Join us on Wednesday, February 16, 2022 at 6:30 pm for a ZOOM conversation with author and historian Jeffrey H. Jackson. Presented in conversation with SNMA Executive Director Hunter O’Hanian, Jackson will discuss his latest book, Paper Bullets.

The event is free, open to the public, and conducted via ZOOM.
Upon registering a link and password will be automatically emailed to you.

Book Synopsis
Paper Bullets is the first book to tell the history of an audacious anti-Nazi campaign undertaken by an unlikely pair: two French women, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, better remembered today by their artist names, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, who drew on their skills as Parisian avant-garde artists to write and distribute “paper bullets”—wicked insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive fictional dialogues designed to demoralize Nazi troops occupying their adopted home on the British Channel Island of Jersey. Devising their own PSYOPS campaign, they slipped their notes into soldier’s pockets or tucked them inside newsstand magazines.

Hunted by the secret field police, the couple was finally betrayed in 1944, when the Germans imprisoned them, and tried them in a court martial, sentencing them to death for their actions. Ultimately they survived, but even in jail, they continued to fight the Nazis by reaching out to other prisoners and spreading a message of hope.

Paper Bullets is a compelling World War II story about the galvanizing power of art, love and resistance.

About Jeffrey H. Jackson
Jeffrey H. Jackson is Professor of History at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, and the author of Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis, which was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and Nonfiction and named a Stonewall Honor Book and a Booklist Best Book of 2020. An expert on European history and culture, he is the author of Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 and Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris. He has appeared in documentary films and helped develop “Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story” for PBS’s Great Performances.