Places

After the fighting ended in April 1945, Vienna was occupied by four Allied powers and divided into sectors, with the First District administered jointly. Viennese faced bombed housing, broken utilities, five ration systems and a flourishing black market at the Naschmarkt and Resselpark. Diaries, ration cards and relief parcels show how occupation was experienced as both liberation and deprivation, until the Austrian State Treaty ended it in 1955.

In the first months of the Great War, London moved from Edwardian confidence to wartime anxiety. Crowds gathered silently, recruitment posters appeared, Belgian refugees arrived, and the capital became the administrative heart of Britain’s war effort.

Jerusalem in 1948 examines the battle for the city, the siege and displacement, the end of the British Mandate, Israeli statehood, and the city’s division between Israel and Jordan, drawing on newspapers, letters, diaries, and photographs.

In 1991 Moscow became the stage for the final act of the Soviet Union. Through newspapers, underground broadsheets, diaries, and letters to the editor, this article reconstructs how Muscovites experienced censorship, queues, the August coup, and the sudden unmaking of a superpower.

This reference reconstructs Beirut in the 1960s through period postcards, social surveys, newspaper evidence, Red Cross records, and banking accounts. It follows apartment life in Hamra, market routines, port work, traffic, leisure, and the Karantina fires, while distinguishing the glossy ‘golden age’ image from the unequal city that most residents knew.

In 1971 Dhaka was the political heart of East Pakistan and the nerve centre of the struggle that became Bangladesh. This article examines the city’s transformation through Operation Searchlight, occupation, everyday endurance, newspapers, photographs, and the surrender that ended the war.

A primary-source portrait of Johannesburg under apartheid, showing how Drum photographers, black newspapers and the white press recorded the routines, humiliations and resilience of everyday city life. The article follows pass raids, forced removals, township culture and censorship through the lenses and captions of the time.

In 1886 New York was a booming port, a crowded immigrant gateway, and a city convulsed by labor agitation. The dedication of the Statue of Liberty on October 28 gave the year a symbolic center, while Castle Garden, tenement workshops, and the Henry George mayoral campaign revealed the tensions beneath the celebration.

London in 1953 was a city of spectacle and austerity. The Coronation of Elizabeth II drew millions to the streets and made television history, yet rationing, bomb sites and postwar reconstruction still shaped daily life. This article uses newspapers, photographs, transport records and personal testimony to reconstruct the capital in that pivotal year.

In 1933 Berlin became the stage for Hitler’s seizure of power. This article explores the Reichstag fire, the Enabling Act, the boycott of Jewish businesses, book burnings, and the transformation of everyday life through newspapers, diaries, photographs, and archival records.