Author name: Brett Holman

Brett Holman is a historian who lives in Armidale, Australia.

Books, Pictures, Reviews

Marked for Death

[This review was commissioned by the Michigan War Studies Review back in 2016, but for some reason never got published. As MiWSR is now, sadly, defunct, I guess there’s no harm in putting it up here on Airminded.] James Hamilton-Paterson. Marked for Death: The First War in the Air. New York: Pegasus Books, 2016. Vanishingly

Postcard showing Zeppelin LVI bombing Leige, 6 August 1914
1900s, 1910s, 1940s, Australia, Blogging, tweeting and podcasting, Interviews, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Sounds

Phantom airship tales from Rat City

I’m featured in the latest episode of the podcast Tales from Rat City, which is focused on unusual and sometimes bizarre aspects of the history of Ballarat, Victoria’s third largest city (if you’ve heard of the Eureka Stockade, well, that’s where that was). It’s run by David Waldron (a historian at Federation University who co-authored

Croydon Airport booking hall, summer 1935
1930s, Civil aviation, Periodicals, Pictures

You wouldn’t read about it

Would you? It’s the summer of 1935.((Late July or early August 1935, judging from the August Popular Flying on display. I can’t quite make out the newspaper headlines but the themes (British troops? American naval policy?) could fit late July.)) You’re at Croydon Airport, waiting to board an Imperial Airways flight to Paris. But you

1910s, Art, Contemporary, Interviews, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures

15 minutes of relevance

‘In the future, every historian will be relevant for 15 minutes’, as somebody once said. Here’s my 15 minutes, an interview with journalist Connor Echols for Responsible Statecraft on the parallels between the 1913 phantom airship panic and the 2023 spy balloon panic. As I’ve been busy with other things and have had to watch

Vance, Jonathan. High Flight: Aviation and the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2002
Books, Pictures, Reviews

The year of reading airmindedly — I

2023 will mark 120 years since the first controlled heavier than air flight, and 240 years since the first more or less controlled lighter than air flight. Much more importantly, it’s also the year in which I am going to get my ever-growing stack of to-be-read aviation history books under control! I can’t promise that

Scroll to Top