[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
Airminded is hosting the next edition of the History Carnival on 1 June. Please send me suggestions for the best history blogging since 1 May, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by del.ici.ous (tagged historycarnival). Thanks!
Image source: Weapons on the Wall.
Starting tomorrow, I'm going to try some more post-blogging. It's 100 years since the phantom airship wave of 1909, when mysterious aerial visitors appeared in the night skies over Britain. Or at least, stories about mysterious aerial visitors filled the newspapers of Britain. It's hard to tell from this distance: the only evidence we have about the scareships are the press reports, which could be a problem if you are interested in a possible underlying reality. But then again, since the number of (alleged) phantom airship witnesses is relatively small, the press was the only way most people would have learned that their sky was being invaded by Zeppelins every night. So for them as for us, the stories are the event itself. (The phantom airship scare did not take place, perhaps?)
My sources are a variety of print periodicals: The Times, the Liberal Manchester Guardian (much more Radical than it was later), the Globe and Traveller and the Standard (both from London and both Conservative, or Unionist if you prefer), Saturday Review (Conservative, but not as reactionary as under Lady Houston), Fortnightly Review, Punch, the local weeklies Norfolk News, Eastern Counties Journal, and Norwich, Yarmouth, and Lynn Commercial Gazette (which I'll refer to as the Norfolk News!) and Southampton Times and Hampshire Express, and the specialist weekly Flight. At this time there was no radio and film was a novelty.
Compared with the Sudeten crisis twenty-nine years later, the 1909 airship scare was not as intense nor was it as protracted. It was not a major defence or political crisis. But it was about the first time that the possibility of an aerial threat to Britain was given an extended run in the press, even if that threat was not yet the knock-out blow ...
Further reading: Alfred Gollin, The Impact of Air Power on the British People and their Government, 1909-14 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); David Clarke, 'Scareships over Britain: the airship wave of 1909', Fortean Studies 6 (1999), 39-63; Nigel Watson, 'Airships and invaders. Background to a social panic', Magonia 3 (Spring 1980).
The Tarrant Tabor, a prototype bomber designed and built in 1918-9. There were high hopes among strategic bombing advocates (including P. R. C. Groves) for this giant machine, but by the time it was ready for its maiden flight in May 1919, the war was over and its purpose now unclear. Not that this mattered much, for that first flight was abortive:
...continue reading
Military History Carnival 16 has been posted at American Presidents Blog. There's an easy choice for me (although the snails did make me go 'ewwww'): The Blogger will always get through has found an intact trench in East Sussex, which was part of the anti-invasion defences in the Second World War. Sterling work, and there is a video and another photo (and snails) in a follow-up post. Which is as good an opportunity as any to mention a link which Alun Salt passed on to me, a report by Wessex Archaeology of a Time Team excavation of possible Second World War defences in the Shooters Hill region of southeast London, including an underground bunker of unusual design. One the one hand, the idea of doing archaeology on such a recent period seems faintly ridiculous -- there are people still alive who would remember what was there, and there are plenty of paper records for historians to sift through. On the other hand, not everything about such defences will have been written down, and memories fade, so it's not actually ridiculous at all. More world war archaeology, I say, more!
So, the thesis is done, if not dusted. What do I do now?
The first thing to do is to earn a living. That's now sorted, at least for the next few months; I'm doing a bit more IT work and, more interestingly, some sessional tutoring for the Arts Faculty. I last did that in 2006, so it's useful to be able to burnish my teaching credentials. The two subjects I'm tutoring are called Total War in Europe: World War One and From Homer to Hollywood. I'm enjoying both very much so far. Total War in Europe is of course right up my alley: this week in tutes we discussed militarism before 1914, and next week we'll be looking at the July Crisis. It's hard to make that material uninteresting, but I'm the man for the job. From Homer to Hollywood is an interdisciplinary breadth subject (for those familiar with the terminology of the Melbourne Model) for first year students, which examines representations of war in a variety of poems, novels, plays, paintings and films. We've started off with the Iliad and The Song of Roland; later we'll get to do War and Peace, Guernica and the film Gallipoli, among many other things. It's a bit outside my comfort zone in terms of approach (more litcrit than historical) but I'm learning a lot and enjoying teaching the first years.
Then there's the career. It's not exactly a good time to be looking for academic jobs (when is it ever), but I'm going to give it a bash. I need to publish though, and if I can get, say, two papers in the pipeline this year, that will help with that. I've got plenty of ideas, but as yet little inclination to get stuck into writing again. That will have to change! There's also the thesis-to-book process to begin, assuming it isn't roundly rubbished by the examiners, of course.
Finally, there's blogging. I do intend to keep writing at Airminded, although I'm not really sure what I'll have to say -- the problem with a research blog is that when you're not doing research, you're probably not going to be blogging that much either! That is something I'll have to cope with though, as I've just been made a member of Cliopatria, in place of the now-defunct Revise and Dissent. It's an honour but one which I'll have to work at justifying.
As my mind has been on other matters of late, I've been a bit remiss in attending to matters historioblogospheric. So here are some of the things I've not noted:
Last year, one of my posts was chosen for On Line Opinion/Clup Troppo's list of the best Australian blog posts of 2007. Well, the 2008 list is being compiled and another of my posts has again been so honoured! It's a better pick than last year's, I feel, though it's not that well written (it doesn't even have a proper ending). But at least Pericles hasn't popped up again to tell me that history is a waste of time or something.
Hard on the heels of The Edge of the American West, Ross Mahoney at Thoughts on Military History is post-blogging the (aerial) Battle of the Mareth Line. The first post is here.
Over at The Edge of the American West, David Silbey is post-blogging the Boxer Uprising. The first post in the series is here.
A bit earlier than usual, the winners of the 2008 Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogging of the past year have been announced. They are The Edge of the American West (best group blog), Northwest History (best individual blog), Wynken de Worde (best new blog), Tenured Radical (best post), Walking the Berkshires (best series of posts), and Zunguzungu (best writer). I'm not terribly familiar with any of the winners this year (though I did link to the best post), so I'll just do my usual thing of congratulating them all and adding them to my ever-lengthening sidebar.
