[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] As Alan Allport has noted, Winston Churchill’s famous speech of 20 August 1940 was and is remembered for a ‘single, unrepresentative sentence’, i.e.: Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. The speech was given during the Battle of Britain, and ‘the Few’ […]
Some photos I took while in Perth for the AAEH. I didn’t have a lot of time for sightseeing in Perth itself; apart from a bit of a wander through the CBD and a look at the Museum of Western Australia (disappointing after seeing the Fremantle branches), my main outing was to Kings Park. This
Gregory Benford and the Editors of Popular Mechanics. The Wonderful Future that Never Was. New York and London: Hearst Books, 2010. A wonderfully illustrated look at techno-optimism from the early 1900s to the 1960s — much of it American, of course. It’s lighthearted in tone, but Benford is no dummy so hopefully the text is
Part of my PhD thesis involved conceptualising the various forms of defence against aerial bombardment put forward during the thirty-odd years before the Second World War: things like anti-aircraft guns, air-raid shelters, an international air force, and so on. Something I didn’t include was what we might call spiritual air defence. Partly because I didn’t
William Mulligan. The Origins of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Argues that the war was not inevitable and in many ways was in fact unlikely and unexpected, which itself seems improbable to me. But he gave a very good talk at the Perth AAEH on the question, so I’ll be interested
The other day I received an email from Andrew Gray, a reader of this blog, alerting me to the existence of a new online newspaper archive available at ukpressonline. I’ve used ukpressonline before for its complete runs of the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, which were the most popular British dailies for most of
In a discussion of the activities of MI5’s Port Control section during the First World War, Christopher Andrew mentions German musings about using biological weapons against British civilians: The most novel as well as the most sinister form of wartime sabotage attempted by Sektion P was biological warfare. At least one of its scientists in
Fears of poison gas attacks during the Blitz don’t receive much attention from historians, and with good reason: not only did they not take place, but the evidence (for example, the number of gas masks being carried about) suggests that most people were complacent about the possibility. But not all. On 2 September 1940, a
As I’d never been out west before, I allowed myself a couple of days after the Perth conference for sightseeing. First I travelled down to Fremantle, not far south of Perth.
Claudia Baldoli, Andrew Knapp and Richard Overy, eds. Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945. London and New York: Continuum, 2011. The proceedings of the Exeter conference I attended a couple of years ago, which sought to expand our understanding of the civilian experience of aerial bombardment beyond Britain and Germany by comparison with
