Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post about a software project Tim Sherratt and I were working on for Heritage of the Air called hota-time. Briefly, the idea was that hota-time would extract and then plot travel times between London and Sydney mentioned in Trove Newspaper headlines, as a quantitative way to gauge the […]
Continuing this miscellany, on 23 August 1913 the Maitland Daily Mercury published a letter from the Reverend G. W. Payne reporting that he, his wife, and a Mr and Mrs Preston had seen ‘an aeroplane with searchlight hovering fairly high over Newcastle and the Hunter Valley‘.1 This was just before 4am on 22 August 1913,
It’s been a while since I’ve done a mystery aircraft post, so here are a few Australian ones I’ve been saving up for a rainy day (or days):
A few years back, my article ‘William Le Queux, the Zeppelin menace and the Invisible Hand’ was published in Critical Survey, with the following abstract: In contrast to William Le Queux’s pre-1914 novels about German spies and invasion, his wartime writing is much less well known. Analysis of a number of his works, predominantly non-fictional,
It seems like only last week that I was spruiking a podcast appearance — actually, it was last month, which is also not very long ago! This time it was on the History of the Second World War podcast with Wesley Livesay, chatting about the German air raids on Britain of the First World War
While you’re waiting for me to write Home Fires Burning, here are some other books (mostly) on the same topic, whether wholly or in substantial part. This is not meant to be in any way a comprehensive list; it’s merely what I have found to be most useful. I’ve included links to out-of-copyright/open access versions,
So I’m writing a book. Why? There are already many histories of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War: in my proposal, I listed eleven published since the 1980s alone, and even that is hardly exhaustive. Many of these are excellent — Ian Castle’s books, in particular, are required reading on
I am delighted to announce that I have signed an advance contract with Cambridge University Press((Founded in 1534. Just sayin’…)) to publish my next book, currently entitled Home Fires Burning: Emotion, Spectacle, and Britain’s First War from the Air, in their Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series. Here’s a one
The ostensible purpose of the Air Services Exhibition was to raise money for ‘the FLYING SERVICES HOSPITALS’ and ‘VISCOUNT FRENCH’S WAR CHARITIES’, as you can see in the poster above. But those laudable aims didn’t mean it wasn’t also propaganda (as you can also see in the poster above). And, despite the name of the
So if I had been able to go back in time and visit the Air Services Exhibition at the People’s Palace on Mile End Road in November 1917, what would I have seen? Well, there are some photos extant. The one above gives a general idea of the exhibition space.
