[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
These are (lightly edited) topic notes I wrote for a unit I’m teaching into in a few weeks, HIST332/HIST432 History as Film. The basic format is that students watch a historical film chosen by an academic to fit a specific theme, who also gives a lecture and leads a seminar discussion on the film. My
Alan Allport. Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939-1945. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Alan’s –– since he’s a longtime friend of this blog I feel justified in the slight informality — last book looked at what happened to the British soldier when he went home after the Second
An Australian view of the 1913 phantom airship scare in Britain, from the Sydney Globe, 8 March 1913, p. 7: A scare was created in England last week by the reported appearance of a mysterious airship at night over the East Coast. Two residents of Ipswich separately saw the searchlight of the airship, and one
David Clarke. How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth. London: Aurum Press, 2015. Clarke is a journalist and academic who has also worked with the National Archives on the declassification of Britain’s official UFO files. Here he takes a wider view, providing a social history of ufology (a subject he has
