History in the Making hasn’t quite finished with selfies. As the people who bring us the Oxford English Dictionary have just named ‘selfie’ the word of the year, we’ve decided to dedicate yet another blog post to this phenomenon.

The OED defines a selfie as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”. The Guardian was reported that the word has Australian roots: it can be traced back to a post on an Australian online forum in 2002: “Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”

So what about selfie’s in history? A recent post on the Oxford University Press (OUP) blog has persuaded us that Anastasia’s 1913 self-portrait was not, in-fact, the world’s first selfie. The OUP blog explains that many early photographic portraits shot by daguerreotypists were self-portraits (Like this mid 19th century photo below of an anonymous daguerreotypist).

Ever wondered what would WW2 look like if the smart phone was invented in 1940? In selfie-related alternative history, the Huntington Post this week published a titillating gallery of famous photographs reimagined as selfies (created for an advertising campaign for a South African newspaper. The doctored photo of Churchill below gives you a taste of what we’re talking about;