The next History Carnival is going up on 1 June at Aqueduct, so don't forget to send in your nominations, either directly to amy AT amystevensonline DOT com or via the form.
Monthly Archives: May 2006
Revise and Dissent and other blogs
I was extremely flattered to be asked, along with a number of very fine history bloggers, by Cliopatria's Ralph Luker to participate in a new group blog at the History News Network. We've called it Revise and Dissent and it's been up and running for nearly a week now! Unfortunately, its launch has coincided with a lull in my blogging activity as I madly prepare for my talk on Wednesday, so I haven't posted at R&D yet, but of course the nice thing about a group blog is that nobody will notice :)
Meanwhile, here are a few interesting blogs I've come across recently. I'm Too Sexy for My Master's Thesis is a sentiment that most academic bloggers can relate to, I'm sure; but Rachel's thesis topic sounds pretty sexy too, on the British Army's Jewish Legion in the First World War. It's very much a research blog, which is good to see. Cas Stavert of Only Two Rs is writing a novel set in the First World War, and also reading lots of early twentieth century British novels -- which I'm finding very educational! (Via Great War Fiction.) Finally, Modern Mechanix extracts weird and wonderful articles and advertisements from old science magazines. Sadly they are all American, not British, but there is still much of interest to me. For example, check out this Italian gas mask for typists, or these early German and American radar devices. (Via Boing Boing.)
Propellors and propaganda
I'm giving a talk next Wednesday as part of the History Department's Work In Progress Day, and that's the title I would have given it, had I been the least bit imaginative the day I wrote the abstract. Instead I have a nothing title ("Airpower and British society: plans and progress"), and to go along with it, a nothing abstract:
My thesis is on the impact of airpower propaganda on the British people between 1908 and 1941. During this period, air panics -- most importantly the fear of the 'knock-out blow' of civilisation by bombing and gas attacks -- replaced naval and invasion panics as the most characteristic and significant expression of public concern about the defence of Britain. More positively, some looked to aviation to promote peace through deterrence or collective security. The ways in which these hopes and fears were articulated and manipulated have been little studied and provide insights into some perhaps surprising aspects of British society.
Of course, I am merely following the time-honoured academic tradition of writing the abstract long before the paper is written, or even thought about, which explains the nothingness! I will actually just be giving a general overview of what my PhD is about, what themes I hope to explore, what the sources are, and so on. I'm in the second-last slot of the day, so most people will probably be dozing off by then and I can slip my talk in without getting noticed :D 20 minutes plus 10 for discussion, a little razzle, a little dazzle, some laughs, some tears, and that's all there is to it.
Actually, it will be good to get it out of the way, because it will satisfy one of the conditions for the confirmation of my PhD candidature, which means I can get funding for overseas travel. It's the first talk I'll have given for my PhD, which probably should be confronting, but WIPD is apparently a very relaxed environment (59 other students from the department will be giving papers -- cleverly, they all chose interesting titles like "Sexing the belly: the cultural politics of Britney Spears' pregnant body"), and anyway I have given a couple of papers at big international conferences before, so I am not without experience. Mind you, I gave them very badly, but perhaps I have matured with age ...
The department is also revamping its website, and now has a list of its postgraduate students, including yours truly. This proves what I have suspected for a while, namely that as a British historian (historian of Britain, whatever) I am in a distinct minority in my department! What's with all this Australian history, sheesh.
The flower of an entire generation
P. R. C. Groves explains why, in his view, Britain in the early 1930s was possessed by a 'national defeatism', namely the idea that war was immoral and should be banned, and the nations disarmed:
The origins of the malady may be summarized as: the Voluntary System, the Somme and Passchendaele. The sacrifice of the flower of an entire generation -- largely owing to the ineptitude of the military mind, though the responsibility is at the moment immaterial -- implied the loss of a leavening virile influence in our national life. And this loss has vastly increased the influence of the feminists, the clericals, the doctrinaires and the dreamers, because it has decreased the normal healthy counterpoise to it. These well-intentioned idealists argue on a plane which has no relation to reality. Consequently their conclusions are false. The path which they advocate leads not to peace but to perdition. There is but one way to peace, and it lies through justice established and maintained by collective responsibility.1
So there are three parts to this. Firstly, the idea of a "lost generation", the premature deaths of Britain's best and brightest in the Great War. Secondly, the evil results of the loss of their manly influence: feminists and pacifists running riot. Thirdly, his rejection of this in favour of the (presumably virile!) solution of collective security (he endorses Lord Davies' New Commonwealth Society and the right wing of the League of Nations Union).
I tend to agree that it was because of the deaths of so many young men that the idea that war was inherently immoral became popular. But it seems to me (and I realise I'm going out on a limb here :) that this was more because of the fact of their deaths, and the perception that they were sacrificed to no useful purpose, rather than the supposed loss of a generation of masculine leaders. The sheer brute facts of the war, and the disillusionment with its results, were bound to influence what people thought about the use of force in international affairs.
- P. R. C. Groves, Behind the Smoke Screen (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 308. [↩]
Acquisitions
John Feather. A History of British Publishing. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 2nd edition. Most of my primary sources, so far, are books; this will help me understand the economics and the ideologies of the book publishing industry.
Corey Robin. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. On the political uses of fear, from an American perspective. I like the titles of the first three chapters: "Fear", "Terror", "Anxiety".
History Carnival 31
Welcome to History Carnival 31! Mr Wells' celebrated Time Traveller voyaged into the distant future, but we will have the levers on our time machine set firmly in the reverse position -- less chance of running into a Morlock that way. To help us navigate the currents and eddies of the historical ether, we read the latest bulletins from the Time Transit Authority before we set out: one on the need to respect privacy, and another on the world-historical significance of 26 April. Our perusals of historical mystery novels may or may not prepare us for our possible encounters with crime throughout history, but they are entertaining. Finally, we are ready; we seat ourselves on the saddle, and depress the lever; night and day blur into one, and a strange din fills our ears ...
Our first encounter with the past is in South Korea in the mid-1970s, where we learn of the reasons for a dictatorship's intolerance of popular narcotics. Otherwise, we quickly pass through the late 20th century, hoping to avoid the shoals of Franco-German anti-Americanism, but instead are drawn into the complex timestreams of the Middle-East. We observe the difficulties of Arab liberalism, but find cause for hope. Trying to skirt the clouded issue of the relative importance of realism and idealism in the US recognition of Israel, however, only leads us into one of the key topographical features of the 20th century timescape, anti-Semitism. Indeed, it appears to be a recurring feature at this time, in both Germany and the Arab world. We observe the death of the individual most responsible for this, Adolf Hitler but also note the strange post-1945 rumours of his survival, as though his death was somehow insufficient in light of his effect upon history. Lingering in 1943, we examine the evidence for one of his extermination units (and it is amazing that there are those who can deny the reality of such evil, even those with no apparent ideological axe to grind), when our attention is diverted by a somehow airminded flavour to the time continuum: it appears that there is to be a cinematographical remake of the story of the RAF's breaching of the Ruhr dams. (We earnestly hope that Mr Jackson retains the music of the original.) But perhaps Guy Gibson et al not need have done it all, were it not for the support of German nobility for the Nazis from the 1920s onwards.
We finally break free of the Second World War, hoping to find happier timelines. Instead, we are witness to the misery of the American dustbowl in the 1930s. We are distressed to observe that Mr Gandhi's powerful philosophy is being misrepresented; and regret the missed opportunity for a meeting of the minds between Mr Tagore and Mr Einstein. But at least the Powerpoint edition of the history of contraceptives relieves the gloom! We barely have time to wonder if the US government's war on rats inspired noted thespian Mr James Cagney before a sudden gust of the time-winds sends us hurtling back past the Great War altogether and into another century ...
The 19th century is as war-ridden as the 20th, at least in later memory. Grierson's Raid, in the American Civil War, has been re-presented in many different forms in subsequent years, while the battle of Pueblo in 1862 is celebrated by Mexicans to this day -- not without reason, as the invading French army was defeated, to the surprise of all. Also surprising, perhaps, is the relative lack of present-day remembrance of the censure of US President James Polk for engineering a war he had long desired. History may not actually repeat, but on occasion it does seem that we have been this way before.
It is at this point in time that we relive the ghastly story of the anthropophagous Donner party, but more particularly how its Wikipedian retelling holds lessons for the modern student. But it is time for a rest in our chronological journey. We adjust the levers, braking our progress. We barely have time to register the War of 1812 and the salutory story behind the US national anthem before we come to a complete halt. We now stand on the threshold of the 18th century, where the modern shades into the early modern. Looking backwards (or is it forwards?), we wonder if there are new ways to frame the American 19th century, and are surprised to learn of the different interpretations of public morality in the northern and the southern United States.
We have come far, over two centuries. But there is much more history yet to be explored: we therefore make certain adjustments to the mechanism, so as to accelerate the rate of our travel down the river of time. And so on to early modern England! We indulge in the rowdy revelries of London's May Days before examining the significance of 1688. We also discern, around the turn of the 17th century, some of the political theologies which perhaps played a part in eventually bringing the Glorious Revolution about. The flow of time confines us to England, for the moment. We note how the transition was made between medieval plays and their early modern successors (such as Shakespeare's Coriolanus), and the introduction of finest china into England. And from on high we observe where Henry VIII's six wives lived. But here is an anomaly -- Chaucer suggesting pickup lines for medieval historians in the 21st-century (some of which, it may be suggested, could have broader appeal -- Baroness Thatcher might warm to the line 'Art thou a disastrous poll tax? Bycause I feele a risynge comynge on.') A 14th-century chrononaut, perhaps?
The pace of our temporal journey continues to quicken. We find ourselves drawn to smaller, hitherto neglected medieval sites, full of interest for the curious time traveler -- a Byzantine church, for example, or a Swedish manor house. The years pass like minutes now, the centuries like hours. The stroboscopic flickers of light from the Sun's daily journeys are mesmerising. We have come 20 or so centuries from our starting point; yet we are not so far distant that we cannot discern correspondences with our own time. The uses of fear in Roman politics should sound a warning to the free peoples of the 21st century. Less threatening, perhaps, are the reverberations and reflections of ancient religions back to our own century. But debating who were the four greatest ancient Greeks, and reflecting upon the dignity of immigrants from the Polynesians onwards puts our own meagre claims to historical significance to shame. We gaze upon the works of Imhotep, and despair.
And so we resolve to push on. We depress the lever still further, and hurtle back into realms of time beyond the knowledge of historians -- first into the domain of archaeologists, then those of geologists, astronomers and finally cosmologists. There is a pervasive heat, a thickening and a constriction of space, an implosion of light ... oh! the singularity!
YOU HAVE BEEN READING ...
Abdusalaam Al-Hindi; Ahistoricality; American Civil War Gaming & Reading; American Presidents Blog; archy; Atlantic Review; Axis of Evel Knievel; Blogging the Renaissance; blogographos; Break of Day in the Trenches; diamond geezer; Done with Mirrors; Earmarks in Early Modern Culture; edwired; Frog in a Well (Korea); Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog; Google Earth Blog; Great War Fiction; History is Elementary; History News Network; Holocaust Controversies; homo edax; Living in Egypt; Living the Scientific Life; Mideast: On Target; Mode for Caleb; Muhlberger's Early History; My London Your London; OhmyNews International; OUPblog; Patrick in Detroit; PhDiva; Philobiblon; Respectful Insolence; Salto sabrius; The Dougout; The Little Professor; The Moor Next Door; The Rhine River; the skwib; World History Blog.
PS The next History Carnival will be hosted by Amy Stevens at Acqueduct, on 1 June. Please send your nominations to amy AT amystevensonline DOT com or use the form.
The 1926 General Strike
It's 80 years to the day since the end of the 1926 General Strike, which lasted just nine days. It had long been anticipated or feared (depending on ideology) as the precursor to a socialist revolution, on the 1917 Bolshevik model, but this turned out not to be the case. It was begun, in somewhat half-hearted and disorganised fashion, by the Trades Union Congress on 3 May in support of the miners who were facing steep pay cuts; it ended on 12 May without any promise by the government to preserve wages. Several million workers went out on strike. But the TUC's position was virtually censored; civilian volunteers and the armed forces kept transportation and basic services going; and the peace was generally kept apart from localised and small-scale incidents. The strike did not appear to be achieving anything other than alienating middle-class opinion; and far from being revolutionary in intent, the TUC were worried about its constitutionality, which is why they were anxious to reach a compromise with the government. The miners stayed out for another 6 months or so, and gained little apart from worse conditions or losing their jobs altogether. The possibility of another general strike receded, not only because of the failure of the 1926 one, but also because of new legislation which banned sympathetic strikes.
While the possibility of an actual revolution was a bit of right-wing myth, and despite the failure of the General Strike to achieve its ends, it has been enshrined in left-wing mythology as shaking 'the British ruling class out of their thrones' and showing 'brilliantly how collective working class action can change society'. From my perspective though, it doesn't seem like the ruling class were shaken much at all. Most of the works I've read from the early 1920s display fear of the working class or socialist revolution; for example Hugh Addison's The Battle of London (London: Herbert Jenkins, n.d. [1923]) where a general strike paralyses the country ahead of a bloody worker's uprising in London and (naturally) a knock-out blow by the Germans. However, it is very noticeable that after 1926, there is a sudden drop-off in concern about the working class. This may start to to pick up again in the 1930s during the Slump, but to me this suggests that the failure of the General Strike demonstrated to the 'British ruling class' that, despite their fears, Britain was actually pretty safe from revolution. Perhaps it had deeper or longer term effects that don't show up on the level of popular literature, though.
A good, short (but old) overview of the General Strike is Geoffrey McDonald, "The defeat of the General Strike" in Gillian Peele and Chris Cook, eds, The Politics of Reappraisal 1918-1939 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1975), 64-87.
The post not posted
I have been finishing off a long-ish post that I've been meaning to write for a while, but now I don't think I will post it. This is because I came to realise that it's actually stuff I want to write about more formally at some stage, in my thesis or in a paper. Generally speaking, the things I write about on this blog are more closely related to my actual research than many other academic history blogs, which is how I wanted it to be, but it does seem that I've reached a limit here! I guess it's because blogs have no particular academic standing, so it's like I'm giving away something (my research, my ideas) for nothing. Somebody else could take those references and ideas1 and publish them before I get a chance to, or maybe I'll say something careless and wrong that will reflect badly on me; a journal article at least passes before several more sets of eyeballs before it gets to the outside world. I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that presenting research on a blog or other non-peer reviewed forum is career suicide, but it may not be particularly wise either. Now, I don't mind posting snippets of interesting or curious information which I don't have any particular use for, and which I may or may not use some day. That can be a helpful form of thinking aloud, for one thing, and it may lead to something more formal. But it seems to be different when it comes to my core research. Posting about that makes me nervous, I find, so I tend to talk about somewhat peripheral (but hopefully still interesting) subjects. That may be safer, but it probably also reduces the potential benefits of having a research blog.
So, I might re-work the post not posted into a shorter, more general piece. And it's not like there's a lack of interesting but non-threatening things to blog about -- the trouble is finding the time to do it! I suspect, too, that my more central research concerns will be easier to write about on here when I am also writing them up for publication or presentation. But I don't know. Am I being too paranoid? Not paranoid enough?
- Not that I am claiming to have had any brilliant ones ... [↩]
The Carnival is coming
Airminded is hosting the 31st History Carnival on 15 May, a week from today! I already have a good number of nominations, but I need more. Please send your suggestions for the best recent posts in the historioblogosphere to me by way of the form, or drop me a line through the contact page. And note that earlier is better than later, since I'm in Australia, many timezones ahead of most potential contributors.
Given my own nationality and specialisation, I'd be especially pleased to hear of anything relating to Australian history or to 20th century British history -- the Antipodes and the anti-Antipodes, if you like. But of course, posts about any and all periods, regions and subjects, whether academic and non-academic in nature, are welcome! As long as it's history, it's fair game.
Image source: www.biggles.info.
Air University Press titles online
Air University Press, the publishing arm of the USAF's Air University, has most of its books available in PDF format for free download. As one might expect, the subject matter is mostly American and recent, but some are on-topic for me, including Williamson Murray's Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe, 1933-1945, George K. Williams' Biplanes and Bombsights: British Bombing in World War I, William Edward Fischer's The Development of Military Night Aviation to 1919, and Philip S. Meilinger's The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Airpower Theory and Airmen and Air Theory: A Review of the Sources.