Frank, S. orcid.org/0000-0002-9499-4741 (2025) Michel Gnimagnon’s Captivity Report: A Handwritten Account of a French Colonial POW, 1941. In: Ferris, K. and Halstead, H., (eds.) Miniatures: A Reader in the History of Everyday Life. Exeter Histories of Everyday Life. University of Exeter Press, pp. 21-29. ISBN: 9781804130018. ISSN: 3033-3938. EISSN: 3033-4039.
Abstract
Sarah Frank shows the value of a rare handwritten account of life as a POW penned by a French colonial soldier from Benin during the Second World War. Such bottomup accounts from people subject to colonial rule challenge the assumptions and distortions that exist in top-down archival documents written by white Europeans, allow for an alternative periodization governed by the micro-level of lived experience rather than the macro-level of diplomacy and state politics, and enable the everyday life historian to restore voice to those silenced by history.
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| Item Type: | Book Section |
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| Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 The Author(s). This publication is licensed, unless otherwise indicated, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and source, link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate any modifications. Any third-party material in this book is not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third-party material are given in the image (or extract) credit lines. If you would like to reuse any third-party material, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. |
| Keywords: | History |
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| Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
| Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities |
| Date Deposited: | 11 Jun 2026 14:04 |
| Last Modified: | 11 Jun 2026 18:01 |
| Status: | Published |
| Publisher: | University of Exeter Press |
| Series Name: | Exeter Histories of Everyday Life |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Identification Number: | 10.47788/xnqo7504 |
| Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:241861 |
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