Acquisitions
Brett Holman. The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. :D
Acquisitions, Books, Pictures, Publications
1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Books, Periodicals, Pictures
The Imperial Aircraft Flotilla — I
We are familiar enough with the Spitfire Funds of the Second World War, in which patriotic individuals and groups could buy aircraft for the nation. There was a fair amount of precedent for this. In the early 1930s, Lady Houston more than once offered the government hundreds of thousands of pounds for air defence, though
Acquisitions, Books
Acquisitions
Eric Hobsbawm. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991. London: Abacus, 1995. I’ve just been rereading Hobsbawm’s trilogy on the long 19th century, and realised I hadn’t read his book on the short 20th century, and so here we are.
1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Academia, Aerial theatre, After 1950, Books, Grants, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics
Course correction
With my book’s publication imminent and my return to the job market beginning to, if not loom, then at least creep up, it’s time to think about what’s next in terms of a research programme. I had been thinking of something to do with mystery aircraft, and indeed my next small research project, on scares
Acquisitions, Books
Acquisitions
Kenneth R. Sealy. The Geography of Air Transport. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1966. Revised edition. A bit outside my usual timeframe, but I had to rescue it from a secondhand bookshop. Lots of statistics and maps about world aviation in the early jet age, but also going back to the interwar period. If I ever
1910s, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Plots and tables, Rumours, Tools and methods
Throwing numbers at a map
Since I’ll be undertaking a research trip to the UK this November or so, I need to think about exactly what I’m going to do there. Giving a paper at the AHA is part of that process. That will hopefully help me formulate my approach or at least identify potential approaches to comparing airship, spy
1910s, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Publications
Self-archive: ‘The airship panic of 1913’
I’ve just submitted an article for peer review, ‘The airship panic of 1913: the birth of aerial theatre and the British fear of Germany on the eve of the Great War’. I’m not going to say where, since it will likely be rejected and I don’t need to have a public record of my failures!
Books, Publications
Teasing
My book is now finished: the cover has been finalised, the proofs are complete, the index is done, the files have been sent to the printers. Publication is now only a month away. Ashgate has put up some teasers on its website: the table of contents, the introduction, and the index. I found my first
Acquisitions, Books
Acquisitions
James Brown. Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession. Collingwood: Redback, 2014. Brown has garnered a lot of attention recently for his critique of the Anzac myth. What is perhaps most interesting about his position is that he isn’t coming at the question from a historical or even political position: his argument is
1910s, Art, Before 1900, Periodicals, Pictures, Words
Flitting, 1950
This cartoon appeared in Flight in 1913.1 It’s entitled ‘In 1950’ with the caption ‘Flitting — by the light of the Easter moon’. Now, ‘flitting’ is a term used in Scotland and the north of England to mean moving house. It is, or at least was, a practice which happened much more often there than