Bernhard Rieger. Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. A cultural history of the responses to three particular types of ‘modern wonder’: aviation, passenger liners, and cinema. I read this back when I was doing my PhD, but I’ve moved to a different […]
Paris has, unfortunately, been in the news lately, which has made me think back to my visit in December 2013. Happier days. I never got around to posting any photos from that trip, so now seems like a good time to rectify that. But because you can find far more beautiful pictures of Parisian landmarks
[Horatio] Barber. How to Fly a Plane: The First World War Pilot’s Manual. Stroud, Amberley Publishing, 2014 [1917]. Christmas present! Barber was a British aviation pioneer, holder of Aero Club Certificate no. 30, the first occupant of Hendon Aerodrome, the first Briton to get a degree in aeronautics. During the First World War he did
Back to back Roads to War! This week’s topic is the most airminded yet: the first German air raids on Britain. I had to cheat slightly to fit them in, as technically I’m supposed to talk about the centenary events in the week leading up to the broadcast date, i.e 23 December, but the first
I’m shocked to see that it’s already nearly two weeks since I got back from my UK research trip — it seems like it was just a couple of days ago. It was a fairly long trip: five weeks in total, essentially all of them spent in archives in London (National Archives, British Library, Imperial
After a break of a few weeks, today I recorded another Road to War episode for ABC New England, covering the period 10–16 December 1914. I focused on the German naval bombardment of Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby, which caused the greatest loss of civilian loss of life due to enemy action in Britain for the
So, I bought so many books in the UK that I had to post some of them home to myself; here are some of them. You might ask why I didn’t just note down the names of all these books and order them when I got back to Australia, but such a self-evidently absurd question
Yesterday was the last research day proper of my big trip. Actually, I was supposed to be having a holiday, but instead I spent it in Aylesbury at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, trying to see if I could get to the bottom of the Great Missenden affair of 18 October 1914, when villagers decided
Chatting to Andrew Gray the other day, I realised that I’d never got around to posting about a small discovery I’d made about one of the most sensational sightings from the 1909 phantom airship scare. This is the claim by a Welsh showman named Lethbridge that he had actually seen an airship on the ground,
While looking for other things in the National Archives today, I came across a proposed ‘aerial attack on Germany’s next grain crop’ in a War Council meeting held at 10 Downing Street on 24 February 1915.1 It was actually two proposed attacks. Mervyn O’Gorman, a civilian engineer who was in charge of the Royal Aircraft
