Scott W. Palmer. Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. I followed Scott’s advice, but as I don’t have a car or an office, I ended up with only one copy :) It looks like a worthy companion to Corn and Fritzsche, and indeed, now […]
Bluebird at Daytona Beach, 1935. Image source: Florida Photographic Collection. Well, the title of this post is a lie — there’s only two mysteries that concern me here, and one isn’t particularly mysterious … Sir Malcolm Campbell was a world-famous British speed maniac (there’s no other word for it), setting many records on land and
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Niall Ferguson has an article out in the New York Magazine, on the use of computer wargames in learning about history and strategy. (Via ClioWeb). It’s a frustrating piece. As a sometime wargamer myself, I do agree with him that they can have their uses. But I think he fundamentally,
I’ve previously mentioned the Holden airship. At the moment it is at Brisbane, and there are concerns that it will be flown over the Gabba during the first Ashes test next month.1 The problem is that Holden isn’t paying Cricket Australia anything for the privilege of flying a billboard over the cricket ground, where it
Last month, I noted a parallel between certain pre- and post-Hiroshima nuclear warfare narratives. Here’s an even more common one, this time between the knock-out blow itself and nuclear warfare. Here’s the American astronomer Carl Sagan, from the final chapter (“Who speaks for Earth?”) of the 1980 companion book to his acclaimed television series, Cosmos:
Strange name, good blog. Gavin Robinson is moving on from a PhD on horse supply in the English Civil War: This is mostly a history blog, but I’m aiming to be eclectic. I’m likely to be posting works in progress; reflections on things I’ve been reading; extracts from and criticism of my PhD thesis; and
Vera Brittain. One Voice: Pacifist Writings from the Second World War. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. Consists two of her wartime works, Humiliation with Honour (1942) and Seed of Chaos (1944), a condemnation of RAF area bombing. Scholarly introduction by Aleksandra Bennett, foreword by Shirley Williams. Peter Cooksley. The Home Front: Civilian Life in
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] In a comment to an earlier post, Jonathan Dresner quite legitimately took exception to my use of the term ‘interwar’ to refer to the period 1919-1939: From an Asian history perspective, the Japanese use of chemical weapons in China isn’t really “interwar,” as major combat operations began in late ’37
30 Sqn D.H.9A at 9700 ft over Peri Magurum. A friend has alerted me to a thread on the Something Awful forums (thanks, Mike!) One of the users has access to a collection of photos taken by an RAF sergeant who served with 30 Squadron in the early 1920s, which unfortunately looks like it is
Between the wars, it was a commonplace that poison gas would be used in the next war, would be used in large quantities, and would probably be used against civilians. This was a natural enough assumption; after all, it was used liberally enough in the Great War, and it was widely assumed that science would
