Category: History
-
The King’s Oath: Promissio Regis
By Thornical Press – December 24, 2025 The promissio regis, literally “the king’s promise,” is the formal oath taken by English and later British monarchs at their coronation. Far from being a mere ceremonial flourish, it has functioned across centuries as a compact statement of the moral, religious, and legal obligations that bind the sovereign…
-
Workplace Culture in GDR State Enterprises 1980–1988
By Thornical Press – December 16, 2025 The years 1980–1988 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were a period of relative surface stability and growing strain beneath it. In state enterprises (Volkseigene Betriebe, VEBs) the routines of production and the rituals of socialist workplace life continued to shape daily existence even as economic bottlenecks, technological…
-
The Democratic Classic: Taste, Care, and the Model A
By Thornical Press – October 20, 2025 The Model A established a new design grammar for Ford: clearer silhouettes, defined surfaces, and a shift from exposed mechanics to contained form. The hood and radiator surround became a vertical focal point, the wheelbase offered a balanced stance, and the fenders were sculpted to trace motion even…
-
Trabant: DDR Status Symbol
By Thornical Press – October 19, 2025 The Trabant feels like a pocket-sized time machine, a little plaster-and-steel relic that smells faintly of petrol and old upholstery and carries an entire vanished nation’s patience in its modest frame. Introduced in the late 1950s and produced in Zwickau for decades after, the “Trabi” was not merely…
Thornical Press 