[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] The new Military History Carnival has been posted at Wig-Wags. One of the featured posts, The state of strategy at Kings of War — which looks at the great strategic thinkers of history and wonders why there seem to have been relatively few in recent times — inspired the above title. It’s […]
No sooner does Bomber Command get approval for its own grand memorial — to be precise, a £3.5 million neoclassical pavilion in London’s Green Park commemorating its 55,000 dead — than Fighter Command trumps it with a proposal for an even grander memorial: a ‘Battle of Britain Beacon’ at the RAF Museum at Hendon, which
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Watching this: made me think of this:
After a long hiatus, a new Military History Carnival has appeared, at The Edge of the American West and H-War. (Thanks, David Silbey!) A post on combat drones at Legal History Blog caught my eye. It suggests that drones are part of a process in America, post-Vietnam, whereby the need for public support for military
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] ‘Harvard by the Yarra’ is actually the University of Melbourne, Australia (the Yarra being the major river hereabouts, though the university is not actually anywhere near it). Some wag coined the phrase to describe (and deride) the aspirations implicit in the Melbourne Model, a radical overhaul of undergraduate teaching announced in 2007.
I don’t have anything deep or moving to say about the bushfires which destroyed several towns on the north-east edge of Melbourne on Saturday (try here instead). Everyone I know is (I think) safe, which is the first thing to say, but beyond that … the official death toll is currently 181, but is sure
This post will only be of interest to Melbourne readers. Melbourne Cinémathèque is holding a season of 1930s Howard Hawks films this month, including three of his aviation classics: Only Angels Have Wings, Ceiling Zero (both on Wednesday, 3 December) and The Dawn Patrol (Wednesday, 17 December). They’re showing at ACMI. I don’t think I’ve
One of the fun things about reading old books that nobody else has opened for decades is what you sometimes find inside them: annotations, bookmarks, letters, racist leaflets (OK, that one was not so fun). Above is a library call slip (i.e. the bit of paper you fill in to request that a book be
As Chris noted here the other day, David Philips died recently. David was a recently retired associate professor in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, where he taught for three decades, and had an international reputation in the study of crime and policing in 19th century Britain and the comparative study
Director Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge) has been working on a new film, called Australia. As the name perhaps suggests, it’s a sweeping saga of this wide, brown land of ours: the men who conquered it, the women who loved them, the cattle, the dust, the flies … well, it sounds pretty dull to
