History Comes to Life With Tweets From Past

By: Noam Cohen | New York Times

Like watching a building collapse in slow motion, a Twitter account run by a group of German historians provides hour-by-hour updates of the horrors of Kristallnacht, which culminated in a night of anti-Jewish terror 75 years ago in Nazi Germany that plunged the country on a path to the Holocaust.

The account, @9Nov38, for the date of the widespread violence and destruction of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses across Germany and Austria, is practicing what could be called “historical tweeting” — using the brevity and immediacy of Twitter to recreate events from the past as if they were playing out before our eyes.