On 15 July 1892, Walter Benjamin was born into a well heeled assimilated Jewish family in Berlin. On 26 September 1940, he was interrupted in his escape to the US from Nazi Germany. Prevented from crossing from Occupied France into Spain, weakened by illness and threatened with being handed over to the Gestapo, he chose suicide.
The decisive episode in the overthrow of slavery in the British Caribbean was the great Jamaican revolt that began on 27 December 1831.
Some object morally to the war, some politically, others have already completed tours of duty and were revolted by their experiences as an occupying army.
The war in Iraq has re-politicised some of the generation of soldiers who opposed the war in Vietnam, veteran Jerry Lembcke told Socialist Worker.
Read our monthly supplement, featuring Alex Callinicos on Alternatives to Neo-liberalism and an interview with economist Andrew Glyn on the challenges that face the world economy.
James Connolly, the Irish revolutionary socialist executed for his part in the 1916 rising, said that partition of Ireland would produce a "carnival of reaction North and South".
On 1 July 1916, 150,000 British soldiers went "over the top" on the Western Front to attack the German trenches in the Somme region. The front, along which British and French armies confronted the German army, stretched from Switzerland to the Channel.
Who caused the First World War? Revisionist historians argue that the war had to be fought because Germany was aggressive and militaristic, a "rogue state" that threatened "the balance of power" and "the peace of Europe".
BirdsongSebastian Faulks Set before and during the First World War, Birdsong is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a number of traumatic experiences, from a love affair that tears apart the family he lives with, to the brutality of the war itself.
The Poznan uprising of June 1956 sparked a mass movement in Poland and set in train the events leading towards the revolution in Hungary later in the year.
Karol Modzelewski was a student and political activist in 1956. He went on to co-write the Open Letter to the Party, which challenged Stalinism from the left and was key to setting up the Solidarity union. Karol answered questions from Socialist Worker
