From Kro­nos Media comes a pret­ty astound­ing mon­tage of video show­ing Berlin in July 1945 — just two months after the Nazis lost The Bat­tle of Berlin and Hitler com­mit­ted sui­cide, and a month after the allies signed the Dec­la­ra­tion Regard­ing the Defeat of Ger­many and the Assump­tion of Supreme Author­i­ty by Allied Pow­ers. 

The near­ly 75-year-old footage shows a city in sham­bles. You see the wound­ed, and build­ings reduced to piles of rub­ble. The Reich­stag makes an appear­ance, as does the worn-out Bran­den­burg Gate, through which res­i­dents passed from British-con­trolled Berlin to Sovi­et-con­trolled Berlin. And most­ly you see every­day peo­ple try­ing to get on with their lives. Most chill­ing is the final scene, where an aer­i­al shot car­ries you over miles and miles of des­o­la­tion. To see Berlin dur­ing an ear­li­er, cer­tain­ly bet­ter time, vis­it our 2013 post: Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film Between 1900 and 1914.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in May 2015.

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Relat­ed Con­tent

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

The Fin­land Wartime Pho­to Archive: 160,000 Images From World War II Now Online

22-Year-Old P.O.W. Kurt Von­negut Writes Home from World War II: “I’ll Be Damned If It Was Worth It”

Down­load 78 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es: From Ancient Greece to The Mod­ern World

I sus­pect many few­er peo­ple are assigned John Hersey’s Hiroshi­ma, a book most every­one in my cohort read at some stage in their edu­ca­tion. And cer­tain­ly, far few­er peo­ple are sub­ject­ed to the kind of alarmist (and rea­son­ably so) pro­pa­gan­da films that dra­ma­tized the gris­ly details of fall­out and nuclear win­ter. Even the recent HBO minis­eries Cher­nobyl, with its grotesque depic­tion of radi­a­tion poi­son­ing, prompt­ed a wave of tourism to the site, draw­ing Insta­gram gen­er­a­tion gawk­ers born too late to have heard the ter­ri­fy­ing news first­hand.

Yet, the threat of a nuclear dis­as­ter and its atten­dant hor­rors has hard­ly gone away. The UN Gen­er­al Assem­bly issued a state­ment this year warn­ing of the high­est poten­tial for a dev­as­tat­ing inci­dent since the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis. We are enter­ing a new era of nuclear pro­lif­er­a­tion, with many coun­tries who have no love for each oth­er join­ing the race. “As the risk of nuclear con­fronta­tion grows,” writes Simon Tis­dall at The Guardian, “the cold war sys­tem of treaties that helped pre­vent Armaged­don is being dis­man­tled, large­ly at Trump’s behest.” Calls for a No-First-Use pol­i­cy in the U.S. have grown more urgent.

Liv­ing mem­o­ry of the peri­od in which two glob­al super­pow­ers almost destroyed each oth­er, and took every­one else with them, has not deterred the archi­tects of today’s geopol­i­tics. But remem­ber­ing that his­to­ry should nonethe­less be required of us all. In the Busi­ness Insid­er video above, you can get a sense of the scope of nuclear test­ing that esca­lat­ed through­out the Cold War, in an ani­mat­ed time­line show­ing every sin­gle explo­sion in Japan and the var­i­ous test­ing sites in Rus­sia, New Mex­i­co, Aus­tralia, and the Pacif­ic Islands from 1945 into the 1990s, when they final­ly drop off. As the decades progress, more coun­tries amass arse­nals and con­duct their own test­ing.

Despite the expert warn­ings, some­thing cer­tain­ly has changed since the fall of the Sovi­et Union. Over a forty year peri­od, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. trained to anni­hi­late the oth­er, and the prospect of nuclear war became an extinc­tion-lev­el event. That may not be the case in a frag­ment­ed, mul­ti­po­lar world with many small­er coun­tries vying for region­al suprema­cy. But a nuclear event, inten­tion or acci­den­tal, could still be cat­a­stroph­ic on the order of thou­sands or mil­lions of deaths. The ani­ma­tion shows us how we got here, through decades of nor­mal­iz­ing the stock­pil­ing and test­ing of the ulti­mate weapons of mass destruc­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

Pro­tect and Sur­vive: 1970s British Instruc­tion­al Films on How to Live Through a Nuclear Attack

U.S. Det­o­nates Nuclear Weapons in Space; Peo­ple Watch Spec­ta­cle Sip­ping Drinks on Rooftops (1962)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

No stu­dent of Chi­nese has an easy time with pro­nun­ci­a­tion. Even lin­guist Joshua Rud­der, who tells ani­mat­ed sto­ries on his Youtube chan­nel Native­Lang about lan­guages around the world and how they came to be, admits his own strug­gles to get it right. “But late­ly I’ve been bury­ing myself in hun­dreds of pages of Chi­nese lin­guis­tic his­to­ry, and you know what? I’m in good com­pa­ny,” says Rud­der in the intro­duc­tion to the video above, “What ‘Ancient’ Chi­nese Sound­ed Like — and How We Know.” “Chi­nese pro­nun­ci­a­tion puz­zled experts in Chi­na for a long, long time.”

This leads into the sto­ry of one par­tic­u­lar expert, a 19th schol­ar named Chen Li who sought to recov­er Chi­nese pro­nun­ci­a­tions that even then seemed to have been lost to his­to­ry. “How do you recov­er the sounds immor­tal­ized in clas­si­cal texts? How do you make the old poems rhyme again?” And how do you do it when “you have no record­ings, no pho­net­ic tran­scrip­tions, not even an alpha­bet — you’re work­ing with char­ac­ters.” Ah yes, char­ac­ters, those thou­sands of logograms, evolved over mil­len­nia, that still today bedev­il any­one try­ing to get a han­dle on the Chi­nese lan­guage, not exclud­ing the Chi­nese them­selves. That goes espe­cial­ly for some­one as lin­guis­ti­cal­ly ambi­tious as Chen Li.

Chen Li’s research on the cor­rect pro­nun­ci­a­tion of ancient Chi­nese brought him to the Qieyun, an even then-1200-year-old dic­tio­nary of fan­qie (反切), or the pro­nun­ci­a­tion of sin­gle char­ac­ters described by using com­bi­na­tions of oth­er char­ac­ters. (On Wikipedia, you can find assem­bled links to scanned frag­ments of the text cur­rent­ly held in places like the British Library and the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France.) Draw­ing on not just the Qieyun but oth­er sources as well, Chen Li’s painstak­ing work of recon­struct­ing old pro­nun­ci­a­tions over­turned the long-stand­ing teach­ing that the Chi­nese lan­guage had 36 ini­tial con­so­nant sounds. He found that it had 41. But even after that dis­cov­ery, the nature of these “pre­cise sounds” remained unknown, an incom­plete­ness of knowl­edge chipped away at by the Swedish schol­ar Bernard Karl­gren in the 1900s, who took into account “the many liv­ing vari­eties” of the Chi­nese lan­guage.

Oth­er Asian lan­guages with vocab­u­lary descend­ed from Chi­nese also come in to play. Rud­der takes the exam­ple of the word for “coun­try,” pro­nounced guó (國) in mod­ern Man­darin but kuk in Kore­an (국), koku in Japan­ese (国), and kuək in Viet­namese (quốc), all sug­gest­ing a com­mon ancient Chi­nese ances­tor word end­ing in a K‑like con­so­nant sound. But how­ev­er much progress has been made, this research into “ancient” Chi­nese has turned out to be research into a lin­guis­tic peri­od of “mid­dle Chi­nese,” which reveals evi­dence of “an even old­er lan­guage to uncov­er, a thou­sand years old­er still.” The work of a lin­guis­tic his­to­ry, just like the hum­bler work of a Chi­nese lan­guage-learn­er, is nev­er done.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Chi­nese Lessons

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

What Did Etr­uscan Sound Like? An Ani­mat­ed Video Pro­nounces the Ancient Lan­guage That We Still Don’t Ful­ly Under­stand

What Did Old Eng­lish Sound Like? Hear Recon­struc­tions of Beowulf, The Bible, and Casu­al Con­ver­sa­tions

Hear What the Lan­guage Spo­ken by Our Ances­tors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sound­ed Like: A Recon­struc­tion of the Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean Lan­guage

A Map of How the Word “Tea” Spread Across the World

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.