This is very tangentially relevant to my topic: it has been found that anthrax samples given to Iraq by the US in the 1980s can be traced back to a cow which died in Oxfordshire in 1937. British scientists weaponised anthrax taken from this cow for their biological warfare tests during the Second World War […]
David Edgerton. England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991. This is a very short book, only some 108 pages long – as the subtitle says, an essay rather a fully researched monograph. The overall point of the book is to argue that
I will shortly put up the first of an occasional series of notes on books I’m reading in the course of my studies. They won’t be fully-fledged critical reviews, more just a brief description and some thoughts and impressions of how the book relates to my own particular interests. I’ll only write about those I
Today I officially began my candidature … I’m a PhD student! It must be nearly eight years since I was last a postgraduate research student (a masters degree in astrophysics). Oy vey.
I haven’t yet been to the UK National Archives (well, I haven’t been to the UK at all yet …) but I probably will at some point for the PhD, and I have ordered documents from them before. So it’s more than a little disturbing to learn via Schneier on Security via Patahistory that forged
Inspired by my chance finding of a 1937 Who’s Who in a secondhand bookshop, and desirous of putting it to use, from time to time I will write up brief biographical notes on people important to the history of airpower propaganda in Britain. The first of these is on L. E. O. Charlton.
I’ve (mostly) finished a big update to my other site, scareships, which is about the British phantom airship scares of 1909 and 1912-3 – essentially, Edwardian UFO waves. To my mind, the fact that people (including, for a time, newspaper editors) believed that German zeppelins were buzzing their country – when in fact they weren’t
This happened a week ago, but it’s rather cool – a re-enactment of the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic by the British airmen Alcock and Brown in June 1919. They used a modified Vickers Vimy, a two-engined aircraft designed for bombing German cities. The Vimy was never used in this role, but a flight
But of course it shouldn’t have to. It was a pointless and tragic waste of human life. References to London’s stoicism during the Blitz are all over the place: former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Australian Labor Party foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd (“British bulldog spirit” was how he phrased it on the radio
