Okay, Gene,” he said. “Nighttime coming your way shortly.”
But nighttime, Cernan suspected, would only present another problem, and he was right. No sooner did the spacecraft move into the shadowed part of the earth and the temperature drop to -270 degrees than the sweat that covered his visor froze over, blinding him completely.
Cernan leaned forward, rubbed his nose against the inside of the visor, and opened a tiny hole in the ice. He could see the lights of Australia beneath him.
“How are you doing, Geno?” Stafford asked.
“Really fogged up here,” Cernan said, continuing to work as well as he could through the AMU checklist. The same poor connection to the AMU that was preventing data from Cernan’s biomedical sensors from reaching the ground also now disrupted the communications between the two astronauts.
“Can you see anything, Geno?” Stafford asked. “Can you understand me? Geno? Geno? Yes or no?”
Cernan responded, but whatever he was saying was unintelligible.
Stafford contemplated his and his pilot’s options. Another daytime was soon approaching, which would cook Cernan again, followed by another nighttime, which would freeze his visor solid once more. Cernan could not maneuver with the main umbilical cord, much less, Stafford guessed, with the untested AMU, and every additional minute he remained outside was another minute of mortal danger.
That, for Stafford, was it. He knew Cernan and, after training with him for more than a year, understood the man’s mettle. Cernan would keep working back there, with his vision gone, his heartbeat triphammering, a razor-like piece of metal threatening to tear his suit open wide, the light and shadow of the day and night tormenting him, all the while trying to fly the air force’s cursed AMU if it killed him—which it might.
As commander of the ship, Stafford had the authority to make any decision that concerned the conduct of his mission and the welfare of his crew, even if the flight controllers on the ground didn’t agree. The EVA, he decided, was over.
“Okay,” he said, partly to Cernan and partly to the ground. “No-go. The link is terrible. Did you understand? Geno? Do you hear me? I said no-go. We’re aborting.”
Cernan did hear him. He released a long breath—both with relief and with trepidation. Aborting the EVA was easy enough. Making his way blindly back around the jagged metal shard, moving along the side of the Gemini—finding the handholds and Velcro and the ship’s aft cable without the benefit of vision, all the while battling to keep his heart rate under control—was no small matter. Then, too, there was the matter of folding himself back inside the tiny seat of his little spacecraft and getting the hatch closed while wearing a space suit that kept him as rigid as a mannequin. Gene Cernan had left Gemini 9 to walk in space.
If his suit tore or he became incapacitated or he could not reenter the ship at all, there was no guarantee that walk would ever end.
“I don’t think I’ll make it that way,” Cernan said, flicking his unseeing eyes back around the rear end of the ship toward the front. But that way, as both astronauts knew, was the only way. The comment was all Cernan said that sounded like surrender—but it was enough.
Stafford heard the transmission clearly and nodded silently and somberly. Inside his head, Slayton’s words echoed hauntingly. Cut him loose.
Jeffrey Kluger is Editor at Large at Time, where he has written more than 45 cover stories. Coauthor of Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, which was the basis for the movie Apollo 13, he is also the author of 13 other books including his latest book Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story.
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In his book Rope, author Tim Queeney takes readers on a unique and compelling adventure through the history of rope and its impact on civilization. In the article below, Queeney takes a look at the Nuremberg executions during WWII, which rope played a critical role in as the men were executed by hangings.
In October 1946, the victorious World War II Allies were in need of a hangman. The 1945-46 International Military Tribunal convened by the British, Americans, Soviets and French at Nuremberg had resulted in death sentences for 12 of the highest-ranking Nazis, including Adolf Hitler’s one-time successor Herman Goering. Who would place the noose and throw the gallows lever? The man ultimately given the job turned out to be a curious choice.
View of the defendants in the dock at the International Military Tribunal trial of war criminals in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany. November 1945. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia.
The British executioner Albert Pierrepoint, an experienced hangman who had executed 15 German spies in Britain during the war, seemed the obvious candidate. Albert’s father Henry had been a hangman, along with his uncle Thomas. As a family-proud schoolboy, Albert had written of his wish to be a hangman, too. Pierrepoint was involved in his first execution in 1932 at age 27 when he assisted Thomas in the hanging of an Irish farmer charged with murdering his brother. During the war, Pierrepoint not only hanged spies but also American soldiers convicted of capital crimes in Britain.
U.S. Army Sergeant John C. Woods. Public domain.
Yet the job of dispatching the Nuremberg Nazis went to a boastful and inexperienced U.S. Army private from Wichita, Kansas, named John C. Woods. When he applied for the job of hangman in 1944, he claimed he had assisted in hangings in Texas and Oklahoma before the war, even though both states had switched to using the electric chair when Woods was still a child. The Army, evidently pleased that someone actually wanted the job, overlooked Woods’s inflated claims, made him hangman, and promoted him from private to master sergeant.
In 1944, Woods received some quick training at the Paris Disciplinary Training Center. Then while the war was still being fought on the western front, Woods executed more than 30 American soldiers convicted of various crimes.
For the October 1946 Nuremberg executions, Woods eschewed Pierrepoint’s accepted British method of the “long drop” in which the weight of the convicted was used to calculate a sufficiently forceful drop to ensure the neck was broken in the so-called “hangman’s fracture.” Woods also rejected the approach of employing a metal ring through which the rope was passed instead of the bulky hangman’s noose. Instead, Woods tied a traditional hangman’s knot. He later explained, “I like what I call the Thirteen Knot noose.” He used a separate rope for each execution, pre-stretching each one to make the sudden stop at the end of the rope more effective. There were claims that Woods botched the executions since almost all the Nazis died by strangulation, not by neck fractures. In addition, Woods further miscalculated and many of the men’s heads struck the platform as they fell through the trap door opening. Woods, who was unperturbed by his role—he ate a hearty dinner that night after it was done—remarked following the last drop, “Ten men in 103 minutes. That’s fast work.”
Following the executions, Woods claimed in an interview quoted in a 1950 Time magazine obituary that vengeful Germans attempted to poison him and that someone even took a shot at him in Paris. He said that he wore two 45 caliber pistols at all times. “If some German thinks he wants to get me, he better make sure he does it with his first shot because I was raised with a pistol in my hand.”
In 1950, Woods was serving with the Army’s 7th Engineer Brigade at Eniwetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, in support of atomic bomb testing. Some of the scientists working on atomic weapons and rocketry programs were Germans who had been brought to the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip, the effort to scoop up German scientists before the Soviets to ensure German technological secrets would be in American hands. On July 21, Woods was working on a set of lights while standing in a pool of water and was suddenly killed in what the Army later called an accidental electrocution. Some, including French MacLean, author of American Hangman, a 2019 biography of Woods, have suggested the possibility that Woods’s death was not an accident, that perhaps one or several of the Paperclip scientists exacted revenge for their countrymen hanged by Woods at Nuremberg.
Sources:
Queeney, Tim. Rope – How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. New York, St. Martin’s Press. 2025
MacLean, French L. American Hangman: MSgt. John C. Woods: The United States Army’s Notorious Executioner in World War II and Nurnberg. Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer Publishing, 2019
Tim Queeney is the editor of Ocean Navigator, a magazine for offshore voyager. Tim’s work has appeared in Professional Mariner, American History, and Aviation History. He has had short stories published in the crime anthology Landfall, Best New England Crime Stories 2018 and in the speculative anthology A Land Without Mirrors. Tim lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, with his wife and a rescue dog, Frankie. A lifelong sailor, he teaches celestial navigation, radar navigation, and coastal piloting ashore—where he tied plenty of knots and handled many a rope.
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In The Sea Captain’s Wife, New York Times bestselling author Tilar J. Mazzeo reveals the true story of the first female captain of a merchant ship and her treacherous navigation of Antarctica’s deadly waters. Read on for a featured excerpt!
Neptune’s Car Clipper Ship, 19th Century. Courtesy of Wikimedia. Public Domain.
This story begins in another place, another time, in a world of which only fragments remain.
Close your eyes and imagine, first, a cold and angry emptiness. The emptiness roars around you. You are on a sea, hurtling where the wind and water take you. You fall and you rise in darkness. The falling is fast and unforgiving and twists your gut as you count the seconds downward. The rising is worse. The sea towers forty feet above you, and you know only the terror that comes before falling.
Into this emptiness, build yourself a ship. A mighty, ghostly clipper. She is long and lean. Two hundred feet or more from bow to stern, painted coffin black to ride this darkness. You stand on her deck, held aloft with each angry swell by a million board feet of pitch pine laid out in planking, which moans and bends with the force of the ocean: her flesh and muscle. A forest of timber ribs is her backbone. Above this hull, three barren masts rise, a hundred feet above the sea. In fair winds, these ancient, empty trees are strung with 3,500 yards or more of crackling stiff canvas to carry you with unimagined speed around the globe and home again if you are lucky. This night, her yardarms are howling, empty crucifixes. This ship is Neptune’s Car—the mythic chariot of a jealous god of storm and sea. Her name: a tribute to appease a fickle master.
Let the globe of our world spin slowly. Set this chariot upon a point, a latitude, a longitude. Turn west to the New World. Follow the line south from New York City and south some more, past Brazil, to the very last reaches, a place called Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire. Put your finger somewhere in that furious passage, between the end of the Earth and the frozen land of ice, Antarctica. Here is our tempest. Trace your finger around the tip of the continent, westward again, past the fearsome headland of Cape Horn and then past Robinson Crusoe Island. Let your finger take you, following a point somewhere in the great Southern Ocean, back northward, up the coast of two continents, along the edge of the Pacific, until you reach San Francisco: your destination, the city of gold dust.
We are on a dangerous journey. A journey in which wealthy shipowners pit young men against each other with the promise of riches, urging them on to reckless dangers, in the name of another man’s lucre. The year is 1856. The season is early September: just before spring in the southern hemisphere, too early for this voyage. Somewhere in the darkness, three other ships, our competitors, careen the waves with us. Not all of us will survive this journey.
At the helm of our ship is a man, the captain, Joshua. He is twenty-nine, but his face is already weather-beaten and tired. The headaches blind him. He castigates himself now. He had misgivings before he saw this ship out of New York’s harbor. He has been ill. He feels his force draining. Sometimes there is a cough; sometimes a fever. He has stood on this deck, sleepless, vigilant, for eight days and nights fighting the blast and the water. At the ropes and in the rigging far above the twisting sea are his crew. Men and boys, barefoot on icy decks too slick for shoe leather. They, too, are frightened, tired. One among them, shackled in chains below these decks, is angry, vengeful.
There is a woman, too, the sole female inhabitant of this bark. She is small and plump, and her black, plaited hair cannot be contained in this tempest. She is the sea captain’s wife and just nineteen: Mary Ann. Her wide skirts and oilskin cloak, her only defense against a polar wind, disguise for the moment the warm, gentle swell in her belly.
She wants desperately for them to win this race. The prize means, for her and Joshua, freedom. With this purse, with the sale of this cargo, destined to fuel a gold rush making more men rich in distant California, there will be enough. Enough to imagine a different future for them and their baby. Enough to buy a share of a ship and chart one’s own course. Enough, they said to each other when they dreamed, to build a little farm on their land in Maine, where the Weskeag River meets the sea and the salt marshes stretch beyond for many acres.
But, first, they must survive.
For eight days and nights Joshua has stood on the quarterdeck and fought the sea. In the gray half-light of the ninth morning, there is no fight left in him. He slips to the deck and lets the darkness take him. There is a cry from somewhere among the crew: “Captain!” In the shadows below the deck, the angry, vengeful officer waits, indignation swelling, also expectant. His eyes narrow. Mary Ann understands. There will be no safe harbor in San Francisco, no freedom, no farm running down to the banks of the Weskeag River unless she fights for them.
DR. TILAR J. MAZZEO is the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle bestselling author of numerous award-winning works of narrative nonfiction, including history and biography titles. Formerly the Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English at Colby College and Professeur Associée in the Department of World Literatures at the University of Montreal, Dr. Mazzeo left the academy in 2019 to focus fulltime on writing. A fifth-generation sailor and tenth-generation Mainer (where the Patten story begins), she lives today on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where, with her husband, she captains a Vancouver 42 offshore sailboat.
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J. Randy Taraborrelli shares with The History Reader an excerpt from his instant New York Times bestselling book, JFK: Public, Private, Secret. Read on to discover how Jackie’s parents and John’s parents felt about their budding relationship as well as early details on how John’s family supported his early political career.
Jackie Bouvier and John F. Kennedy married in Newport, Rhode Island, on September 12, 1953. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia.
“The secret to happily-ever-after,” Janet Auchincloss had been preaching to Jackie and Lee ever since they were little girls, “is money and power.” She always believed she was entitled to affluence and security. Rose Kennedy felt the same way. Many women of that time, in fact, felt similarly even if, like Rose, they didn’t come right out and say it. While they dated and married with money and power in mind, to verbalize it would’ve been considered gauche, and certainly to explicitly pass it on to your daughters as a mandate, vulgar. They should learn by example, as Rose’s daughters did. With the exception of Rosie, all of them would marry men who had the potential to make a lot of money and be very powerful. The Kennedy girls would go into their marriages with their own wealth, unlike Jackie and Lee, who had no money of their own. Jack Kennedy met both of Janet’s standards, money and power. Her daughter could do a lot worse, and with John Husted, she would have. Therefore, JFK had Mummy’s approval, though she did have some reservations.
Janet knew her former husband, Jack Bouvier, and her father, Jim Lee, had strong feelings about Jack’s father, Joe. Jackie’s cousin John Davis explained: “In 1945, Jackie’s grandfather, Jim Lee, confided in Joe that he was about to invest in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. That was prime real estate. Joe acted quickly and bought it for himself, thereby double- crossing Jim. Earlier, when Joe was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, his crackdown on the way certain stocks could be traded had decimated Jack Bouvier’s portfolio. ‘My father and ex-husband hate Jack’s father,’ Janet told Mrs. [Martha] Bartlett. ‘So?’ Mrs. Bartlett countered. ‘What’s that got to do with Jackie?’ Janet couldn’t disagree with that, I guess.”
Joe Kennedy had been impressed with Jackie when he first met her in Palm Beach in December 1951. Once he realized she might be a factor in their lives, he took it upon himself to look into her background. “He’d heard she was an heiress, but when he checked it out, he found it wasn’t true,” said his nephew Joey Gargan. “He also assumed she was mostly French, given her surname. In fact, he learned she was only about one-eighth French, no matter what her mother, who was mostly Irish, might claim. She had also said the Bouviers were descended from French aristocracy, which also wasn’t true.”
Joe Kennedy’s secretary, Janet DesRosiers, recalled, “Joe used to say, ‘It doesn’t matter who you are. It matters who people think you are.’ That was politics, after all. He decided to keep an eye on Jackie while also giving Jack the freedom to pursue her. After all, she was, by any measure, the perfect political wife on paper. We all saw that. She looked good on Jack’s arm. That mattered.”
At this same time, Jackie was given a promotion at the Times-Herald. Her “Inquiring Photographer” column would be known as the “Inquiring Camera Girl” and would carry her byline. While she was determined to continue working, she felt there was no reason she couldn’t also date Jack. However, their budding romance would be complicated by his workload as he traveled about and laid the groundwork for his Senate campaign. “It was a very spasmodic courtship,” she later said, “conducted mainly at long distance with a great clanking of coins in dozens of phone booths.”
On April 6, after assembling a crackerjack team to help him get to the finish line, Jack officially announced his Senate run. His team included Dave Powers from Boston, a loyal friend who’d been in charge of his congressional campaign. There was also Larry O’Brien, an experienced politico from Springfield, and Kenny O’Donnell, Bobby’s old college roommate, a fellow Irishman who had served in the Army Air Corps.
A big part of Kenny O’Donnell’s job would be taming Jack’s father, who was financing the whole operation but who everyone agreed had a damaged reputation and weak political instincts. Joe could be a bully, unreasonable, contentious, and prone to spreading conspiracy theories. On the plus side, he was a great media strategist, knew how to plant just the right stories at just the right times, and was able to secure the important endorsement of top newspapers, even if he had to pay for them. In a couple months’ time, he’d write a check for half a million dollars to get the support of the conservative Boston Post. Jack would say his father had to “buy the newspaper” to get such great backing. Joe had plenty of money and would spend as much as he needed to in order to see his son win. “Kennedys must win” was his philosophy, always. There had to be a way around him, however, in building the kind of statewide campaign necessary for Jack to win. Kenny had the smarts to figure it out, and a big part of how he did that was to pass the buck on to someone who had real influence over the patriarch: his son Bobby.
Twenty-six-year-old RFK knew that to control his father he needed to act as if he was seeking his approval when, actually, he was strategizing ways around it. Jack too often vehemently disagreed with their father, which always caused havoc, and Teddy, of course, was too young to be a factor. Bobby had turned pacifying the old man into a fine art; he’d been doing it all his life. When his two older brothers were off finding themselves, he was home sparring with Joe. Now, he would be used to tame him. Bobby would end up being a titanic force on Jack’s team, from this point forward . . . and all the way to the White House.
J. RANDY TARABORRELLI is the acclaimed author of numerous New York Times bestsellers about the Kennedys, including Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot, adapted as a miniseries by NBC, and The Kennedys – After Camelot, adapted for television by Reelz. His other bestselling works include The Kennedy Heirs and Jackie, Janet & Lee. His most recent book, Jackie: Public, Private, Secret, debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times bestseller list. Taraborrelli is currently adapting both Jackie: Public, Private, Secret and JFK: Public, Private, Secret for television.
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An instant USA Today bestseller, The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz by Anne Sebba is a vivid portrait of the disparate women who came together to form an orchestra in order to survive the horrors of Auschwitz. Read on for a featured excerpt!
Auschwitz’s main gate, bearing the motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work makes one free). Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The success of the men’s orchestra, smaller than the big symphony orchestra in Auschwitz I and known as the Lagerkapelle (or camp chamber ensemble) under Laks’s direction, was likely a major source of inspiration for Maria Mandl’s idea to develop a women’s orchestra. The Laks orchestra played in the men’s sector of Birkenau, known as B1b, and Mandl proposed that the women’s orchestra should be housed in a separate but nearby section known as B1a, which would similarly play marches for the female prisoners going out to work.
“I had to organize the orchestra under Mandl,” Helen “Zippi” Spitzer said in an interview in 2000, adding that “she noticed I’m an artist and a musician.”
Zippi’s comments are an interesting indication of the degree to which she had ingratiated herself with Mandl. She had a sure instinct of how best to survive the Nazi extermination system, deploying every aspect of her varied background and wide-ranging abilities to make herself indispensable to Mandl, who had the power of life and death over all the women prisoners. “Even she did not understand the system,” Zippi said of Mandl. “She wanted results. If she asked for 18 or 20 diagrams for Berlin she couldn’t care less when I did it, how I did it, as long as it was done.”
Once, when Zippi was ill with stomach cramps, she needed to lie on her bunk bed until they passed, a serious infringement of camp rules. Mandl found her there, but, instead of punishing Zippi, the normally brutal guard simply touched her gently on the forehead in a motherly way and allowed her to remain. “She knew I did my job and delivered and worked during the night sometimes. So I could have the day free,” Zippi explained in the same interview. “Some kommandos were protected…I didn’t investigate how I knew it. I just did.”
As soon as Mandl discussed her orchestra project, Zippi realized that her claim to be a “musician,” even though she could only play the mandolin to a basic level, would create further dependence. And in this way the ring of mutual manipulation tightened.
All that remains today of Block 12, the musicians’ block, with the central pile of bricks that once provided a stove. Photo courtesy of Anne Sebba.
However, establishing an all-female orchestra was bound to be complicated, especially since the decision was not up to Mandl alone. First, she had to clear the project with a senior male SS camp official. In early 1943 she approached Paul Müller, camp director and number two to the commandant, who, fortunately for her, saw there were advantages as it simplified counting the rows of prisoners marching to work and made the imposition of faux military discipline easier. He agreed to help her with the paperwork that was necessary to propose the project to Rudolf Höss, overall commandant of the camp.
Zippi’s role in helping Mandl set up the women’s orchestra was in fact rather more ambiguous than she made it sound. Although Zippi explained that she had already been “very creative” in the camp drawing office and so now grabbed “the chance to talk about music and artistic things,” she nonetheless said that Mandl had initially turned to Katya Singer, a fellow Slovak Zippi had befriended on the journey to Auschwitz, for help with this venture and it was Katya who then approached Zippi. “The camp hierarchy wanted Katya, because she was the top administrative inmate at this time, to go with them to Auschwitz I and make contact with the men there partly to get instruments and partly to discuss procedures…But Katya did not understand music so she suggested I go in her place. So that was the beginning.”
Katya did not speak about the origins of the orchestra in her one known interview but spoke highly of Zippi as her assistant. “Zippi never did anything harmful to anyone. She was always straightforward with me.” In an earlier interview in 1983, Zippi described the origins of the orchestra slightly differently, omitting Katya’s initial role.
“[Mandl] was coming to our camp office and started to discuss how to go about it…we promised her we’d get professional musicians from the card index and if not we’d make inquiries.” Zippi was clearly keen to be involved: “I wanted the contact with the men,” she said, claiming later that she thought they would be a useful source of information for any resistance activities. She thus asked for permission to be included in the group that went to the men’s camp in Auschwitz I “to see how they did it.”
Zippi provided a slightly different version in 1982 of how the women’s orchestra began. “We wanted to see how the men functioned,” she said. “I had a dual role working with and reporting to Katya Singer on the negotiations with the men’s orchestra. They agreed to supply us with violins and all the necessary instruments in abundance. They had their own and there were thousands of instruments from all over Europe from deportees…even the sheet music they brought with them was used by the camp orchestras…after four weeks the orchestra had a barracks. It was Block 12.
In early 1943, while these preliminary discussions were continuing, a specially convened block leaders’ meeting in Birkenau announced the plan to start another orchestra, this time for female-only players. Hanna Szyller (later Palarczyk), deputy block elder in Block 12, attended the meeting and was in no doubt that the idea for an all-female orchestra originated from Mandl. Female block elders, the slightly privileged prisoners whose job was largely to maintain discipline and distribute food, were now instructed to seek out prisoners who could play instruments.
Among the first to volunteer immediately when she heard about the creation of the new orchestra was Zofia Czajkowska, a thirty-six-year-old Polish music teacher, who had arrived on April 27, 1942, from her hometown of Tarnów on the first Polish women’s transport to Auschwitz. Zofia had been tortured in prison before deportation and then spent a year at the camp assigned to the most exhausting physical labor. By early 1943 she was in a weak physical and mental state and saw the orchestra as possibly the only means of escaping from her plight.
ANNE SEBBA is a prize-winning biographer, lecturer, and former Reuters foreign correspondent who has written several books, including That Woman and Les Parisiennes. A former chair of Britain’s Society of Authors and now on the Council, Anne is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. She lives in London.
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In 2023, two metal detectorists discovered an assemblage of five Anglo-Saxon gold and garnet jewels on a hillside near Donington on Bain in Lincolnshire, UK. Dating to the 7th century, they were found dispersed over a radius of 20-30 feet in plough soil, indicating they had recently been churned up by deep cultivation. The assemblage is the largest group of gold and garnet jewelry known from Lincolnshire.
The largest jewel in the grouping is a D-shaped pendant with an inset garnet decorated with gold bands and panels of gold wire filigree. It has damage in the upper right corner that is so finely wrought it was unlikely to have been caused by agricultural activity. It’s more likely that it was done with tools, either during the setting of the garnet or before burial.
Also in the assemblage is a gold disc pendant with a garnet in the center and eight double-twisted filigree ropes radiating out from the gemstone in a star shape. It shows minor damage in the gold wire border and filigree. A second circular gold pendant featured beaded filigree on the suspension loop and s-shaped scrolls. It once contained a gemstone at the center, but that has been lost. The gold sheet has been bent inwards in the upper left.
The fourth pendant is the smallest of the group. It is a lightweight piece made of gold sheet with a gold strip border decorated with gold beading. A dark red gemstone (also likely a garnet) is set in the center. There is a crack across the surface.
The last piece is a domed gold boss decorated with garnet cloisonne cells. The circular cell in the top center contains remains of its garnet, and only two of the five triangular cells on the side still contain their garnets. The cells have gold wire borders, one undecorated, two beaded. This may have been the dome of a brooch that was later converted into a pendant. It is the first example of a “crown arches” style of decoration found in Lincolnshire.
Pendants with large garnet settlings were part of elaborate necklaces that also included beads, spacers and smaller pendants, found in the graves of high-status women from the period, but this assemblage is lacking the other necklace elements or any other artifacts typically found in female Anglo-Saxon burials. There was no evidence of a grave or human remains at the find site. One of the metal detectorists had explored the field many times over the course of more than 10 years and never found any other Anglo-Saxon artifacts or grave materials.
Lincolnshire Portable Antiquities Scheme finds liaison officer Lisa Brundle has been studying the assemblage and recently published her findings in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology.
The Donington group of jewels is unlikely to have been a necklace set from an Anglo-Saxon woman’s grave, Brundle noted, because no beads or spacers were found to suggest they had all been strung together. To try and unravel the mystery, Brundle instead sought alternate explanations for why these five items were found in a group.
“One possibility is that the assemblage derives from a smith’s hoard,” Brundle wrote.
During the seventh century, garnet supplies were dwindling, and an itinerant goldsmith may have collected some antique jewels to modify into new accessories. How the smith collected them is up for debate, though, as grave-robbers are known to have targeted high-status women’s graves to remove their prized jewels, Brundle wrote in the study.
Removing the pendants from circulation can also be seen as a kind of “ritual killing,” which transformed powerful, antique symbols of elite status into new items no longer connected to those individuals, Brundle noted.
But it is also possible that one or more women simply gathered their own jewelry and hid it away.
“One interpretation is that the assemblage represents the treasured possessions of kin or social groups, deliberately concealed during periods of instability or transition,” Brundle wrote.
The assemblage has been declared Treasure and acquired by the Lincoln Museum.
One of only three British flags to survive the Battle of Trafalgar is at risk of the leaving the UK. Worn by RMS Royal Sovereign, the ship that led the British attack, it is the most historically significant of the three and the only complete example of a Union Jack from a 100-gun first-rate flagship. The Minister of Culture has placed a temporary export bar on the flag to give local institutions the chance to acquire it for the nation purchase price of £450,000 ($600,000) before it leaves the country.
The Battle of Trafalgar took place on October 21, 1805, when the outnumbered British fleet under the command of then Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated the combined fleet of Napoleonic France and Spain. Commanded by Admiral Collingwood, Royal Sovereign led one of the two columns of warships with Admiral Horatio Nelson’s Victory leading the other. Royal Sovereign moved faster under the day’s light winds than Victory and quickly pulled ahead of the other British ships, raking the Spanish three-decker ship Santa Ana. Royal Sovereign and Santa Ana fought each other for almost three hours until the latter surrendered. Royal Sovereign’s foremast was heavily damaged, but the Union Jack was still flying.
By the end of the battle, Royal Sovereign had lost her mizzen, mainmasts and foremast. The rigging was shot to tatters and the ship had to be towed. The flag bears the scars of its pole-position role in the fight. There are holes, burn marks, gunpowder stains and wooden splinters from the ship embedded in the woven cloth.
Unique among the surviving Trafalgar flags, this one was made and repairs by the sailors of the Royal Sovereign. They made it from hand-stitched wool bunting with a weighted edge. Charles Aubrey Antram, one of Royal Sovereign’s four master’s mates kept it after the action, indicating he may have been the signal mate. It remained in his family by descent until 2004 when it was sold at auction to a private collector.
Culture Minister, Baroness Twycross said:
Few symbols in our country are as evocative as the Union Flag, and this flag in particular is an extraordinary representation of Britain’s history and national identity.
This flag was made by ordinary Britons and now epitomises a defining moment in our national history. I hope this profoundly important historical artefact can remain in Britain for the public to enjoy.”
Two Celtic gold coins that are among the oldest ever found in Switzerland have been discovered by volunteers near Arisdorf, three miles south of the German border. They date to the second half of the 3rd century B.C., and only about 20 examples are known from Switzerland.
Research suggests that the introduction of monetary systems in Central Europe can be traced back to Celtic mercenaries. These men were paid for their services in Greece with coins and brought them back home with them. Around the middle of the 3rd century BC, the Celts began their own coinage, imitating gold coins of the Macedonian king Philip II (359–336 BC). The obverse of these coins depicts the head of the Greek god Apollo, the reverse a chariot (biga). The Celts adapted both motifs in their own distinctive style. The two gold coins from Arisdorf are among these imitations. Coin expert Michael Nick of the Inventory of Coin Finds of Switzerland (IFS) identified the stater (weight 7.8 g) as the Gamshurst type and the quarter stater (1.86 g) as the Montmorot type. They thus belong to the very small group of just over 20 known examples of the oldest Celtic coins from Switzerland, which originated around the middle and second half of the 3rd century BC.
These were extremely valuable coins, far too valuable to serve as regular circulation currency. The Celts probably used them to pay their soldiers just as the original Greek staters had been used to pay for their mercenary services in Macedon. They may have also been diplomatic gifts, to secure political favors or alliances, or as dowries.
The find site is on the Bärenfels Moor, which may be a clue to how the coins got there. These gold coins are most often found in graves or in bogs/bodies of water which were held as sacred by the Celts. The coins are believed to have been left as offerings.
Because the two gold coins are so rare, canton officials decided to put them on display as soon as possible. In March, they will join the ongoing exhibition “Treasure Finds” at the Historical Museum Basel in the Barfüsserkirche. The exhibition includes Celtic silver coins from a hoard of 34 dating to around 80-70 B.C. that were found in the Bärenfels area in 2022.
The largest jewel in the grouping is a D-shaped pendant with an inset garnet decorated with gold bands and panels of gold wire filigree. It has damage in the upper right corner that is so finely wrought it was unlikely to have been caused by agricultural activity. It’s more likely that it was done with tools, either during the setting of the garnet or before burial.
Also in the assemblage is a gold disc pendant with a garnet in the center and eight double-twisted filigree ropes radiating out from the gemstone in a star shape. It shows minor damage in the gold wire border and filigree. A second circular gold pendant featured beaded filigree on the suspension loop and s-shaped scrolls. It once contained a gemstone at the center, but that has been lost. The gold sheet has been bent inwards in the upper left.
The fourth pendant is the smallest of the group. It is a lightweight piece made of gold sheet with a gold strip border decorated with gold beading. A dark red gemstone (also likely a garnet) is set in the center. There is a crack across the surface.
The last piece is a domed gold boss decorated with garnet cloisonne cells. The circular cell in the top center contains remains of its garnet, and only two of the five triangular cells on the side still contain their garnets. The cells have gold wire borders, one undecorated, two beaded. This may have been the dome of a brooch that was later converted into a pendant. It is the first example of a “crown arches” style of decoration found in Lincolnshire.
By the end of the battle, Royal Sovereign had lost her mizzen, mainmasts and foremast. The rigging was shot to tatters and the ship had to be towed. The flag bears the scars of its pole-position role in the fight. There are holes, burn marks, gunpowder stains and wooden splinters from the ship embedded in the woven cloth.
These were extremely valuable coins, far too valuable to serve as regular circulation currency. The Celts probably used them to pay their soldiers just as the original Greek staters had been used to pay for their mercenary services in Macedon. They may have also been diplomatic gifts, to secure political favors or alliances, or as dowries.
The find site is on the Bärenfels Moor, which may be a clue to how the coins got there. These gold coins are most often found in graves or in bogs/bodies of water which were held as sacred by the Celts. The coins are believed to have been left as offerings.
Because the two gold coins are so rare, canton officials decided to put them on display as soon as possible. In March, they will join the ongoing exhibition “Treasure Finds” at the Historical Museum Basel in the Barfüsserkirche. The exhibition includes Celtic silver coins from a hoard of 34 dating to around 80-70 B.C. that were found in the Bärenfels area in 2022.