Ian Castle. The First Blitz: Bombing London in the First World War. Oxford and New York: Osprey, 2015. As seen on the Internet! I already own the two books which this combines. But they were review copies so I didn’t pay for them; it seems fair enough to support the author more concretely this time.
In the last decade or so, it seems to have become a thing to refer to the German air raids on Britain during the First World War as the ‘First Blitz’. There are now at least three books on the topic with that title or variations thereof: Andrew Hyde’s The First Blitz: The German Bomber
The novelist William Le Queux is famous, or rather infamous, for beating the drum of the German invasion and spy threat before the Great War. But what did he do during the war? Unsurprisingly, he did much the same thing. On 28 February 1915, for example, The People published an article by Le Queux entitled
This could be the lurid cover of an Edwardian novel about the dangers of aerial bombardment, with an aeroplane, an airship and Death himself hovering over a great city, watching the terrified populace streaming outwards in panic: the first knock-out blow from the air. But it’s not. Instead it’s the lurid cover of an Edwardian
This photograph purportedly shows a squadron of Italian Savoia-Marchetti S.55X flying boats over the Alps on 1 July 1933, during the second and last of the long-distance formation flights led by the Fascist air minister, Italo Balbo (hence ‘balbo‘, briefly in vogue to describe a large formation of aircraft), Rome to Chicago and back. These
So, after a month of reposts, my celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary is nearly over. All that remains is the surprise which I promised, which is (no surprise!) the PhD thesis I submitted way back in 2009, for which I was subsequently awarded my PhD — after all, Airminded began life as a PhD blog.
These are (lightly edited) topic notes I wrote for a unit I’m teaching into in a few weeks, HIST332/HIST432 History as Film. The basic format is that students watch a historical film chosen by an academic to fit a specific theme, who also gives a lecture and leads a seminar discussion on the film. My
Alan Allport. Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939-1945. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Alan’s –– since he’s a longtime friend of this blog I feel justified in the slight informality — last book looked at what happened to the British soldier when he went home after the Second
An Australian view of the 1913 phantom airship scare in Britain, from the Sydney Globe, 8 March 1913, p. 7: A scare was created in England last week by the reported appearance of a mysterious airship at night over the East Coast. Two residents of Ipswich separately saw the searchlight of the airship, and one
David Clarke. How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth. London: Aurum Press, 2015. Clarke is a journalist and academic who has also worked with the National Archives on the declassification of Britain’s official UFO files. Here he takes a wider view, providing a social history of ufology (a subject he has
