Closing some tabs…

An /r/AskHistorians moment I greatly enjoyed: years ago, a user complained that seeing a Black officer in Frozen 2 "immediately took [them] out of the movie", and asked if that was realistic for 1860s Scandinavia—only to be informed that there is a long history of Black people as members of European (including Scandinavian) royal courts, and the movie character may well have been based on an actual person, John Panzio Tockson, a well-known personal servant to the Swedish King in the era the movie was set. In other words, one of the most historically accurate features of a movie featuring "trolls and ice magic", as the respondent quipped.

The respondent recently commented, "My answer was brief, cursory, and just not enough in my mind. I then spent 6 years looking deeper into his life, doing it as a side-project while pursuing other research." It's now a published and open access paper in The Scandinavian Journal of History: "Picturing John Panzio Tockson: Afro-Swedish identity, racialization, and black self-fashioning in late nineteenth-century Sweden"—looking at Tockson's life, how media of the time portrayed him (spoiler: racistly), and how he may have portrayed himself.

0

If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://status.nevillepark.ca/users/nev/statuses/01KG86YJVJSKFP9F68SHFV3ZRJ on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)