Blogging, tweeting and podcasting

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I've never been to a Cliopatria Awards ceremony, but I imagine it is full of glitz and glamour, tuxedos and ball gowns. As the best history bloggers of the past year, the winners certainly deserve to be feted in this way. But instead of my applause all I can give them is a little recognition, by writing this post and adding their respective blogs to Airminded's sidebar. 2010's winners are: U.S. Intellectual History (best group blog), The Renaissance Mathematicus (best blog), Ph.D. Octopus (best new blog), A Blast from the Past (best post), Disunion (best series of posts), and Lapata of Chapati Mystery (best writing). Congratulations to all of you!

I must admit to being particularly pleased to see A Blast from the Past in there, as its author, Mike Dash, is someone who I was reading long before I started blogging, and who comments here himself from time to time. (Also because I suspect I was reading his original blog at the Charles Fort Institute long before any other history bloggers!) I already have Mike's other blog, A Fortean in the Archives, listed; it overlaps a lot with A Blast from the Past which is why I haven't previously listed them both, but I see he's planning to differentiate them more in future so I'm happy to rectify this omission.

Also noteworthy is that one of the other winners, Disunion, is a military history blog. In fact, it's a very ambitious and high-powered group blog, hosted by the New York Times, which is post-blogging the American Civil War from go to woah. They're still some months off from the war's start, as they're just up to the start of 1861. It will be fascinating to follow this one over the next few years.

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Nominations for the 2010 Cliopatria Awards for history blogging are open until the end of November. As usual there are six categories: Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. I think it's been a bumper crop this year as far as number of nominations is concerned, maybe the best so far. But don't let that stop you adding your own!

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7 October was not the end of the Blitz or even of the Battle of Britain, but it is the end of my post-blogging of 1940, at least for now. The main reason for this is because I'm running out of primary sources, especially the Daily Mail. But as I think I've shown, in the preceding week or two the press (at least the parts available to me) seems to have decided that a turning point in the air battle had been reached: that the Luftwaffe had been decisively repulsed by day and that the invasion was not coming. Also, the early shock of the bombing of London had worn off -- after three weeks or so it was clear that this was no knock-out blow -- and the problems in the shelters were starting to be resolved by a number of well-publicised measures. So late September/early October turns out to be as good a place to stop as any.
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Tomorrow I'll start post-blogging 1940. My starting point will be 25 August 1940 (the day after the first bombs fell on central London, one of the starting points of the Blitz) and will take it through to some point in October. As usual, I'll be presenting the view from the press, using daily newspapers like The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Mail, and also a Sunday weekly, the Observer. I might also try complementing this with the view from home intelligence. Unlike my previous efforts I won't try to cover everything that was going on; the basic facts are well enough known anyway. Instead I'll take inspiration from Alan Allport's now-completed post-blogging of British demobilisation and try to give a flavour, an impression of what was happening, how people felt and reacted. Of course it may evolve as it goes along.

Don't forget to keep reading the other 1940 post-blogging efforts, as well as my 1940 aggregation blog.

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Military History Carnival #25 is now up at The Edge of the American West. My favourite selection this time around is from Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog and concerns the question of the last cavalry charge in history. As an Australian, I am legally obliged (I think it's in the Constitution, somewhere near the back) to claim (loudly, if necessary) that 4th Light Horse Brigade's action at Beersheba in 1917 holds this distinction; but according to Dr Beachcombing Polish, British, American and Italian mounted forces all charged their enemies at some point between 1939 and 2001. Well, obviously I don't know about that but it's an interesting read, as is the rest of the blog -- it even has a tag for forteana.

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I've put the series of posts I did a couple of years ago on the Sudeten crisis into one big PDF file called, rather grandiosely, Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis: The British Press, August-October 1938 (147 pages, 5.6 Mb). It's freely available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. It's very bloggy in style, but I've also added a basic index and put in internal links between the chapters (posts). My Sudeten posts are probably the best thing I've done with this blog, and they've been linked to from a few educational sites as well as Wikipedia. So by putting them into this format I hope they'll be made accessible to a wider audience. (I've been inspired in this by the work Evangeline Holland has been doing over at Edwardian Promenade.)

The conversion was done using a nifty tool called WPTEX. This is some PHP which hooks into WordPress's functions and reads out and formats your posts into LaTeX format. It didn't quite do what I wanted but with some PHP and LaTeX hackery I think it turned out pretty nice in the end.

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British Fact and German Fiction

Thanks to Frank Herrera for pointing me to British Fact and German Fiction. It's a British propaganda film just under fifteen minutes long, made in 1917 by the Thanhouser Company for the Department of Information. Since it has Portuguese Spanish intertitles (luckily with more recent English subtitles), it was obviously shown overseas, though from the comments in Nicholas Reeves' Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War (1986) it does seem it was intended for domestic consumption. I can't embed the film here but you can watch it at the appropriately named Europa Film Treasures website.

The 'German fiction' referred to was a letter supposedly published in a German newspaper claiming to be an eyewitness account of serious damage caused to various London icons -- the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Bridge, Hyde Park, Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross Station, the Bank of England, Trafalgar Square, St Paul's Cathedral, Liverpool Street Station, Buckingham Palace -- by German air raids in July, August and September. I say supposedly because as the Imperial War Museum notes (IWM 443), the newspaper is hard to identify based on the English title given, the Westphalia Daily News. But if the German press did claim this, it was an own goal because this film shows that the locations were still all intact, at least as of 25 and 26 September when the film was supposedly shot. Again, I say supposedly, because this is established by a policeman holding a placard showing the date in many of the scenes, but we have to take this on trust.1 In this case, however, there's no reason I can see for the DOI to fake the date, as it was quite true that the damage done was vastly exaggerated by the letter-writer, and in fact simply made up. There is also footage of some of the places German bombs did hit: working class homes, small businesses, the road in front of a hotel. The text sarcastically says these are the Germans' idea of 'munition factories', though the British (like everyone else who ever dropped bombs in anger) were just as prone to claiming they only bombed military targets.
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  1. There's also a shot of the front page of the Evening Standard, though the date is not visible. The headline -- 'Zeps and Gothas raid together' -- does pretty much tie it down to 26 September. [↩]

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On 3 July 2005, I published Airminded's first post, making it five years old today. I don't usually mark blogiversaries, but half a decade is not bad in 'web blog' terms.

This is a good opportunity to thank all of the commenters here, especially the regulars. I've been very fortunate in that regard: the comment threads are usually more interesting than the posts themselves. I also appreciate those regular readers who don't leave comments but show up in the web stats. I hope Airminded continues to attract such discerning visitors in the future!

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Follow the events of 1940 day by day and week by week, seventy years later:

Airminded - 7 October 1940
Battle of Britain Day by Day - 31 October 1940
Days of Glory - 31 October 1940
Duxford Operations Blog - 31 October 1940
Nick Cooper's Random Blog - 31 October/1 November 1940
Orwell Diaries - 25 October 1940
Spitfire Site - 6 October 1940
World War II Day-By-Day - 31 October 1940
World War II Today - 31 October 1940
WW2: A Civilian in the Second World War - 29 October 1940

@RAFDuxford1940
@ukwarcabinet
@BattleofBritain
1940 Chronicle
Battle of Britain Pilot's Blog

See also: an introduction; and an aggregation blog.