They were pictures of some of the single moments that portrayed world-changing events or at least photos that revealed startling and unseen significant events occurring at the ignorance of most of the rest of the world. They are hindsight exemplified for sure. I recognized most of them or at least could identify what they were shooting and I've seen them in my history classes or at least in historical articles. Rougy's right. There wasn't a complete centering on America, but even if it had, America defined many of the paradigm shifts in western culture of the recent decades.

The prohibition pic may have been a bad choice I'll admit, but that's one out of how many? Come on.

Tell me that Tienamen Square, Vietnam, the nuke, Titanic, Hindenburg, flight, exploration of ancient cultures, scaling Everest, the Nazi holocaust, the fall of the Berlin wall, the Indonesian tsunami, and the Beatles are purely a American and I'll eat my hat.

Please tell me the Beatles are purely American. I'd like to watch all the brits around beat you to a pulp.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'hindenburg, german, crash, newsreel, 1937' to 'hindenburg, german, crash, newsreel, 1937, o the humanity' - edited by calvados

>> ^HaricotVert:
And to think the Hindenburg was much, much larger...


But as people mentioned, this balloon isn't filled with just hydrogen.

And to think the Hindenburg was much, much larger...

U S A, U S A. It's so much fun to watch an empire soar like the Hindenburg.

The only way this could have been cooler is if the Hindenburg flew into the bridge and they tried to put the fire out by dropping the Titanic on it.

What utter garbage! This guy's a history teacher? Maybe he should actually read some history books. Hitler lost the presidential election pretty badly. He was a powerful orator, however, and thanks to his speeches the Nazi party managed to gain more seats in the Reichstag elections than any other political party--but they still controlled only about 1/3 of the seats.

Because no party had a majority in the Reichstag it proved impossible to get any legislation passed. So the current President (Marshall Paul von Hindenburg) appointed Hitler Chancellor in order to form an alliance with his own party to get the Reichstag working again.

In the mean time, the Nazis had been busy causing mass chaos out in the streets to stir public unrest and were quite happily assassinating politicians who opposed them. Hitler then used the burning of the Reichstag (ostensibly by Communists but probably by the Nazis themselves) to ask that he be granted emergency and "temporary" dictatorship powers ("Attack of the Clones" anyone?) to stop the Communist threat. The Reichstag believed him and it all went downhill from there.

Christ, you can just Wiki this stuff and here's this dumbass spouting off crap like 98% of the German people voted for Hitler when it was actually 30.1%. Hitler came to power not by the vote of the German people but by ruthlessly eliminating opponents while fear-mongering to consolidate power. I could rip apart this guy's other comments like the Jews going quietly along with their own genocide but he's already proved himself a pompous moron so it's not worth the effort.

loved Stick Figure Theatre. they did a great Hindenburg episode too.

Ohhh and I nearly forgot:
See Hindenburg: The Giant Matchstick
The Facts on the Hindenburg Disaster:
1. The bags of hydrogen that provided the lifting force for the Hindenburg were NOT the main contributor to the fire. The surface of the ship was coated with a combination of dark iron oxide and reflective aluminum paint. These components are extremely flammable and burn at a tremendously energetic rate once ignited. The skin of the airship was ignited by electrical discharge from the clouds while docking during an electrical storm. This reaction has been proven chemically for years, and was demonstrated with actual remnants of the Hindenburg sixty years later, which burned as vigorously as on the day of the disaster.
2. The hydrogen burned quickly, safely, above the occupants. When the escaping hydrogen was ignited by the burning skin of the airship, it burned far above the airship, and was completely consumed within 60 seconds of the ignition. During this period of time, the airship descended to the ground from the 150-foot docking tower.
3. Almost all deaths were caused by jumping or falling from the airship. Of the 35 deaths from the disaster, 33 were caused by jumping or falling. Only two deaths were caused by burning, and it is likely that those two were from proximity to the burning skin of the airship, or from the stores of diesel fuel that were ignited by the covering. Whereas the hydrogen burned within one minute of ignition, the diesel fires burned for up to ten hours after the ignition.
4. The Hindenburg would have burned if it had been filled with inert helium gas. Even if the Hindenburg had not been lifted by hydrogen, the ignition of the covering would still have happened, and would then have set ablaze the diesel stores, resulting in the same disaster.
5. The main cause of the disaster was pilot error. The only way to prevent the disaster would have been if the pilot had chosen to land in better conditions elsewhere, which was very feasible, considering he had had enough fuel remaining to reach all the way to California.

Hey Mr Scientist, riddle me this.

The Nature of Hydrogen:

* Hydrogen is less flammable than gasoline. The self-ignition temperature of hydrogen is 550 degrees Celsius. Gasoline varies from 228-501 degrees Celsius, depending on the grade. When the Hindenburg burned, it took some time before the hydrogen bags were ignited.
* Hydrogen disperses quickly. Being the lightest element (fifteen times lighter than air), hydrogen rises and spreads out quickly in the atmosphere. So when a leak occurs, the hydrogen gas quickly becomes so sparse that it cannot burn. Even when ignited, hydrogen burns upward, and is quickly consumed, as shown in the Hindenburg picture. By contrast, materials such as gasoline and diesel vapors, as well as natural gas are heavier than air, and will not disperse, remaining a flammable threat for much longer.
* Hydrogen is non-toxic. Hydrogen is a non-toxic, naturally-occurring element in the atmosphere. By comparison, all petroleum fuels are asphyxiants, and are poisonous to humans.
* Hydrogen combustion produces only water. When pure hydrogen is burned in pure oxygen, only pure water is produced. Granted, that’s an ideal scenario, which doesn’t occur outside of laboratories and the space shuttle. In any case, when a hydrogen engine burns, it actually cleans the ambient air, by completing combustion of the unburned hydrocarbons that surround us. Compared with the toxic compounds (carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and hydrogen sulfide) produced by petroleum fuels, the products of hydrogen burning are much safer.
* Hydrogen can be stored safely. Tanks currently in use for storage of compressed hydrogen (similar to compressed natural gas tanks) have survived intact through testing by various means, including being shot with six rounds from a .357 magnum, detonating a stick of dynamite next to them, and subjecting them to fire at 1500 degrees F. Clearly, a typical gasoline tank wouldn’t survive a single one of these tests.

Saw a documentary on PBS about the Hindenburg explosion - and how the explosion was not caused by the hydrogen, but by the construction of ship itself.

The hydrogen ignited, of course, once there was a spark, but it is no more to blame than the fuel inside the rocket boosters of the space shuttle Challenger.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/html/e3-about.html

meh, this is just a bunch of recycled videos with skate filler... and the hindenburg