[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 1 March 2014. This was an initial roughing out of an idea for my next big research project, which hasn’t quite happened because I’ve been distracted by other things and haven’t got any funding yet. But I still hope to pursue it in some […]
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 15 May 2013. I’ve come up with some absolutely terrible titles for Airminded posts, but I like this one very much.] Roland Garros is today mainly known for having given his name to the home of French tennis. But long before then he was
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 31 August 2011. This is one of a number of posts from Airminded’s 7th year making an interesting or original point which probably deserve a wider audience somehow, but which either fall a bit outside my comfort zone or aren’t quite big enough for
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 3 March 2011. Sometimes, blogging takes time. Which reminds me, there are at least two posts I need to finish writing… one day.] A recent comment by J Campbell raised the question of whether Nevil Shute’s 1949 novel No Highway was in fact a
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 25 April 2010. My first substantial, and I think still my most effective, critique of Anzac.] It’s Anzac Day once again. On Anzac Day, Australia remembers some things but forgets others. We remember the sacrifices of the original Anzacs at Gallipoli, but forget that
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 29 August 2008. This is the first post of my day-by-day blogging — postblogging — of the Sudeten (or Munich) crisis; the others can be found here. I was briefly a pioneer of this kind of thing, but it’s a pretty obvious idea which
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 17 May 2008. I reuse these visualisations of the Blitz and the knock-out blow from the air, especially the second one, all the time — they’re in my book and just this week I showed them in a lecture and a conference paper. So
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 22 December 2006. My first attempt to set out a scholarly justification of my fascination with mystery aircraft.] On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: ‘a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’1 of
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 22 December 2005. Some people liked it, but Andy suggested that ‘Your a prat who likes to distort history and I bet you wear sandels Brainwashed little moron’.] I was in the bowels of the ERC library at Melbourne Uni the other day, scavenging
It’s 10 years to the day since I put up Airminded’s first post, imaginatively entitled ‘First post!’ That is a long time ago, a very long time in internet years. Still, Airminded wasn’t one of the first history blogs. In fact, Ralph Luker (of Cliopatria fame, alas long since retired from blogging) made a start
