Some newspapers have suggested that it was a myth that the Allies and the Germans played in a football match in No Mans Land during the Christmas Truce in December 1914. Mark Connelly, Professor of Modern British History at the Center for War, Propaganda and Society at the University of Kent has been quoted as saying that "the entire episode has been romanticized in the intervening years." He says "there is no absolute hard, verifiable evidence of a match" taking place and says "the event has been glorified beyond recognition".
The Christmas Truce Football Game in December 1914.
In September, 1997, Spartacus Educational founder and managing director John Simkin became the first educational publisher in Britain to establish a website that was willing to provide teachers and students with free educational materials.
According to a survey carried out by the Fischer Trust, Spartacus Educational is one of the top three websites used by history teachers and students in Britain (the other two are BBC History and the Public Record Office’s Learning Curve). The Spartacus Educational website currently gets up to 7 million page impressions a month and 3 million unique visitors.
As well as running the Spartacus Educational website John Simkin has also produced material for the Electronic Telegraph, the European Virtual School and the Guardian's educational website, Learn. He was also a member of the European History E-Learning Project (E-Help), a project to encourage and improve use of ICT and the internet in classrooms across the continent.
We have published six e-books, Charles Dickens: A Biography (October, 2012), First World War Encyclopedia (October, 2012), Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia (November, 2012), Gandhi: A Biography (December, 2012), The Spanish Civil War (December, 2012) and The American Civil War (December, 2012). He also contributed an article to the recently published book, Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Learning in History (December, 2012).
- Colossus Computer
- Codes & Codebreaking
- Gilbert Gifford
- Thomas Phelippes
- Henry Stuart
- Thomas Howard
- Jean Valentine
- Peter Twinn
- Code and Cypher School
- Bletchley Park
- Peter Hilton
- Harry Fensom
- Jean Campbell-Harris
- Francis Harry Hinsley
- Jack Good
- Frank Birch
- Tommy Flowers
- Max Newman
- Hugh Alexander
- Shelia Lawn
- Oliver Lawn
- Stuart Milner-Barry
- Sarah Baring
- Osla Benning
- Alastair Denniston
- Mavis Batey
- Peter Calvocoressi
- Enigma Machine
- Keith Batey
- Gordon Welchman
- Alfred Dilwyn Knox
- Frederick Winterbotham
- Alan Turing
- Margaret Rock
- Joan Clarke
- Keith Batey
- Juan Pujol
- Desmond Bristow
- Tennant Bagley
- David Edmund Murphy
- Clare Edward Petty
- Raymond Rocca
- Wistar Janney
- Cicely Angleton
- Anne Truitt
- Antoinette Bradlee
- Miles Copeland
- George T. Kalaris
- Vasili Mitrokhin
- Melita Norwood
- Ursula Beurton
- Stephen De Mowbray
- Eleanor Philby
- Tim Milne
- Marjorie Maxse
- Nicholas Elliott
- Alister Watson
- Suzanne La Follette
- Suzanne La Follette
- Antonina Porfirieva
- Konstantin Volkov
- Flora Solomon
- Aileen Philby
- Victor Kiernan
- Joan Robinson
- Maurice Dobb
- David Guest
- Edith Tudor Hart
- Litzi Friedmann
- James Klugmann
- FWW Lessons
- Classroom Activities
- Mildred Kramer
- Gardner Jackson
- Frederic C. Howe
- Karl Hermann Brunck
- Marjorie Maxse
- Tomás Harris
- Franz Neumann
- Elizabeth Zarubina
- Vassili Mironov
- Joseph Weinberg
- Robert J. Lamphere
- Gerhart Eisler
- Joel Barr
- Alfred Sarant
- Vivian Glassman
- William Perl
- Paul Massing
- Valentine Markin
- Vassily Zarubin
- Anatoli Yatskov
- Semyon Semyonov
- Alexander Feklissov
- Morton Sobell
- Max Elitcher
- Meredith Gardner
- Venona Project
- William Weisband
- Theodore Hall
- Vsevolod Merkulov
- Leonid Kvasnikov
- Pavel Fitin
- Helen Silvermaster
- William Ludwig Ullmann
- Joseph Katz
- Donald Niven Wheeler
- Judith Coplon
- Duncan Chaplin Lee
- Mary Price
- William Remington
- Harold Glasser
- Frank Coe
- Anatoly Gorsky
- Donald Hiss
- Charles Kramer
- Hope Hale Davis
- Rose Strunsky
- Graham Stokes
- Victor Perlo
- Henry Hill Collins
- Lee Pressman
- Marion Bachrach
- Harold Ware
- Nathan Witt
- Abraham George Silverman
- Karl von Eberstein
- Lina Heydrich
- Juliet Poyntz
- Julian Wadleigh
- John Lewis
- Hermann Fegelein
- Jacob Golos
- Noel Field
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- Iskhak Akhmerov
- Harry Dexter White
- Nathan Silvermaster
- Classroom Activities
- George Gardstein
- Nina Vassilleva
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- Karl Hoffman
- John Rosen
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- Yourka Dubof
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- William Sokolow
- Siege of Sidney Street
- Peter Piaktow
- Charles Bentinck Budd
- Lida Baarová
- Hans Goebbels
- Anka Stalherm
- Joszef Peter
- Priscilla Hiss
- Dewey Commission
- James Burnham
- Martin Abern
- Harry Overstreet
- Martha Dodd
- Boris Morros
- Alfred Stern
- Boris Vinogradov
- Offington Park
- Eitel Wolf Dobert
- Jane Archer
- Samuel Dickstein
- Boris Morros
- Meyer London
- Louis Waldman
- Alexander Radó
- Dmitri Bystrolyotov
- Ernest Holloway Oldham
The Dewey Commission conducted thirteen hearings at the home of Diego Rivera in Coyoacan, from 10th April to 17th April, 1937, that looked at the claims against Trotsky and his son, Lev Sedov. The commission was made up of Dewey, Suzanne La Follette, Carlo Tresca, Benjamin Stolberg, Carleton Beals, Otto Ruehle, Alfred Rosmer, Wendelin Thomas, Edward A. Ross and John Chamberlain. Dewey invited the Soviet Union government to send documentary material and legal representatives to cross-examine Trotsky. However, they refused to do that and the offer for the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Andrei Troyanovsky, to attend, was also rejected.
John Dewey opened the hearings with the words: "This commission, like many millions of workers of city and country, of hand and brain, believes that no man should be condemned without a chance to defend himself.... The simple fact that we are here is evidence that conscience demands that Mr. Trotsky be not condemned before he has had full opportunity to present whatever evidence is in his possession in reply to the guilty verdict returned in a court where he was neither present nor represented. If Leon Trotsky is guilty of the acts with which he is charged, no condemnation can be too severe."
A copy of this statement was sent to Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD. On 29th March, 1937, he sent it to Joseph Stalin with the message: "The 7th department of the... NKVD recruited Martha Dodd, daughter of the American Ambassador in Berlin, who came in March 1937 to Moscow for business negotiations. She described in her report her social status, her father's status, and prospects of her further work for us. Forwarding a copy of the latter, I ask instructions about Martha Dodd's use." For the rest of the year Martha Dodd provided information from the American embassy. A NKVD report stated: "Martha Dodd... checks Ambassador Dodd's reports to Roosevelt in the archive and communicates to us short summaries of the contents, whose numbers we gave to her. She continues providing us with materials from the American Embassy, trying mainly to get data about Germany, Japan, and Poland." Her controller reported giving her "200 American dollars, 10 rubles, and gifts bought for 500 rubles."
In a memo from Boris Vinogradov he pointed out that it was important for her to believe that she would eventually be allowed to marry him. He wrote that "her dream is to be my wife, at least virtually, and that I will come to work in America and she would help me."