The Friday Digest 07/11/14

THP Friday digest

This week's update features the first photograph of a human being, medieval chess pieces and luminous balloons in Berlin.

The Belgium refugees who made their home in Baildon during the First World War.

* The Belgium refugees who made their home in Baildon during the First World War.

Britain to repay £2bn First World War debt

* The UK is taking steps to repay the £2 billion debt it originally borrowed to finance the First World War.

Princess Royal Harbour, Albany, is where many Australian soldiers left, never to return (c) Anmdrew Halsall

* One hundred years on, the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) sacrifice during the First World War is to be commemorated with the process starting in Albany, one of Australia's most remote towns.

German Vice Admiral von Spee's cruiser squadron, leaving Valparaiso, Chile, circa 3 November 1914, following the Battle of Coronel.

* Coronel: an unlikely naval battle remembered.

Deaf Munitions Workers (c) Action on Hearing Loss

* The untold stories of deaf people in the First World War.

Treatment in the Red Cross Hospital in Villach. Austrian National Library, Public Domain

* A day at a hospital during the First World War.

A cinema queue

* The First World War film that over 20 million people went to see.

* Robert Fisk asks 'Do those who flaunt the poppy on their lapels know that they mock the war dead?'

'Remembrance Day poppies should be white' (c) Alamy

* Should Remembrance Day poppies be white?

While the First World War was the first modern war, as the Somme kit illustrates, it was also primitive. Along with his gas mask a private would be issued with a spiked ‘trench club’ – almost identical to medieval weapons.

* Inventories of war: soldiers' kit from 1066 to 2014.

Images via Bauderfilm

* B erlin is commemorating twenty-five years since the fall of the Berlin Wall with 8,000 luminous balloons.

Josephine Butler, though hardly known, is one of the great British feminists

* ‘Victorian’ sexual exploitation of poor girls isn’t history.

A woodcut from 1864 depicts King John and the barons at Runnymede. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Un/REX

* Recognition for the Magna Carta, 'England's greatest export' 800 years on.

A photo of various bones in an archaeological pit. Archaeologists have been examining hundreds of bones from two skeletons in Buckinghamshire © MOLA Northampton

* An 'amazing' Bronze Age burial in Buckinghamshire has been found to contain skeletons of two children, say archaeologists.

A genome taken from a 36,000-year-old skeleton (skull pictured) has shed new light on the period of interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans. The study of DNA shows that the genes of the earliest inhabitants of the continent survived the Ice Age, helping sow the seed for the modern-day population

* Fossil DNA has confirmed interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals, claim experts.

Medieval chess pieces and postholes, Northampton (c) MOLA

* Medieval chess pieces have been found in Northampton dig.

c1500: a medieval friar preaches to congregation (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

* A brief history of how people communicated in the Middle Ages.

Joan of Arc (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty)

* The truth behind ten big historical mysteries.

Hereford Mappa Mundi (Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

* Seven maps that changed history.

Victorian children collecting apples (Culture Club/Getty Images)

* Nine strange facts about the history of apples.

Llangoed Hall

* Send postcards from your mobile with the new British History Breaks app. This new app (iPad and iPhone only) looks brilliant, it's definitely time to bring back the humble postcard!

'The Discovery of the Gunpowder Plot and the Taking of Guy Fawkes' by Henry Perronet Briggs, circa 1823