Lost stories, any war, any era, any life - narrated history and true personal stories, written and told by Chris Shanku from named, published sources.
Reading the feed…
A WWII veteran carried one sentence for forty years - then drove to a house in Sherman Oaks, California, to say it. This is the story of the Battle of Attu, the only ground battle of the Second World War fought on North American soil, and of two men whose lives collided there: Dick Laird, an Appalachian coal miner's son, and Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi, a California-trained Japanese doctor whose battlefield diary changed how American soldiers saw their enemy. What happened in that driveway in the spring of 1984, and the letter that followed, is one of the most remarkable forgiveness stories to come
In roughly twenty-four hours, the newest division in the Australian army lost 5,533 men and gained nothing - the worst twenty-four hours in Australian military history. On the evening of July 19, 1916, in French Flanders, it attacked a German strongpoint called the Sugarloaf. Somewhere out in front of the line that night, a wounded man who could see the Australian trenches and could not reach them called out four words to a sergeant named Simon Fraser - and Fraser wrote them down. This is the story of that sentence, of the man who wrote it, and of Lambis Englezos, a Melbourne art teacher who s
The phrase "die hard" entered the English language in 1811 - and the man it came from got nothing, not even his name in the newspaper that printed what he did. On May 16, 1811, on a low ridge outside a Spanish village called Albuera, a captain of the 57th Regiment was shot and knew it would kill him. He asked to be carried to the head of his company and set down where his men could see him, and then he told them to keep fighting. Within a year his regiment was being called the Die Hards; within eighteen years the words behind that nickname had been given to his colonel, who survived, became fa
Nine judges sat on the court that hanged nineteen people at Salem, on evidence only the accuser could see. Eight of them went to their graves without ever publicly saying a word about it. This is the story of the one who did not. On January 14, 1697, in a plain wooden meetinghouse in Boston, a forty-four-year-old magistrate handed his minister a folded piece of paper and went back to his pew. When the minister read it aloud, it had his name in it, and the man stood up in front of his neighbors and let every one of them hear it. What he said three years later, almost nobody wanted to hear - and
They say a boy becomes a man when he loses his virginity, but nobody ever talks about when a toddler becomes a boy. On a summer afternoon at the local playground, Chris teaches his three-year-old son Bruce three important rules about being a boy - and finds out the rules are about more than that. It's a story about boyhood rite-of-passage silliness, laying the groundwork for the gentleman Bruce will become, and the dad Chris didn't expect to become along the way. Written and told by Chris Shanku (Moth StorySLAM winner) - a true story from his own life, recorded in his own voice and filmed in h
They cast him in silver, put him in a museum, and have retold his story for two hundred years - though nobody wrote down the year he was born, the year he died, or the year he went to war. On May 16, 1811, outside a village in southern Spain, this lieutenant of the Third Foot ran at his regiment's King's Colour as the man carrying it went down. Written, researched, and curated by Chris Shanku (Moth StorySLAM winner) from named, published sources, and told in Chris's storytelling voice. To learn more about Chris, visit https://www.shanku.net Sources and contested details: the earliest known acc
A city on the other side of the world called him a living Buddha. His own country investigated him, and he died poor in Berlin. He was also a member of the Nazi Party. In December 1937 John Rabe walked through a captured Nanjing with no weapon, no soldiers and no authority of any kind, opening other people's doors. More than two hundred thousand people sheltered inside the zone he chaired. This is what happened to him afterwards, and what the city did about it. Written, researched, and curated by Chris Shanku (Moth StorySLAM winner) from named, published sources, and told in Chris's storytelli
The Japanese Army made the most unsparing account of its own soldiers' slaughter into a national bestseller. The night before the assault on the Russian forts at Port Arthur, in August 1904, a cup of water went hand to hand down a line of soldiers in the trench, and every man said the same phrase as he drank from it and meant it. Written, researched, and curated by Chris Shanku (Moth StorySLAM winner) from named, published sources, and told in Chris's storytelling voice. To learn more about Chris, visit https://www.shanku.net Sources and contested details: the book is Tadayoshi Sakurai's own,
One of the most quoted passages in German war writing has no date on it. Ernst Toller never says which afternoon it happened, and there is nothing in his book that fixes it - while the army's own file dates what sits on either side of that afternoon to the day. A German soldier drives a pick into the wall of a trench in the Priest's Wood, on the ground between Pont-a-Mousson and Verdun, and the point stops dead. What he pulls out of the wall is human. Three words go through him standing there, and he writes them down seventeen years later: a dead human being, not a dead Frenchman, not a dead G
She taught an entire city how to get its damage written down. When it came for her own son, she kept it inside the house for three years. On August 9, 2006, an eighty-two-year-old woman walks up to a microphone in Peace Park in Nagasaki with a page in her hand. Her name is Kikuyo Nakamura. She was twenty-one when the bomb fell, with a one-month-old asleep in the house behind her, and she spent most of the life that followed doing paperwork - getting other survivors' injuries onto the official record, somewhere the state could see them. There was not a woman in that city better placed to say ou
What happened to Giles Corey in September 1692 was done to exactly one person in the whole of American history, and it happened because he would not answer one routine question. Almost two hundred years later a balladeer gave him two famous last words. He never said them. On June 1, 1676, sixteen years before any of it, twelve men are picked by the constable and taken up to a farm at Salem Farms to look at a body and write down what they can see - a man who had lived in that house for years, and whom his neighbors described as a grown man who needed keeping. Written, researched, and curated by
Nine years after the bomb, a woman in Hiroshima was asked what she would do if she were told she had failed and had to leave. Her answer was one sentence long, and it was about a beam. Before that: a handful of people pick their way across a factory yard on the third morning after the bomb, looking for a body. They find her alive under a piece of propped-up roofing, her left leg broken beneath her, after two days and two nights. Her name is Toshiko Sasaki and she is twenty years old. Everything between that morning and that room is other people deciding what her life is going to be - her paren
In a Washington courtroom, George Carmack was asked about the woman he had been married to for thirteen years, and his answer took one sentence. His name is on the claim that started the Klondike Gold Rush. He is not the man who found the gold. A man puts his name to a piece of paper on August 17, 1896, and hands it back across a table in the Yukon. His wife's brother found that gold the day before, on water her people had fished for longer than anybody could count. George Carmack came over the Chilkoot Pass in 1887 with no money and no trade. He married Shaaw Tlaa, a Tagish woman the miners o
He walked into the Tennessee House wearing a red rose - in that chamber, the colour worn by the men voting against the Nineteenth Amendment. Thirty-five states had ratified it. It needed thirty-six. Before the afternoon was out, Harry Burn would vote three times on the same question. He was twenty-four, from a farm town in east Tennessee, and he had come to Nashville intending to vote for the amendment. Then the men from home, the ones he called his political advisors, asked him for something else. Not to vote it down. To wait, and let it go over to January, when a thing of that size could be
Seven of the eight were sentenced - to labor camps, to exile, to a locked psychiatric ward. The eighth was a twenty-one-year-old student who had spent the night before getting ready for prison, and she was let go. It took her about a year to find out what that cost instead. At noon on August 25, 1968, eight people walked out across the cobblestones of Red Square, sat down at the foot of the Lobnoye Mesto, and raised banners against the invasion of Czechoslovakia four days earlier. The demonstration lasted three to five minutes. She was let go because the others talked her into saying she had b
