Astonishing moments of history

  Halt for this New York tunnel officer in his "catwalk car"[1950]

  In 1704, Mohawk Indians raided the frontier town of Deerfield, Mass. They captured local pastor John Williams, along with his family. Most of the family (those who didn’t die in the attack or aftermath) would be ransomed – all but a seven-year-old girl the Mohawks refused to free. Eunice Williams, born Sept. 17, 1696, would spend the rest of her life with the Mohawks. She converted to Catholicism and married a Mohawk Catholic. Her family never gave up trying to bring her home, but when they finally reached her as an adult it was too late. She refused to return, and her Puritan family never got over the loss.

Women having stockings painted on instead of buying them during war time, 1941.  

The 1965 war remains memorable for two things. One was a monumental miscalculation by pakistan. President Ayub Khan, egged on by his scheming and feckless foreign minister Zulfikar ali bhutto, sent a top secret order to his army chief General Mohammed Musa: “As a general rule, Hindu morale would not stand for more than a couple of hard blows delivered at the right time and the right place. Such opportunities should therefore be sought and exploited.” Secondly, India’s leadership- as it has done consistently over the past 2500 years- frittered away on the negotiating table what the soldiers won on the battlefield. At the end of a bruising 22-day war, india held 1920 square kilometres of Pakistani territory while pakistan only held 550 squre kilometres of indian land. The Haji Pir pass was also captured by indian soldiers after an epic battle. And yet india surrendered everything at the Tashkent Declaration in january 1966. Was shastri ji feeling the pressure from the international commu