Tag: Modern History
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Rebekah Harkness, “The maddest woman this town has ever seen.”
Taylor Swift’s ‘The Last Great American Dynasty’ chronicles the life of heiress and socialite Rebekah Harkness. Coco Barrett explores the real woman behind the song and the aspects of her life that inspired Swift’s lyrics.
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The Spaghetti Trees of Ticino
If you’ve ever traveled to southern Switzerland, you may have been lucky enough to see a Spaghetti tree in real life. Sam Marks explores the now infamous Spaghetti tree incident of 1957.
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Is There Anybody Out There? The Golden Record in the Twentieth-Century Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
On 5 September 1977, the Voyager 1 space probe was launched into space by NASA, containing the Golden Record. Kat Jivkova traces the history and context of the Golden Record and the criticisms it has incurred since then.
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The Voice of Stephen Hawking: Dennis Klatt’s Developments in Speech Synthesis
Written by Kat Jivkova. While a fundamental part of the legacy of the late physicist Stephen Hawking was the speech synthesis that allowed him to partly triumph over his disability, the creator and background the Computer Speech Synthesis has been neglected. Kat Jivkova aims to rectify this by shedding much delayed light on the work…
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Elena Ferrante and the History of the Italian Language
Written by Ruth Cullen. What is the significance of using either the local dialect or the school-taught standard? Using the account of Neopolitan bilingualism from Elena Ferrante’s acclaimed novel ‘My Brilliant Friend’ as a starting point, Ruth Cullen discusses the history of the formation of modern standard Italian and its complex social relationship with the…
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The Rise and Fall of ETA: The Spanish Terrorist Groups’ Bloodiest Years
Written by Sally Dolphin. The Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), over it’s 50 year operation period, caused huge amounts of bloodshed in the Basque region of northern Spain. Sally Dolphin explores this violent episode in Spanish political history.
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On Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’
Written by Georgia Smith. The inherent link between politics and language, in ‘dying words,’ is discussed in relation to the life and works of George Orwell.
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Wes Anderson’s ‘The French Dispatch’: Confronting Satire and the Immutability of Youth Political Experience
Written by Georgia Smith. Wes Anderson’s 2021 film, ‘The French Dispatch’ satirises youth political culture in the 1960s through depicting the events surrounding the final edition of ‘The French Dispatch’ in a fictional newspaper. Georgia Smith reviews the film, asking how satire can tell an impactful and important story.
Retrospect Journal 