1. Norman Rufus Colin Cohn FBA was a British academic, historian and writer who spent 14 years as a professorial fellow and as Astor-Wolfson Professor at the University of Sussex.
10 Facts About Norman Cohn
1. 2.
Norman Cohn was educated at Gresham's School and Christ Church, Oxford.
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Norman Cohn was a scholar and research student at Christ Church between 1933 and 1939, taking a first-class degree in Modern Languages in 1936 and in 1939.
4.
Norman Cohn served for six years in the British Army, being commissioned into the Queen's Royal Regiment in 1939 and transferring to the Intelligence Corps in 1944, where his knowledge of modern languages found employment.
5.
In 1962, Norman Cohn was approached by Observer editor David Astor after Astor gave a speech on the psychopathological roots of extremism.
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Norman Cohn became the head of the Centre for Research in Collective Psychopathology, which was set up and initially financed by Astor to look into the causes of extremism and persecution.
7.
From 1973 to 1980, Norman Cohn was Astor-Wolfson Professor of History at Sussex.
8.
Norman Cohn died on 31 July 2007, in Cambridge, England, at the age of 92, from a degenerative heart condition.
9.
Norman Cohn argued that this conspiracy theory motivated its supporters to seek the massacre of the Jewish people and became a major psychological factor in the Nazi Holocaust.
10.
Norman Cohn's work was honoured by his election as a Fellow of the British Academy, for which he was nominated by Isaiah Berlin.