1920s

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I've updated my list of online British newspaper archives. This time, the new titles are:

Aberdeen Journal
AJR Information
Catholic Herald
Connacht Sentinel
Cork Examiner
Jewish Chronicle
Irish Press
Irish Times
Kilkenny People
Louth and North Lincolnshire Advertiser
Nenagh News
Northants Evening Telegraph
The Post/Sunday Post (Dundee)
Sligo Champion
Sowerby Bridge News

Many of these are Irish, mostly from from the Irish Newspaper Archives but a couple from the British Newspaper Archive. [edit: I actually forgot my self-imposed rule to only include Irish newspapers before 1922 -- oops!] Thanks to a list of newspaper archives at Wikipedia, I also found the Irish Times, a couple of London-based Jewish newspapers (one, AJR Research, free) and the free Sowerby Bridge News, which appears to be an individual effort. Another great free resource is the Catholic Herald -- for example, here's their response to Guernica, 'Open town bombing a regular practice of Reds'. In addition, 14 titles have increased year coverage, though sometimes this is only a year or two.

With respect to the US-based NewspaperArchive, there's some good news, some other good news, and some bad news. The good news is that they have overhauled their interface and it's now much easier to use. For example, they have adopted Trove-style filters so you can quickly narrow a search by time period or location or title. This means it's more useful for discovery purposes, whereas before it was more difficult than it had to be to find things that you didn't already know were there. The other good news is that they have mostly cleaned up the metadata for their British titles. Previously if you went looking for British titles from the 20th century you would get a lot from the 18th especially, but also the 17th and 19th centuries. Maybe poor OCR was to blame (e.g. 1744 looking like 1944) but it's something that could easily have been noticed and fixed if a human had looked over things now and then. It seems that has now happened; while I did find a couple of errant titles the vast majority were correctly dated (or at least, the vast majority of the ones said to be from the 20th century were; it could be that the reverse problem is occurring too). So these are really positive developments, and signs that NewspaperArchive is committed to improving its service. The bad news, however, is really quite bad, at least from my point of view. It seems that NewspaperArchive has run into copyright or permissions problems, because now none of the British titles it carries go beyond 1904 (which also means that a couple of them, Lloyds News and the Staffordshire Sentinel, have been dropped altogether; the Hackney Express and Shoreditch Observer has been added, but this is already in the British Newspaper Archive anyway). Previously they mostly extended into the 1910s or 1920s. For example, the single most useful title, the Daily Mail, used to be covered up to 1921, so you'd get Versailles, the Great War, the People's Budget, the dreadnought race, the beginnings of airmindedness... now you get, I don't know, the Taff Vale decision? So I doubt I'll be renewing my subscription to NewspaperArchive: there's just not enough stuff for me now. But given the great improvements NewspaperArchive has made recently, I'd certainly join up again if the coverage situation improves in the future.

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Uses of 'Mars' and 'canals' vs uses of 'Mars' only in peer-reviewed astronomical articles, 1861-1970

So, to wrap up this accidental series. To check whether professional astronomical journals displayed the same patterns in discussing 'Mars' and 'canals' as the more popular/amateur ones I again looked at the peak decade 1891-1900, this time selecting only the more serious, respected journals. However, because of the French problem I had to exclude L'Astronomie and Ciel et Terre (the former was apparently more popular anyway). So for my top three I ended up with Astronomische Nachrichten, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP) and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). Astronomische Nachrichten ('astronomical notes') was the leading astronomical journal of the 19th century, founded 1821. It published articles in a number of languages including English. Fulltext Service seems to be multilingual, as it picks up the German (at least) equivalents of Mars/Martian and canal/canals. That doesn't help with the French problem, but that will only affect a small minority of Astronomische Nachrichten's articles. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific was founded in California as a joint amateur-professional organisation. Its PASP is now a very highly regarded journal, although I must admit I don't know if this was always the case. MNRAS is the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain. It also happens to be where my solitary peer-reviewed astronomy article was published (and when I say 'my', I think approximately 1 sentence relates to research I actually undertook), but even so it really is a highly-respected journal.
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In my post about the lingering scientific interest in the Martian canals hypothesis after 1909, I said that there was a problem with journal coverage. What do I mean by this? Have a look:

Uses of 'Mars' and 'canals' in peer-reviewed astronomical articles

This is a repeat of the first plot in the previous post, showing the number of articles published in peer-reviewed astronomical journals mentioning 'Mars' and 'canals' between 1861 and 1970, only this time for each of three journals: Observatory, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, and Popular Astronomy. I chose these three because they were the journals which had the most such articles, both over the entire period and in the peak decade of the 1890s.
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Uses of 'Mars' and 'canals' in peer-reviewed astronomical articles

In a recent, hmm, let's call it a discussion resulting from an old post I wrote about the US Air Force's one-time interesting in mapping Mars, I tried to assess how scientific interest in the Martian canals hypothesis lingered after the early 20th century, and said I would run up some figures to illustrate the data. So here they are.

My source is the ADSLabs Fulltext Service. ADS is the Astrophysical Data System, an online database of articles published in astronomy and physics journals. Which doesn't sound so amazing these days, but it was in 1994 when I first used it! (More on its history here.) The interface has changed remarkably little since then, but it is still free and very comprehensive. While it is primarily an abstract service, fulltext is available for many older articles -- but only as non-searchable images. Moreover, not all articles have abstracts. However, the text of articles from most of the major journals have been OCRed into a parallel database, the Fulltext Service. Like the classic ADS Abstract Service, this was not designed with historians in mind, but it's still quite useful.
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It was less than two months ago that my peer-reviewed article 'The shadow of the airliner: commercial bombers and the rhetorical destruction of Britain, 1917-1935' was accepted by Twentieth Century British History, but it's already available online, thanks to the journal's advance access policy. (So while the article has been typeset, the page numbers are only temporary, pending its formal publication at a later date.) This is great; otherwise it could easily take six months before making its appearance.

The publishers of Twentieth Century British History, Oxford Journals, also have an enlightened policy of allowing authors to put a free-access URL to the article on their own website: 'The article should only be viewed from the Oxford Journals site, and not hosted by your own personal/institutional web site or that of other third parties, though you or your co-authors may post the URLs on your own sites or those of your institutions/organizations'. What this means is that if you follow this link (abstract), this link (full text) or this link (PDF) you can read the whole article for free! Technically I suppose this is a form of Green OA, but no money changes hands; it's just part of the service. I suppose they realise that library subscriptions represent the vast bulk of their income, and letting authors provide free access to their articles from their websites is not going to undercut this. This also is great.

Here is the abstract:

Aerial bombardment was widely believed to pose an existential threat to Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. An important but neglected reason for this was the danger from civilian airliners converted into makeshift bombers, the so-called 'commercial bomber': an idea which arose in Britain late in the First World War. If true, this meant that even a disarmed Germany could potentially attack Britain with a large bomber force thanks to its successful civil aviation industry. By the early 1930s the commercial bomber concept appeared widely in British airpower discourse. Proponents of both disarmament and rearmament used, in different ways and with varying success, the threat of the commercial bomber to advance their respective causes. Despite the technical weakness of the arguments for convertibility, rhetoric about the commercial bomber subsided only after rearmament had begun in earnest in 1935 and they became irrelevant next to the growth in numbers of purpose-built bombers. While the commercial bomber was in fact a mirage, its effects on the disarmament and rearmament debates were real.

Here endeth the tale of the Unpublishable Article of Doom.

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When I started my PhD, I hoped to examine fictional representations of aerial bombardment in plays as well as in novels, newspapers and other written sources, but had to abandon this intention because I found very few which discussed the next war in the air in any detail. There are a few where it appears in the background, such as Karel Čapek's Power and Glory (1938), which is much more about poison gas than aerial warfare. The threat of bombing is more important in Wings Over Europe (1928), written by Robert Nichols and Maurice Browne, though this is more of a throwback to older narratives of the world being held to ransom by a league of scientists which possesses the ultimatum weapon (in this case the Guild of United Brain Workers has atomic bombs in aeroplanes circling the world's capitals) rather than owing anything to contemporary airpower theory.

But, as I found with cinematic representations, there were some plays about the knock-out blow. One such is Night Sky, which premiered at London's prestigious Savoy Theatre on 6 January 1937 under the direction of Maurice Elvey.1 The producer was Clifford Whitley; the playwright was L. du Garde Peach, better known (at least to some) as the author of Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History (1963).
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  1. As it happens, a decade earlier Elvey had directed the film version of Noel Pemberton Billing's play, High Treason, which also featured the danger of aerial bombardment -- though as he was apparently the most prolific British film director ever we shouldn't read too much into this. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.]

In the published version of his 2008 Lord Trenchard Memorial Lecture, Richard Overy concluded that now

air power is projected for its potential political or moral impact. In Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan it is the political dividend that has been central to the exercise of air power, just as it was when Trenchard’s Independent Force flew against German cities in 1918 with the hope that a demoralised urban population might pressure the German government to make peace. In this sense it might be possible to argue, without stretching the history too far, that the RAF has begun to forge a new sense of identity in the past two decades more compatible with the traditions of Trenchardism.1

My interest here is in that last word, 'Trenchardism'. Overy nowhere defines it -- in fact, it's the only time it occurs in his article -- but as an airpower historian I have a pretty good idea what he means, despite the fact that it's actually a relatively uncommon term. Marshal of the Royal Air Force (as he ended up) Lord Trenchard is well-known for his belief in strategic bombing as a war-winning weapon, particularly through its effects on morale, and as the RAF's Chief of the Air Staff from 1919 to 1930 he was in a position to promote it. This sense of Trenchardism, something like Douhetism, seems straightforward enough, and it's the sense in which I've encountered it in the secondary literature.2 But here I'm interested in other uses of this word Trenchardism: specifically the way it is used in a a Wikipedia article of that name which was created recently by Jo Pugh of The National Archives, who invites additions and comments (as discussed on Twitter).3 There, Trenchardism is taken beyond simply an enthusiasm for bombing, indeed beyond the military sphere entirely. The dilemma is that in so doing it risks diluting Trenchardism past the point of usefulness. But equally, it highlights a contemporary understanding of Trenchardism which is very different to that we understand now. Are they reconcilable? And if not, which should we prefer?
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  1. Richard Overy, 'Identity, politics and technology in the RAF's history', RUSI Journal 153 (2008), 74-7. Thanks to Ross Mahoney for this reference. [↩]
  2. E.g. Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Strategic Air Warfare: The Evolution and Reality of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 239, 291. [↩]
  3. I won't here discuss the question of whether Wikipedia is an appropriate place for original research. See also Richard Jenson, 'Military history on the electronic frontier: Wikipedia fights the War of 1812', Journal of Military History 76 (2012), 1165-82. [↩]

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I'm pleased to say that Twentieth Century British History has accepted my article 'The shadow of the airliner: commercial bombers and the rhetorical destruction of Britain, 1917-1935' for publication. It should appear online by the end of the year and in print some time after that. Conceptually, though not really intentionally, this article links with the ones I've written on the international air force and the 1935 air panic. The topic is the idea that civilian aircraft could be swiftly converted into effective bombers, which had its origin in the First World War and became extremely common in airpower discourse between the wars, thanks partly to P. R. C. Groves. This is something which has been little discussed by historians, with the main exception of those working on the proposed internationalisation of aviation. I argue that the commercial bomber functioned rhetorically to create a threat from Germany during the Weimar and early Nazi periods, when it was disarmed in the air but strong in civil aviation. Conversely, the issue quickly disappeared from view when the creation of the Luftwaffe was announced.

I have discussed this article here before, actually, though without saying what it was about: it's the one I asked for crowdsourced help in fixing it, after it had already been rejected and rewritten a number of times. Since it was then accepted by the next journal I sent it to (even if not immediately), for me this vindicates the idea of crowdsourcing the editing process in this way. I wouldn't do it as a matter of course, but I'd certainly do it again if (and when) I run into trouble. So thank you to the following people who provided feedback on the article draft:

Alan Allport, Christopher Amano-Langtree, Corry Arnold, Katrina Gulliver, Wilko Hardenberg, Lester Hawksby, James Kightly, Beverley Laing, Ross Mahoney, Andre Mayer, Bob Meade, Andrew Reid, Alun Salt

You'll all be in the acknowledgements, so if I've forgotten anyone, please let me know!

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Another update to my list of early 20th century British newspapers online. There are a number of new titles available:

Dundee Courier
Gloucestershire Echo
Hereford Times
Herts Advertiser
Lincolnshire Echo
Surrey Mirror
Yorkshire Gazette

In addition, the coverage for another dozen titles has been increased, though in some cases only by a year. There's additional coverage of at least some of the First World War period for seven newspapers, and of the Second World War for five.

Because it was getting a big long I've reorganised the list slightly, with separate sections for English, Irish/Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh newspapers. Which highlights the fact that there are no Welsh newspapers in the list at all. (The BNA does have a very few for 1900; hopefully they will be extended in future.)

All of the updates are due to the BNA; none of the other major newspaper sources I'm aware of have added anything for this period in the last three months. If you know of any I've missed, please let me know in the comments. However, I did recently come across UNZ.org, which has a huge amount of early 20th century periodicals (as well as books and other things) scanned and available for free, without even any ads. ('A New, Vast and Slightly Right-Wing Archive of Magazines, Books and TV Shows' is a pretty accurate description.) It's nicely organised too; a search function would be nice but you can use Google for that. Unfortunately for my purposes, all of them are American or monthly or both -- well, okay, these are interesting and useful too, but they don't fit into my list. But UNZ.org does have several British literary journals from the early twentieth century: Cyril Connolly's Horizon, F. R. Leavis's Scrutiny, and The Bookman (though this was a Hodder and Staughton publication, it published general reviews and cultural commentary too). For example, here's George Orwell's 'Wells, Hitler and the World State' from the August 1941 Horizon, which I had to pester some poor interlibrary loan librarian to find for me when I was doing my PhD. So this is a good thing.

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In my discussion of the ill-fated Sykes Memo, I noted that it included proposed force levels for the Dominion air forces, which I haven't seen discussed before. This is interesting because it came at an interesting moment. It's early December 1918, with the Empire was in the flush of victory and all things seeming possible (at least they did to Sykes, which is why he lost his job as Chief of the Air Staff). But it's before any of the Dominions had actually created their own independent air forces (SAAF: 1920; RAAF: 1921; RCAF: 1924; RNZAF: 1937 -- though those dates are inevitably contentious; see Pathfinder 114 for a RAAF perspective). Their decisions to do so inevitably reflected local concerns and conditions, but they also took advice from the RAF, as the Empire's 'mother' air force. So Sykes's proposals provides some insight into how the centre viewed the periphery in an airpower sense at this cusp between war and peace, and what advice he might have given the fledging air forces had he not been ejected from command of the RAF.

So, as before, I've tabulated the squadron numbers from the Sykes Memo in From Many Angles, and added some comments after.1
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  1. F. H. Sykes, From Many Angles: An Autobiography (London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1942), 558-74. [↩]