It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
A slim volume called Colloquial Persian recently came my way; a basic language primer published in 1941. The book was published at a rather fascinating political juncture. In 1941, in response to Germany's relentless eastward push into the USSR, Britain and the USSR launched a joint invasion of Iran, which was then ruled by Mohammad Reza Shah. …
Continue reading How to speak Persian like a colonial Englishman
Coming across a compilation of University of Oxford women's exam papers from the 1870s and 80s was something of a treat for me. Having studied History and German at Oxford from 2011-2015, I was eager to find out how the exam papers from 130 years ago differed from those now. Imagine, then, my horror when I …
In 1943, Walt Disney produced a 10-minute animation purporting to document the process by which German children were turned into "perfect little Nazis". The aim was to demonstrate to the American populace how the Nazis were indoctrinating their sons with the aim of creating an army totally loyal to Hitler. The resulting soldiers are good …
Continue reading Walt Disney’s “The Making of the Nazi” (1943)