Month: December 2019
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A Lucky Accident
Many of the most interesting discoveries you make when doing archival research are the things you weren’t looking for, and this interesting Pepsi ad in the Egyptian sports magazine al Abtal is one of them. Al Abtal (Arabic for “Heroes”) was published in Cairo in the early- and mid-20th century, and over time, its readership…
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Bedouin intelligence agent in Sinai, World War I
Just a few days ago, I found this image of an armed bedouin intelligence agent in Sinai during the World War I era. When I saw it in Yigal Sheffy’s book British Military Intelligence in the Palestine Campaign, 1914-1918, it piqued my curiosity, because you don’t commonly see images of the bedouin spies British and…
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Sometimes, what you see is what you get…sometimes…
Most military history narratives confine themselves to the dry recitation of the facts of battle. With this style of historical story-telling, you get the blow-by-blow of moving lines on the map, the killing and being killed, the who, what, when and where of human warfare, but you don’t get the why. The story which wartime…