Tag: ww2

kath-ballantyne:

pearlo:

anachronistique:

zan77:

katymoonbeam:

kaitybearr:

This scene. THESE WOMEN.

Okay, here’s my thing about this scene and it hit me when I first watched it but has taken me a while (and some conversation) to put into words.

Peggy, for a moment, seems rather uncomfortable with the idea of stealing food, where the other girls encourage it, even praising each other for it.  This to me, seems to underline a real cultural difference. Peggy, having grown up in England with the rationing and the Blitz spirit, would have had a very much ‘make, do and mend’ mindset.  What you had, you shared. Stealing or fiddling rations was not only very frowned upon by others, but could be punishable. 

The American girls, on the flipside, probably grew up young in the Depression.  When there was food, you took it and you took as much as you could, because who knows when it would be there again?  They have made ingenious solutions to avoid waste, and to avoid hunger.  They eat like women who have known what it feels like to not have anything to fill a hungry belly.

That being said, I don’t think less of either set of women. I just think it’s an interesting dichotomy. 

Mostly, of course, yay lady friendships and MOAR PLEASE.

YES ALL OF THIS. It’s a total two-nations-divided thing, on one hand you’ve got the full on stiff upper lip oh no thanks awfully i’ve had quite enough versus, GIRL ARE YOU SERIOUS LEMME FILL YOUR HANDBAG WITH GRAVY.

Also, I love how surprised and impressed Peggy is by their resourcefulness. All the food-swiping would be the kind of thing you’d expect an observant spy to spot instantly, so the fact she hasn’t suggests to me that she’s either been absent from a lot of mealtimes or too wrapped up in her own concerns. And it leads me to hope this is the start of her becoming more integrated into the Griffith circle because LADY FRIENDSHIPS.

Also also I know having a moment where all the Griffith girls band together to get Peggy out of a jam like some sort of Voltron of Moxie would be as cheesy as hell but I STILL WANT IT

yes yes but most importantly CHICKEN POCKET

THIS WAS MY FAVORITE SCENE

Rather than being due to country of origin I think a lot of this comes down to class. Peggy is posh and probably went to a posh school. I doubt she ever went really hungry until she was out on missions. By the time rationing came around she probably would have been working for the SSR and probably got more rations than the general public.
I haven’t actually seen Agent Carter yet so I’m only going on info available from other stuff but I doubt Peggy grew up not knowing where her next meal would come from.
Also while there was make do and mend mentality and you shared what you had with you and yours there was a huge amount of crime and black market stuff during the war/Blitz. I’m sure there was a lot of getting what ever you could and everyone else can get stuffed.

sixpenceee:

sixpenceee:

Sir Nicholas Winton is a humanitarian who organized a rescue operation that saved the lives of 669 Jewish Czechoslovakia children from Nazi death camps, and brought them to the safety of Great Britain between the years 1938-1939.

After the war, his efforts remained unknown. But in 1988, Winton’s wife Grete found the scrapbook from 1939 with the complete list of children’s names and photos. Sir Nicholas Winton is sitting in an audience of Jewish Czechoslovakian people who he saved 50 years before.

WATCH FULL VIDEO HERE

This post gained more than 100,000 notes in over a day. One of the most powerful things I ever posted. 

historicalagentcarter:

This fantastic little booklet was issued to US troops headed to Britain in 1942. It contains some useful pointers and charming attempts at cultural sensitivity.

On “British Women at War,” the following information is given:

A British woman officer or non-commissioned officer can and often does give orders to a man private. The men obey smartly and know it is no shame. For British women have proven themselves in this war. They have stuck to their posts near burning ammunition dumps, delivered messages afoot after their motorcycles have been blasted from under them. They have pulled aviators from burning planes. They have died at gun posts and as they fell another girl has stepped directly into the position and “carried on.” There is not a single record in this war of any British woman in uniformed service quitting her post or failing in her duty under fire.

Now you understand why British soldiers respect the women in uniform. They have won the right to the utmost respect. When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic – remember she didn’t get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich.

The full text can be read here. Here is a story from LIFE magazine outlining the use of the booklet. eatingcroutons has also posted a photo of this excerpt from the booklet, which you can see here.

In 1941, Jews throughout the Third Reich were forced to wear a yellow Star of David. That same year, the first gassing experiments were conducted at Auschwitz and 33,771 Jews were killed by Germans and Ukrainians at Babi Yar outside Kiev. At the beginning of the war, the U.S. media rarely reported on or even knew about these horrific events, but word of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis trickled down to Kirby, Simon, and other Diaspora Jews in the form of wrenching letters from relatives trapped in the old country. Simon and Kirby used Captain America to strike back and boost American morale while proudly alluding to their religious faith. In a later issue, Steve Rogers watches newsreels depicting Nazi atrocities — newsreels Kirby and Simon surely must have watched as well.

Captain America’s weapon of choice was a strange one — not a machine gun, but a shield. The shield is a famous Jewish symbol, the Magen David, which means the “Shield of David.” (It’s also known as the “Star of David” because the Magen David is a hexagram.) The term “shield” in Jewish prayer denotes the closeness and protection of God. In a sad twist of fate, Captain America’s costume featured a star at the same time that Simon and Kirby’s European brethren were being forced to wear a star of a very different kind.

Simcha Weinstein, Up, Up, and Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero (x)

The Super Soldier and the German Psyche

actuallyclintbarton:

katiebakes641:

Hoo boy, we’re going deep down the rabbit hole with this one.  I hope you’ll bear with me, as this might be will be a disturbing post.  Here, have some shirtless!Seb as a precautionary measure:

image

(source)

He’s laughing at me because I’m kind of a masochist.  Anyway, check back with him if you need to.

I have German heritage on both sides of my family – my paternal great-great grandparents came over sometime in the early 20th century (don’t know much about them) and my maternal grandmother grew up in Nazi Germany.  Plus I was a history major specializing in European history from 1871 to the Cold War.  So…I know some things.  You could chalk up all that to another reason this movie was like catnip to me.  That said, it will take a bit to unpack all of this, so bear with me.

The idea of there being a superior race was pretty much unheard of before European imperialism and the Atlantic slave trade.  Before then, Europeans didn’t have much cause to compare themselves to the rest of the world.  But over the course of the 17th-19th centuries, that small part of the globe came to control the remaining 85% of the world.  Suddenly, they were faced with millions upon millions of “savages,” and had to justify their superiority.  Their right to subjugate the rest of humanity.

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Eugenics started [in America], Germans just ran with it.

THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS.  This is something that we do NOT get taught (or that we didn’t get taught when I was taking community college history classes, let alone high school), and I know it’s just an aside, but THANK YOU.

Nazi Germany based all its initial forays into eugenics on programs in America that were active in over 20 states.  That may not really be the topic of this post (which is a good one), but it is very very important to make sure people know.

Two sailors ca. 1940-1945. An image featured in the “Love and War” exhibit at the Kinsey Institute Gallery. More info on the exhibit can be found here.

“The photo is usually seen cropped from the waist up, as it was in the 1980s when the activist organization ACT-UP used in it on a T-shirt in their Read My Lips campaign. But the print hanging in the Kinsey gallery is the original version. Below decks, the sailors’ flies are open, and they are, so to speak, crossing swords.”

Another time, Jack took a call. A voice on the other end said, ‘There are three of us down here in the lobby. We want to see the guy who does this disgusting comic book and show him what real Nazis would do to his Captain America’. To the horror of others in the office, Kirby rolled up his sleeves and headed downstairs. The callers, however, were gone by the time he arrived.

Mark Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics (via nerdhapley)

It’s Jack Kirby’s birthday, so here’s that story of him being bad ass all of the time.

(via nerdhapley)

True fact: during WWII Kirby was assigned as a scout due to his art skills, meaning that he went in alone and unarmed, ahead of Allied attacks so that he could draw enemy fortifications.

Once he was ambushed by three Nazi soldiers, all of them with guns. He killed all three with a knife he stole from one of them.

Dude was verifiably grade-A stone-cold badass.

(via froborr)

And that’s why Jack Kirby was the King.

(via aerialsquid)