A. Bowdoin Van Riper. Imagining Flight: Aviation and Popular Culture. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. In some ways this feels like similar territory to Joseph Corn’s The Winged Gospel, but as the title suggests it has more of a popular culture focus (especially film). It also has much more of a worldwide and […]
David T. Courtwright. Sky as Frontier: Adventure, Aviation, and Empire. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. Looking at the history of aviation as the expansion into a frontier is an interesting approach, especially in terms of the American experience, as examined here. But it’s also a useful entry point to the key transition from
Apparently aviation has historically had some slight connection with the United States… Dominick A. Pisano (ed.) The Airplane in American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. I’ve actually used this collection before, for Jill D. Snider’s excellent chapter on the aerial bombardment of Tulsa in 1921, but there is much else here of
Prudence Black. Smile, Particularly in Bad Weather: The Era of the Australian Airline Hostess. Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2017. I’ve been fortunate to hear some presentations relating to Pru’s ARC project on the history of Australian air hostesses, and it’s fascinating stuff. Drawing partly on oral history interviews, she charts the changing roles and gender expectations
Owen Hatherley. The Ministry of Nostalgia. London and New York: Verso, 2017. Hatherley’s misapprehension about the origins of Keep Calm and Carry On got me an article in The Conversation, so I figure I owe him a book sale. But I also suspect that he’s on to something with his (much) larger argument about the
After reading Bill Fanning’s Death Rays and the Popular Media, I looked at a murky 1937 claim of an official British death ray, supposedly on the authority of Sir Thomas ‘Caligula’s horse’ Inskip, Minister for Defence Co-ordination. That turned out to be not quite what happened. But I was also intrigued by something else Bill
Brett Holman. The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Yes, I’m one of those authors, the kind who buys the paperback edition of their own book, just to see what it looks like! At least I’ll get some of that back in royalties… Mike
Nicholas Booth. Lucifer Rising: British Intelligence and the Occult in the Second World War. Stroud: History Press, 2016. The intersection of two potentially very dodgy topics, black magic and black propaganda; but I’m reassured by the author’s statement that he doesn’t believe in the occult (not sure where he stands on British intelligence…) and fairly
I wrote about the strange, sad story of A. D. Harvey back in 2013. He is an independent PhD historian who has published a number of books and articles across a wide variety of topics, including my own field of airpower history, though his best known work is probably Collision of Empires: Britain in Three
Because it’s the holidays, I’m reading Bill Fanning’s Death Rays and the Popular Media, which proves that there are far more death ray stories out there than I’d ever dreamed, from many countries and by many more hands. Some of these death rays were purely fictional, but many others were supposedly grounded in fact. It’s
