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Military History Carnival 21

15 February 2010 in Blogging by Brett Holman | 5 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Welcome to the restored Military History Carnival, a round-up of the best military history blogging of the last month. Since history is just one damn thing after another, let’s try this as a chronology.

327-5 BCE: Alexander the Great’s army fights yeti in India.
122 CE: Construction of Hadrian’s wall begins in order to amuse 20th century children.
1202: Venice builds a fleet of Landing Ships (Knight) for the Fourth Crusade.
1861-5: Black Confederates probably don’t exist, but if they did here’s what it would take to convince reasonable historians.
1914-9: The First World War sees horses used in a wide variety of roles. Men and women had their roles too.
1915: The many burdens of the poor bloody infantry.
1915: The first Zeppelin raid on Britain.
1915: Fighting at Gallipoli inspires a British sailor-poet to write of ancient Ilium.
1915: An earlier American intervention in Haiti.
1918: Gladys Wake, a Canadian nurse who died on active service in France.
1931-7: Why Metrovicks got into gas turbine research.
1939: ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’: then an unused morale-boosting poster, now a wildly successful internet meme.
1939-45: Why most RAF war dead served in bombers.
1940: Coventry and the aeroplane.
1942: George Herbert Walker Bush becomes the youngest American naval aviator to fly solo.
1948: President Truman sets a precedent for today by ordering the end of segregation in the US armed forces.
1948-9: An earlier international humanitarian airlift.

This edition of the Military History Carnival was brought to you by the year 1915. Thanks go to all those who sent in suggestions. If you’d like to host a future carnival, please contact the Battlefield Biker.

[Update: fixed an embarrassingly-bad description which suggests I barely bothered to read the link. Sorry Gavin!]

1000 tweets later

5 February 2010 in Blogging, Pictures, Words by Brett Holman | 7 comments

Twitter wordle

Last August I took up Twitter. I’ve just reached a thousand tweets (or will have, when this post is auto-tweeted), so it seems like an appropriate time to reflect on how useful the whole thing is.

I was initially sceptical, but I find that Twitter does complement blogging very well. It’s a good place to post links to useful or interesting links which I think are worth sharing, but aren’t worth a blog post (I don’t like just posting links: I feel I should say something insightful to go along with it, but I don’t always have something insightful to say!) Ditto for things I come across in my reading. It’s not quite as good as having somebody sitting next to you who to say ‘hey, look at this!’ to, but then again that sort of behaviour is usually frowned upon in libraries anyway. As the wordle above shows, most of my tweets are military history-related, and still often aviation-related, but a bit more broadly construed than here on the blog. (‘rt’ is short for ‘retweet’, which reposting the tweets of other users.) I also talk about other interests or pop culture from time to time. Of course, I could do that here if I wanted, but I don’t want to change the focus of the blog. The informality of Twitter makes it easier to play around.

Even more than blogging, Twitter is about who is following you and who you are following. (In round numbers, about 140 and about 100 people, respectively.) While there are a few regular Airminded commenters who are on Twitter (@thrustvector, @AirPowerHistory, @jondresner, @lifeasdaddy), I generally interact with a different set of people there. I get the sense that most of them don’t read Airminded, at least not habitually — even outside of the SEO consultants (who LOVE using the web, but only seem to actually use the web to tell other people how they can get more readers). On the other hand, there are people I’ve interacted with in the Twitterverse who do read Airminded, but wouldn’t comment here. Informality wins again. The abbreviated and fleeting nature of tweeting makes it more liberating, in a sense, than blogging: there’s only so much you can say in 140 characters, so you don’t need to say something brilliant, and if you say something strikingly unbrilliant, well, it’s soon lost in the stream. (On the other hand, it’s surprising just how clever some people can be with so little to work with.)

My proudest Twitter moment did relate to Airminded. @ukwarcabinet is tweeting the British Cabinet’s view of the Second World War, day by day (currently it’s up to 4 February 1940). It’s run by the National Archives (@UkNatArchives), and includes a link to the relevant Cabinet papers, which can be downloaded for free. And according to Jo Pugh (@mentionthewar), who works on it, I was partly to blame:

@Airminded I hope the @ukwarcabinet thing seems like a good idea. It was largely inspired by your post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis.

Which is very cool indeed.

Twitter promises to be even better than a bunch of RSS feeds for keeping tabs on conferences, jobs and general academic gossip. I say ‘promises’ because academia is, as usual, slow to cotton on to new media, and the critical mass of #twitterstorians isn’t quite there yet for Twitter to be an essential way to keep up to date with your own field. Which is one reason why I’m writing this post: sign up, follow @Airminded, and tweet! If you choose not to, you can still get an idea of what I’m tweeting by looking at the bottom of the sidebar on Airminded’s home page.

The trumpet calls

1 February 2010 in Blogging, Ephemera, Pictures by Brett Holman | 5 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

The Trumpet Calls

Airminded is hosting the next edition of the Military History Carnival on 15 February. Please send me suggestions for the best military history blogging since 17 January, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by twitter (@Airminded or tagged #mhc21). Thanks!

Image source: Wikipedia.

It’s alive!

18 January 2010 in 1920s, 1930s, After 1950, Air control, Blogging, Contemporary by Brett Holman | 8 comments

After a long hiatus, a new Military History Carnival has appeared, at The Edge of the American West and H-War. (Thanks, David Silbey!) A post on combat drones at Legal History Blog caught my eye. It suggests that drones are part of a process in America, post-Vietnam, whereby the need for public support for military adventurism is minimised by the increasing use of high technology, particularly airpower, since they minimise American casualties and hence political resistance. I’d argue it goes back much further than that. Air control between the wars — as practiced by the RAF in Iraq and the US Marine Corps in Nicaragua — had much the same purpose. And then there’s the (alleged) American preference for security through superweapons. Still, the conversations we are now having about the ethical and political ramifications of drones are interesting; the prospect of robotic warfare in the interwar period didn’t lead to the same debates. We have different interests now, it seems, even with respect to the same subjects.

Dreams of a colder war

11 January 2010 in After 1950, Aircraft, Art, Blogging, Cold War, Ephemera, Pictures by Brett Holman | 8 comments

Freedom has a new sound!

It is officially too darn hot today: 43° C. So naturally my thoughts turn to a colder time: the 1950s. The above image (which I found as part of x-ray delta one’s wonderful Flickr stream; he also has a suitably breathless blog, ATOMIC-ANNIHILATION) would seem to be part of a public relations exercise from Convair, relating to its interceptor, the F-102A Delta Dagger. I’m not sure what year it’s from exactly, but the Dagger entered service in 1956, so probably then or the following year. (So it could be an early effort from Don Draper.) Evidently there were a lot of complaints from the public about sonic booms from the Dagger, the USAF’s first supersonic interceptor. The text is really something else; it almost circles right through brazen propaganda to become an honest argument that sonic booms really are good for you. Almost:

Freedom Has a New Sound!

ALL OVER AMERICA these days the blast of supersonic flight is shattering the old familiar sounds of city and countryside.

At U. S. Air Force bases strategically located near key cities our Airmen maintain their round the clock vigil, ready to take off on a moment’s notice in jet aircraft like Convair’s F-102A all-weather interceptor. Every flight has only one purpose — your personal protection!

The next time jets thunder overhead, remember that the pilots who fly them are not willful disturbers of your peace; they are patriotic young Americans affirming your New Sound of Freedom!

Presumably the next panel would show the milkman clutching his ears and screaming in pain, and the one after that the homeowners sweeping up the bits of broken glass. That new sound of freedom wasn’t free.

2009 Clios

9 January 2010 in Blogging by Brett Holman | No comments

It’s that time of year again: the winners of the 2009 Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogging have been announced! Congratulations to all the winners: Curious Expeditions (best group blog), Georgian London (best individual blog AND best new blog), A Historian’s Craft (best post), The Historical Society (best series of posts), and Executed Today (best writing). As a very modest reward, they’ve all gone onto the list of recommended blogs on the front page. (Actually, as I read most of these blogs already, I thought some were already there … never mind, they are now!)

After; and before?

23 December 2009 in Blogging, Tools by Brett Holman | 6 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Since graduating I’ve become what they call an ‘independent scholar’, meaning I currently have no academic job but still have the irrational desire to do research. I’d certainly like to be a dependent scholar, but it turns out they don’t hand out jobs with your testamur.1 Who knew?

So there are things I need to do. One is to keep an eye out for jobs. In Australia, we don’t have anything like the AHA interview-fests, which sounds like a slightly terrifying (if hopefully worthwhile) experience for recent/almost graduates. Nor does Britain, as far as I know. So job-hunting is presumably less seasonal. We do have the usual job search sites, such as UniJobs.com.au and jobs.ac.uk.

Once into the job application and interview process, one useful site to keep an eye on is the Academic Jobs Wiki, especially the history section. There are also places to share good and bad interview experiences, or simply to vent. The entries are mostly about North American universities, but it being a wiki there’s no reason why that can’t change.

The other thing to keep doing is writing and publishing. Part of that is knowing which journal to submit to, and part of that is knowing how long it takes for them to get your article through the review process. It’s not something journals advertise on their websites (and understandably so), so the only data seems to be anecdotal. Which is why I was glad to stumble across the History Journal Response Times wiki. It might have saved me some grief had I known of it earlier!

Finally, an inspiring blog I recently discovered is Nicholas Evan Sarantakes’ In the Service of Clio, which is aimed at providing advice to history graduate students on the subject of career management. It’s all there, from choosing a university, to conference strategies, to having a life. For me, the best posts are the numerous guest blogs from people who got their PhDs and then got jobs, mostly outside traditional academia. So it can happen.

I’d be glad to know of any similar resources I might have missed.

  1. Australian for ‘diploma’.

Don’t forget …

24 November 2009 in Blogging by Brett Holman | No comments

… to nominate for the 2009 Cliopatria Awards for history blogging! There are six categories: Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. Nominations close at the end of November.

The great air race

23 October 2009 in 1930s, Aircraft, Australia, Blogging, Civil aviation, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 8 comments

The air power race. Great Britain also ran. Saturday Review, 15 December 1934, 514

It’s the 75th anniversary of the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race. More specifically, it’s the 75th anniversary of the day the race was won, 23 October 1934. The winners were C. W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black of Britain, who took just two days and twenty-three hours to cover the 18200 km from London to Melbourne. They flew in a de Havilland DH.88 Comet, named Grosvenor House, a beautifully streamlined twin-engined monoplane which was specially designed for the race. So a triumph for British aviation, then?

Well, if you’ve been reading the debate on a recent comments thread, you’ll know it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Scott and Black did win, but in second place was the Dutch-owned, US-designed Uiver, flown by K. D. Parmentier and J. J. Moll. True, it took 19 hours longer to fly the race route (albeit with an emergency stop at Albury, on the NSW-Victoria border). But that’s pretty impressive when you consider that Uiver was a Douglas DC-2 — an airliner, not designed for speed but for economy and payload. It even carried passengers for most of the race, and made many more stops than required by the race rules, as it was also blazing an air route for KLM. The Dutch actually won the race on handicap. Third was another American airliner, a Boeing 247D. The fastest British equivalent in the race was a New Zealand-owned DH.89 Dragon Rapide, which took nearly two weeks to complete the course.
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Zeroth World Wars

31 August 2009 in 1900s, Before 1900, Blogging, Words by Brett Holman | 7 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A couple of interesting posts at The Russian Front suggest that the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 should be thought of as a World War Zero, or alternatively that the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 should be. It’s often useful to play around with the names we give to historical events and phenomena, because it reminds us that they are just names. And this is an old game for historians (as Dave Stone notes) — the Seven Years’ War is sometimes considered to be the first world war (if not the First World War). But I’m not sure in what sense the Russo-Japanese and Russo-Turkish wars qualify as world wars. Shouldn’t the primary determinant of this be that they were fought on a world scale? Even the epic, doomed voyage of the Baltic fleet to Tsushima isn’t enough to make the Russo-Japanese War a world war, as all the actual fighting was localised to a relatively small region in Manchuria (if you set aside a few potshots at British trawlers).

But in his post, John Steinberg does give a list of reasons for his argument regarding the Russo-Japanese War (which comes out of research for a two-volume work he co-edited entitled The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero). It seems to me that most of them are not actually about geographical extent but rather other sorts of scale — of battles, of casualties, of finance, and so on. That is, in Steinberg’s formulation the Russo-Japanese War sounds something like an approach towards total war, not a world war. If that’s the case then I find this statement surprising:

As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.

I thought the Russo-Japanese War was well-known among western military historians (if not among contemporary western military staffs) for its bloodiness. Hew Strachan, for example, refers to it quite often (well, on 30 pages out of 1139) in volume I of The First World War. It’s also a common element in diplomatic histories of the war’s origins, for Russia’s defeat had a tremendous impact on the strategic calculations of all the other Great Powers. So it seems to me that western historians are quite comfortable in seeing the Russo-Japanese War as a step along the road to total war and/or to the First World War in several respects. I think I must be missing something here.

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