Acquisitions

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions

Michele Haapamaki. The Coming of the Aerial War: Culture and the Fear of Airborne Attack in Inter-war Britain. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014. Michele may be better known to some of you as the Idle Historian, at her blog or on Twitter. She’s also now a published author, and I’ve been looking […]

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions

Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead and Alison J. Williams, eds. From Above: War, Violence and Verticality. London: Hurst & Company, 2013. A collection of essays on the aerial view and how it has changed war. While there is a lot of historical detail in here, most of the contributors to this volume are geographers, rather than

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions

Ron Gretton, Geoff Matthews and James Kightly. Bristol Boxkites at Point Cook: Commemorating the Centenary of Australian Military Aviation 1914-2014. Werribee: Project 2014, 2014. In 1995 a group of volunteers decided to build a flying replica of the first Australian military aircraft, a Bristol Boxkite. It first flew late last year, and flew again at

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions

Richard Lamb. The Drift to War: 1922-1939. London: Bloomsbury, 1991. A narrative history, based on some archival research, of British diplomacy with respect to the German problem (there are only two or three chapters on period before Hitler, so don’t be misled by the 1922 in the subtitle). Unsurprisingly unfavourable to Chamberlain, from the looks

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions

Antony Taylor. London’s Burning: Pulp Fiction, the Politics of Terrorism, and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular Culture, 1840-2005. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. A conference purchase, and an instant one for me after seeing the title. Oddly from my perspective, as far as I can tell it omits almost the entire

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions

Peter Rees. Lancaster Men: The Aussie Heroes of Bomber Command. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2013. I must admit to hesitating over buying this, mainly because of the presence of the word ‘heroes’ in the title. But I understand that the author didn’t have a say in the matter and is a bit embarrassed about

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions

Joanna Bourke. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. A now-classic gender analysis of the impact of the First World War on masculinity — mostly in social and cultural terms, but the first chapter is entitled ‘Mutilating’ so sometimes the impact is quite literal. Other topics

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions

Joan Beaumont. Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2013. With the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War looming, it’s high time we had a book like this: a synoptic overview of the whole of Australia’s war, from the fighting overseas to the conflicts at home, from

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions (jet lag edition)

Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eds. An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. Sometimes the origin of the First World War seems overdetermined, there are so many theories to account for it. Other times, it seems like, as in the

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions

Karl Baedeker. Great Britain: Handbook for Travellers. Old House, 2013 [1937]. As I said, I’m a sucker for facsimile editions, and this one has many nice foldout maps. As the cover doesn’t fail to tell you, this is the version supposedly used by the Luftwaffe to plan the Baedeker raids. At any rate, if you

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