These bots are getting nicher and nicher! @TroveWW1AirRaidBot is a Bluesky and Mastodon bot. Just like @TroveAirRaidBot, it posts Trove newspaper articles containing the phrase “air raid” – with the difference that it only posts those published between 1914 and 1918. The reason for this is because I’ve noticed that @TroveAirRaidBot now posts much more […]
In August 1940, the letter columns of the Stoke-on-Trent Evening Sentinel raged with an intense (if brief) controversy over the existence of unofficial civil defence groups known as ‘street patrols’. These were nothing to do with the national Air Raid Precautions (ARP) organisation, which among other things recruited air raid wardens to monitor and coordinate
Airminded is 20 years old today. That’s a long time in blog years. Airminded at 0 I was an almost-young almost-PhD student. Airminded was going to be a place for me to talk about things I’d found during my research. Airminded at 5 I was a recent PhD graduate, trying to get an academic job.
Catherine Warr, a Yorkshire-based historian, recently posted a video on the British phantom airship panic of 1909 which you can watch on YouTube, or right here: This is terrific public history: engaging and fun while being informative and accurate. Catherine has dozens more videos on her channel, including a bunch of airminded ones (e.g. British airships;
Time to bring this puppy (of a series of blog posts) home! Duriong the last couple of weeks I spent in London researching, I also managed to tick something which had been on my bucket list since my first UK trip in 2007: the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Portsmouth is a little over 2 hours from
Nearly at the end of these posts! During my two weeks in London researching, I also managed to fit in some sightseeing (it helped that none of my archives were open on Sundays). Mostly this meant the British Museum, but there were also a couple of other favourite haunts plus a museum I’d never managed
After Liverpool, Conwy. Via Bangor, very briefly. (All I’ll say is that if you tell people you’re going on holiday to X and their response is ‘X? Really?’, that should probably be taken as an opportunity to rethink your travel plans.)
After Glasgow, York. This was a place we had both previously visited and loved, but not for well over a decade and not together. So we were curious to see if we would enjoy it as much now. Folly? Yes, but that’s not important right now.
The first instalment of some much-belated travel photo blogging from our UK trip in May-June 2024. Above, the Sérilly Cabinet, a private room built for the lady of a Parisian town house around 1778, and now relocated in its entirety to the V&A.
That’s right… … I’m going on a research trip… … to the UK! (I suppose this post should technically be called Archivwochen, but that’s a little too pedantic even for me.) It’s been nearly a decade since my last visit, and that was long before I started working on Home Fires Burning. So I’ve built
