Orac at Respectful Insolence has called attention to the attempted arson attack on The Holocaust History Project, and called for other bloggers to link to the THHP home page as a show of solidarity. There’s no proof as yet, but the suspicion is that Holocaust deniers are responsible. Holocaust denial is pseudohistory, a pathological and […]
Via Early Modern Notes comes the news that Gordon Brown wants to turn Remembrance Sunday into British Day. Aside from Sharon’s remarks to the effect that this would obscure what is supposed to be remembered on that day – the human costs of war – to me, it seems like a pretty negative choice for
I was in the bowels of the ERC library at Melbourne Uni the other day, scavenging for primary sources, when a book called The Peril of the White caught my eye – not because it has anything to do with my topic, but because of the author, who has one of the most splendidly silly
OK, I promise to stop doing that. This time, the answer seems to be: probably … Coming via Charlie’s Diary is a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh on the new US exit strategy in Iraq, which reports that “A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that
Well, not really. Still, it’s an interesting parallel. A RAF officer, Flight-Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, is being court-martialled for refusing to serve in Iraq. A doctor, he has already served two tours there; now he thinks that the war itself was illegal, in that it was not authorised by the United Nations. This is reminiscent of
When you are writing a thesis, nearly everything starts to look relevant to your topic. Unfortunately, that’s the case with the unfolding tragedy in New Orleans. Although it was a natural disaster, not man-made, and involved wind and water, not fire and gas, what Katrina did to New Orleans is something very like what the
This is very tangentially relevant to my topic: it has been found that anthrax samples given to Iraq by the US in the 1980s can be traced back to a cow which died in Oxfordshire in 1937. British scientists weaponised anthrax taken from this cow for their biological warfare tests during the Second World War
I haven’t yet been to the UK National Archives (well, I haven’t been to the UK at all yet …) but I probably will at some point for the PhD, and I have ordered documents from them before. So it’s more than a little disturbing to learn via Schneier on Security via Patahistory that forged
This happened a week ago, but it’s rather cool – a re-enactment of the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic by the British airmen Alcock and Brown in June 1919. They used a modified Vickers Vimy, a two-engined aircraft designed for bombing German cities. The Vimy was never used in this role, but a flight
