There are so many I would have like to have seen the dinosaurs, the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza, the birth of Christ, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and on ,and on ,and on

sorry I got carried away

Mike

Why only witness? What historical event would want to stop from happening, or change in any way?

That's easy Marco - the re-election of George W Bush

It's incredibly silly of me, but I'd like to have seen a party with the Rat Pack. When I was suffering from insomnia, the only thing that could relax me enough to give me even thirty minutes' sleep were the voices of Sinatra, Martin, & Davis Jr. I'd like to see how things were, not according to some author who heard a story from someone whose grandmother's cousin heard from her boyfriend's brother what happened.

Nothing great, but, I'd like to have been able to ask Elizabeth I the real reason she never married. I'd like to have been a member of the Bloomsbury set, just for a while. I'd like to have seen the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace. And this is not really history, but I wish I had been in the right place at the right time to see Maria Callas's major performances.

It still comes from a grape vine. Even from me.
My mother did see Frank Sinatra when she was a teen. She said they acted like it was Elvis in my generation or the Beatles. I guess the Beatles were out when I was her age of seeing Sinatra.

I did see a play once with Yul Brenner in it and sat in the second row from the front of the stage. It was sad, it was his second to last performance of his life. He had cancer and that play in Philadelphia was his very last performances in his life except for a TV commerical of STOP SMOKING, it can cause cancer.

He died soon afterwards of lung cancer.

I felt like Brenner stopped and looked at me for a second when he was bowing. He looked so sad. He just looked at me or in my direction and just paused and looked after the play. We all commented on it that was in our group that went together.

When I think back of the movie "the Ten Commandments" It takes my own breath away to this day.

Brenner was a Wonderful man and great actor.

I stood in the same spot once that Charleston Heston once stood and very few people actually do or would stand there. One day maybe different, it will be open to the public I AM SURE OF THAT ONE. That is on Andrew Wyeth house and property. It is where Heston gave his remarks for his friend Wyeth on a tape called Helga dealing with art work. Why Wyeth paints the way that he does. I have that tape at least for now. Making up my mind to give it over to someone and for him to give hopefully over to Dick Clark. Mr. Clark, had a stroke and very ill right now. Make it go around and let it known of what is really going on. Maybe with any luck it will all come out into the open and people won't think I am crazy anymore.

As far as events in history, I guess every day in everyone life is an event in history because we are all part of a team and we all inter twine in that GREAT DRAMA called life itself.

We never know who we touch or how any one can be effected by our own presence. We say things and it gets around, we tell jokes or stories or our own events and it goes all over. Some maybe only an ounce of it ever gets out and some goes out one hundred fold. WE NEVER KNOW.
Also, we never know how WE ourselves can change history by our own deeds or acts. WE CAN AND WE DO (JUST BY BEING OURSELVES) TAKE PART IN HISTORY EVERY SINGLE DAY THAT WE ARE ALIVE!!!

Happy Birthday to a Great Forum and with Great People who do help it to be 'as good as it get's' !!!!!

I have a friend who would say the battle of Stalingrad, and I would have to say the French Revolution. 1789 through Napoleon.

Greetings All:

I would have liked to witness, from a safe distance of course, the first eruption of the super volcano that lays under what is now Yellowstone National Park.

Since we are some 10,000 years overdue and a lot of strange geological activity is now occuring in the Park I would really like to get some kind of idea as to what to expect if and when that volcano goes off again.

Comments anyone?

for me it would probably be the release of Nelson Mandela and the denise of apartheid ...

Happy holidays

The "Ten Days that Shook the world" still shake me.

I think most of us would like a helicopter over Dallas on Nov 22 1963 with camera coverage of the motorcade, the book depositiory and the grassy knoll so we could send the videotape to John

More personally I would have liked to see one of Bill Hicks' live shows in London.

And of course I want to see the sun rise tomorrow. I will always want that

Gosh that would have saved us some time would it not?
The event I'd most like to witness is in fact an event regrettably yet to occur - the festive spit roasting of a team of Ofsted Inspectors

There are so many events i would have loved to have witnessed.

1) The Beatles playing a gig in the Cavern Club before they were famous.
2) VE day just be be in the atmosphere of such an hisotric event
3) The 1916 rising innIreland when we obtained our indepenedce from Britiain

These are just a few but i hope they are a bit interesting.

Caroline

Greetings!

More interesting perhaps would be for you to relate an experience from a past life ....



Peter

I would have liked to have been with Oppenheimer when he detonated the first a-bomb. The excitement of that moment must have been great. At the same time, I would have liked to have been able to stop the development of this technology. Yes, it may have some great potential for energy, but I believe that the costs and the potential danger is too great. Being a rancher as well as a teacher, I would have loved to have participated on one of the early cattle drives, to truely experience the hardships and excitment of the time. But really, as a student of history, there are so many moments that I would have loved to have participated in it's funny.

_______________________-The first Easter Sunday,

The Beatles live, (Did see Paul; here in 93),

JFK alive, with spiderman to the rescue

Mark Chapman shot on 12/7/80

Walterrt Cronkite tell the truth before he dies.

Chuck Colson tell the truth period.

FOrd and Specter tried and sentenced.

too much to list


Dawn

How about finding out who "deepthroat" really is? The one that helped Woodward and Bernstein crack watergate.

I thnk I would like to have witnessed Napoleon's retreat from Moscow or his last night on the Isle d'Aix.

The first performance of "Hamlet" or better still Shakespeare's last days in Stratford

John Keats touching land in Dorset having "left" England forever

The Bronte sisters at work on their novels

Charles Dickens giving the first ever reading of "A Christmas Carol" at Birmingham town hall.

Parts of my parents' childhood in inner-city Brum in the twenties and thirties

Julius Caesar's assassination

Villa winning the European cup (I could only listen to it on the radio at the time)

Hahaha, funny, good one Andy.

Your wish has come true, we now know who he is!

The events I would like to have witnessed or been in presence at is the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the assassination of JFK, signing of the emancipation proclamation and to have managed the Beatles before they became famous, might have made a few more dollars than I am currently earning now!

I witnessed the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, arriving the day after the event was announced, and spending the remainder of the week in Berlin and Rostock (formerly East Germany). Here is the account of what I witnessed:
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/berlin.htm

I was in South Africa in 1985 when a state of emergency was declared.

I was in the Shankill Road, Belfast, August 1969, visiting my parents-in-law, when Callaghan sent in the troops. Before the troops came in we were dodging bullets and putting up makeshift barricades in the streets in the area now occupied by the Peace Wall. It was scary! I just got back from a conference and a holiday in Northern Ireland. What amazing changes have taken place! Tourism is booming. Pub/club life in Belfast is just great, and the Bushmills Distillery was teeming with visitors from the USA, Japan and Germany. Don't let the miserable politicians kid you that it's all doom and gloom.

I was just three when World War II ended in 1945. I can recall the barrage balloons, sirens and searchlights, sleeping in an air-raid shelter, dog-fights over Kent where we lived at the time, and the victory bonfire at the end of our street. I clearly remember an effigy of Hitler being burned on the bonfire and running screaming to my parents because I thought it was a real man.

I think I've had enough excitement in my life, but I would have liked to have witnessed Goethe meeting Schiller.

I like carolines one about the 1916 rising, wahay.
Dawns scenario of a spiderman averted 22/11/63.

I would have to say......
thin Lizzy live in concert, 78
In the sewer with the second gunman!
Hitlers bunker (have a look at the film 'downfall' if you want to see what it was like)

John

I like turning points... any of...

An evening with the last Neanderthal clan.

The march of British troops under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith from Boston to Lexington and the skirmish at North Bridge in Concord MA.

The charge of the 1st Minnesota Regiment at the Battle of Gettysburg.

With Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk.

/jdg

I used to have dreams constantly about preventing the following people from being killed. And I could never get there in time, so was left in the dark.

President Kennedy

Marilyn Monroe

Karyn Kupcinet

When I pass away, probably the first thing I'm going to ask God is:

Who killed Karyn Kupcinet?

Also, I'd like to have prevented 9-11, or else find out what happened to the real passengers.

I would love to relive Beatlemania, just as I did at ages 8-10. (BTW, I'm an American.)

And if I could come back as any person in history, I'd like to be Mick Jagger.

Kathy

TSBD sixth floor 12.30, Harry Holmes' office Terminal Annexe, 10th and Patton (with a camera), the night in the cell next to Oswald

intercepted IBM execs as they are going to see Bill Gates to tell them he is playing golf but I just happen to have somethings that may interest them.

I wish I could have witnessed the end of the WW II in any country. I wonder how people felt once that war was over (“happy” most likely does not cover it). I keep forgetting to ask my mother when I see once a year. I wish we were documenting people’s memories of that particular day (the very first day of thoughts would also be valuable) in the form of oral history. Having said that, I explored and found out the following piece of news:

November 8, 2007
House Passes Bipartisan Resolution to Establish "National Veterans History Project Week"
U.S. Representative Jon Porter (R-NV) has announced that the U.S. House of Representatives passed House Resolution 770, a bipartisan resolution designating the week of November 11 through November 17, 2007 as "National Veterans History Project Week." The special observance mobilizes America to record the oral history of its wartime veterans. Co-sponsors of the resolution include U. S. Representative Ron Kind (D-WI), original sponsor of the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress American Folklife Center, and 23 other members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The resolution calls upon the people of the United States to interview at least one veteran from their family or community, following guidelines provided by the Veterans History Project. Local, state and national organizations along with federal, state and local governmental institutions are encouraged to document preserve and honor the service of American wartime
veterans.

More on: http://www.loc.gov/vets/

I still wish people were documenting ordinary people’s lives, not only vets. For example, there is a great digitized collection of interviews with former slaves (2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves
ON: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html

This collection truly brings history to life.

Svjetlana Curcic

- The Trojan War
- An Elvis concert
- Hitler's suicide
- To be in DP on 22 Nov 1963
- To be there while Poe was writing Annabell Lee
- To be on the set of one of Laurel&Hardy movies
- To meet Peter Sellers

The Peterloo masacre, but only if I could take a machine gun back with me.