It's that time of year again: the winners of the 2009 Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogging have been announced! Congratulations to all the winners: Curious Expeditions (best group blog), Georgian London (best individual blog AND best new blog), A Historian's Craft (best post), The Historical Society (best series of posts), and Executed Today (best writing). As a very modest reward, they've all gone onto the list of recommended blogs on the front page. (Actually, as I read most of these blogs already, I thought some were already there ... never mind, they are now!)
Blogging, tweeting and podcasting
After; and before?
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
Since graduating I've become what they call an 'independent scholar', meaning I currently have no academic job but still have the irrational desire to do research. I'd certainly like to be a dependent scholar, but it turns out they don't hand out jobs with your testamur.1 Who knew?
So there are things I need to do. One is to keep an eye out for jobs. In Australia, we don't have anything like the AHA interview-fests, which sounds like a slightly terrifying (if hopefully worthwhile) experience for recent/almost graduates. Nor does Britain, as far as I know. So job-hunting is presumably less seasonal. We do have the usual job search sites, such as UniJobs.com.au and jobs.ac.uk.
Once into the job application and interview process, one useful site to keep an eye on is the Academic Jobs Wiki, especially the history section. There are also places to share good and bad interview experiences, or simply to vent. The entries are mostly about North American universities, but it being a wiki there's no reason why that can't change.
The other thing to keep doing is writing and publishing. Part of that is knowing which journal to submit to, and part of that is knowing how long it takes for them to get your article through the review process. It's not something journals advertise on their websites (and understandably so), so the only data seems to be anecdotal. Which is why I was glad to stumble across the History Journal Response Times wiki. It might have saved me some grief had I known of it earlier!
Finally, an inspiring blog I recently discovered is Nicholas Evan Sarantakes' In the Service of Clio, which is aimed at providing advice to history graduate students on the subject of career management. It's all there, from choosing a university, to conference strategies, to having a life. For me, the best posts are the numerous guest blogs from people who got their PhDs and then got jobs, mostly outside traditional academia. So it can happen.
I'd be glad to know of any similar resources I might have missed.
- Australian for 'diploma'. [↩]
Don’t forget …
... to nominate for the 2009 Cliopatria Awards for history blogging! There are six categories: Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. Nominations close at the end of November.
The great air race
It's the 75th anniversary of the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race. More specifically, it's the 75th anniversary of the day the race was won, 23 October 1934. The winners were C. W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black of Britain, who took just two days and twenty-three hours to cover the 18200 km from London to Melbourne. They flew in a de Havilland DH.88 Comet, named Grosvenor House, a beautifully streamlined twin-engined monoplane which was specially designed for the race. So a triumph for British aviation, then?
Well, if you've been reading the debate on a recent comments thread, you'll know it's not quite as straightforward as that. Scott and Black did win, but in second place was the Dutch-owned, US-designed Uiver, flown by K. D. Parmentier and J. J. Moll. True, it took 19 hours longer to fly the race route (albeit with an emergency stop at Albury, on the NSW-Victoria border). But that's pretty impressive when you consider that Uiver was a Douglas DC-2 -- an airliner, not designed for speed but for economy and payload. It even carried passengers for most of the race, and made many more stops than required by the race rules, as it was also blazing an air route for KLM. The Dutch actually won the race on handicap. Third was another American airliner, a Boeing 247D. The fastest British equivalent in the race was a New Zealand-owned DH.89 Dragon Rapide, which took nearly two weeks to complete the course.
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Zeroth World Wars
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
A couple of interesting posts at The Russian Front suggest that the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 should be thought of as a World War Zero, or alternatively that the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 should be. It's often useful to play around with the names we give to historical events and phenomena, because it reminds us that they are just names. And this is an old game for historians (as Dave Stone notes) -- the Seven Years' War is sometimes considered to be the first world war (if not the First World War). But I'm not sure in what sense the Russo-Japanese and Russo-Turkish wars qualify as world wars. Shouldn't the primary determinant of this be that they were fought on a world scale? Even the epic, doomed voyage of the Baltic fleet to Tsushima isn't enough to make the Russo-Japanese War a world war, as all the actual fighting was localised to a relatively small region in Manchuria (if you set aside a few potshots at British trawlers).
But in his post, John Steinberg does give a list of reasons for his argument regarding the Russo-Japanese War (which comes out of research for a two-volume work he co-edited entitled The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero). It seems to me that most of them are not actually about geographical extent but rather other sorts of scale -- of battles, of casualties, of finance, and so on. That is, in Steinberg's formulation the Russo-Japanese War sounds something like an approach towards total war, not a world war. If that's the case then I find this statement surprising:
As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.
I thought the Russo-Japanese War was well-known among western military historians (if not among contemporary western military staffs) for its bloodiness. Hew Strachan, for example, refers to it quite often (well, on 30 pages out of 1139) in volume I of The First World War. It's also a common element in diplomatic histories of the war's origins, for Russia's defeat had a tremendous impact on the strategic calculations of all the other Great Powers. So it seems to me that western historians are quite comfortable in seeing the Russo-Japanese War as a step along the road to total war and/or to the First World War in several respects. I think I must be missing something here.
Your target for tonight …
... is a new blog written by Jakob, a frequent commenter around these parts. He's just finishing up a Master's on engine development at the interwar RAE, and then will roll into a PhD on Metrovicks and the gas turbine. This is pleasing for a number of reasons, not least because I've finally got enough blogs to make up an aviation section my sidebar. So go over and give Thrust Vector a recce!
And, speaking of ending Master's degrees and beginning PhDs, I would be remiss in not mentioning Ross Mahoney, who has handed in his MPhil on air support for the Dieppe raid and will be moving on to doing a PhD on the career of Leigh-Mallory. Well done, Ross!
I, twit
Twitter is the most jumped-upon bandwagon on the net right now. And so I've jumped on too. You can follow me there or by way of the sidebar.
Post-blogging the British demobilisation experience
Alan Allport has a new website, which has information about his forthcoming book, Demobbed: Coming Home After World War Two. (Very spiffy cover too, I must say.) As a companion to the book, he will also be post-blogging the British demobilisation experience from June 1945 to June 1946. That's right -- a whole year's worth of post-blogging! I am awestruck (though not envious! :) The first entry is up, for 18 June 1945, the first day of demobilisation -- even though British forces are still fighting in the Far East. I will be following the return of millions of ex-servicemen and -women to Civvy Street with interest!
Post-blogging the 1909 scareships: thoughts and conclusions
That's it for the phantom airship scare of 1909. It's been interesting for me, as I haven't looked closely at this material since I did my 4th year thesis some time ago (the 1913 scare made it into the PhD, but not 1909). It didn't last very long, only a couple of weeks. At first, the stories were presented as a curiosity, localised to East Anglia. It seems to have been the Conservative press which took most interest at this stage, though it seems to have been divided as to whether a British aeronaut was responsible or an airship flying off a German warship. It was only when two separate sightings of the airship took place in South Wales -- by dock workers at Cardiff and the Punch and Judy showman on Caerphilly Mountain -- that Liberal papers such as the Manchester Guardian started reporting it.1 It seemed that something was going on.
But almost as soon as the phantom airships became 'serious' news, scepticism set in. Percival Spencer announced that his family's firm had recently sold several small airships for the purpose of advertising. Even though he gave no actual evidence of any connection between these and the scareships, it seems to have been good enough for all the newspapers examined here (bar the Norfolk News): there are far fewer stories about the 'fly-by-nights' thereafter, and those that do appear are sceptical or humorous. And, to be fair, real evidence of a hoax did turn up, in the form of a crashed airship and a claim that Jarrott and Letts, purveyors of fine motorcars from the Continent, had been towing it around the Eastern Counties at night as some sort of advertising stunt (which I still don't understand, but never mind).
That doesn't explain the Cardiff sightings, of course, nor the Irish ones nor the North Sea ones nor the (possible) Belgian ones. I don't believe that there were actual airships involved in these cases, except perhaps the last two. No archival evidence has ever emerged of anyone flying airships over Britain at this time, whether homegrown or foreign, other than those which were well-known at the time -- Willows, Spencer, the Army. Maybe meteors, maybe fire balloons, maybe luminous owls. It doesn't much matter to me. What's more important is why various explanations were offered and why they were accepted (or rejected).
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- Though perhaps, seeing as the staid old Times barely took any notice of the whole affair, the real divide was between the quality press and the tabloids: my best sources are definitely of the latter type (Globe, Standard) and it would appear they took much of their reportage from other tabloids (Daily Mail, Daily Express, which I unfortunately haven't looked at for this period). [↩]
History Carnival 77
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
It's just short of three years since I last hosted a History Carnival, so it's about time I did another. And here it is! Herein you will find such diverse topics as:
The Maltese dragon of 1608.
Anti-vaccinators of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The lives of disabled British children around the turn of the 20th century.
An innovation in plumbing from 1963 which never caught on.
Firstly, though, can you help these history bloggers?
Can you add any 19th century female utilitarians to this list?
Do you know any examples of medieval stained glass windows in film?
What Great War gesture is that?
When did violence in war become 'kinetic'?
Technology. We all use it, but maybe we could be using it more?
Why you should use Flickr.
Why you should not be scared of using Wikipedia.
Mashing up Google Maps and the British Library's sound recordings.
A heartwarming story of digital collaboration between archives in five countries.
An equally heartwarming story of digital aggregation within one country.
Medievalists and the early internet: a reminiscence.
Ideas. We all have them ... no, I'm not going to keep doing this!
How to get from Vietnam to Dungeons & Dragons.
When dinosaurs roamed the Earth alongside humans.
A freethinking biology textbook from the 1970s.
Interwar eastern Europe and speed.
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