This summary of an unreleased and untitled film is from the ‘Grave and Gay’ column of the Preston Herald for 7 December 1918: In this film a man dreams that England is under German rule, and various scenes are shown depicting the organised brutality of the Boche. But, in the dream, there is a movement […]
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
So, I bought so many books in the UK that I had to post some of them home to myself; here are some of them. You might ask why I didn’t just note down the names of all these books and order them when I got back to Australia, but such a self-evidently absurd question
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] Previously I argued that two books by Frank Joseph, Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy’s Military Struggles from Africa and Western Europe to the Mediterranean and Soviet Union 1935-45 (Helion & Company, 2010) and The Axis Air Forces: Flying in Support of the German Luftwaffe (Praeger, 2011), were at the
When I started my PhD, I hoped to examine fictional representations of aerial bombardment in plays as well as in novels, newspapers and other written sources, but had to abandon this intention because I found very few which discussed the next war in the air in any detail. There are a few where it appears
It’s been more than two weeks since I’ve posted anything on my current mystery aeroplane research, but it’s not because I haven’t been working on it. In fact it is coming along pretty well. There are still some frustrating gaps in my understanding of the archival records, but the writing is coming along. I’ve written
The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, ‘Death from the skies’, in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 20-4 (see below). The article itself is a short story describing an air raid in the next war. I won’t summarise it in detail,
Brian Madison Jones. Abolishing the Taboo: Dwight D. Eisenhower and American Nuclear Doctrine, 1945-1961. (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2011). I found Brian Jones’s Abolishing the Taboo interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the subject matter: the Cold War fear of nuclear war was the successor to the interwar fear of strategic bombing. Secondly, it’s the book
The fourth RAF Pageant took place on Saturday, 30 June 1923. The ‘turn of the afternoon’, as in the previous year, was ‘another little Eastern drama, based on actual happenings during the War’.1 Once more the Wottnotts were the enemy, and once more the co-operation of air and ground forces was the theme. The main
A recent comment by J Campbell raised the question of whether Nevil Shute’s 1949 novel No Highway was in fact a prediction of the De Havilland Comet airliner’s metal fatigue problems, which led to two crashes (‘hull losses’, in industry parlance) in 1954. My response was that it seemed unlikely that Shute had any particular
