Acquisitions

E. H. Carr. What is History? Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2008. Second edition. What indeed?

David Edgerton. England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines. London: Penguin, 2013. Second edition. England and the Aeroplane was first published in 1991 and is now a key text for understanding modern Britain's relationship with technology in general and aviation in particular (I see it was one of the first books I read during my PhD, and it's one I return to frequently). So a second edition is welcome. What's new? Apart from small revisions to the text there's the subtitle, the illustration captions and some of the illustrations, a reflective preface, and perhaps most valuable of all for those who already have the first edition, a ten page bibliographic essay on the relevant literature since 1990 (which cites my international air force article and refers readers to my 'magnificent blog' (200)! Ahem).

Catriona Pennell. A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Seeks to qualify the idea of war enthusiasm in Britain in 1914, and the lack thereof in Ireland, apparently resoundingly successfully. Uses letters and diaries as well as newspapers. The subject is of intrinsic interest but the methodology and sources will be valuable too. Zeppelins are discussed in several places, but sadly only real ones.

Michael C. Pugh. Liberal Internationalism: The Interwar Movement for Peace in Britain. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Again, the peace movement between the wars was more than just pacifism and it's surprising that there hasn't been a sustained look at British liberal internationalism before now. Has chapters on such things as disarmament, revisionism (aka appeasement) and education. One chapter, entitled 'Innovation', is devoted to the international air force idea, which gets it about right.

Richard Scully. British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860-1914. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Part of the reassessment of the Anglo-German relationship that has blossomed in the last decade or so (it's not just about Germanophobia any more), highlighting a new approach to the sources. For example, Scully argues that high literature needs to be studied in conjunction with low literature, rather than just one or the other in isolation. But he also draws extensively on visual sources such as maps and cartoons, with the second half of the book analysing the portrayal of Germany in Punch.

Alan G. V. Simmonds. Britain and World War One. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. The latest history of the British home front during the First World War (for some reason, the home front in the Second World War rarely seems to receive such comprehensive treatment). Politics, propaganda, production, prewar, postwar -- it's all here.

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2 thoughts on “Acquisitions

  1. You know it's rare when something as worrying as the idea that they're 'only real Zeppelins' gets a reader's nod - you're so right, and we are only all thinking of the films and films that never quite made it (as well as Brett's phantom airshippery).

    And can we say we knew Brett before we knew the blog was 'magnificent' now?

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