It’s the last day of AHA 2026, though the only things on the program for today are historical tours and as I decided (for reasons) to attend online this time, that means the conference is over for me. Though it felt rushed and a bit garbled, I think my talk on London’s air raid shelters […]
‘In the future, every historian will be relevant for 15 minutes’, as somebody once said. Here’s my 15 minutes, an interview with journalist Connor Echols for Responsible Statecraft on the parallels between the 1913 phantom airship panic and the 2023 spy balloon panic. As I’ve been busy with other things and have had to watch
After the drama of 1934, ‘the bomber will always get through’ appears less frequently in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in 1935 (though still at about twice the level than in 1932 or 1933). But it is still mostly being used in a very political way. This is not surprising, with the general election contested
It is sometimes1 claimed that ballooning was an event at the 1900 Paris Olympics. I don’t think it can have been. But it’s genuinely a bit murky, because this was only the second modern Olympics and the planning process evidently was not as formalised as it later became. The Olympics were held that year as
Since I’ll be undertaking a research trip to the UK this November or so, I need to think about exactly what I’m going to do there. Giving a paper at the AHA is part of that process. That will hopefully help me formulate my approach or at least identify potential approaches to comparing airship, spy
View Scareships, 1913 in a larger map Here’s where the 1913 phantom airship sightings took place. Actually, there are a few from late 1912 (including the Sheerness incident), the blue ones. Red indicates sightings in January 1913, green February, cyan March, and yellow April. A quick visual inspection shows that the density of sightings was
Press coverage of mystery airships hasn’t quite fallen off a cliff, but it is perhaps scrabbling down a rocky slope. Only a handful of newspapers mention them today, and not even yesterday’s startling report from the trawler Othello rates a mention. While there is still considerable (mostly negative) discussion of the new aerial navigation regulations,
The big news today is that the government has issued, in the words of the Daily Express, ‘a long list of regulations under the new Aerial Navigation Act to prevent foreign aircraft from flying over Great Britain or Ireland’ (p. 1) The extraordinary thing is that despite their length (9 orders, 4 schedules, a notice,
The phantom airship scare has clearly entered a new phase since the sightings last Friday in Yorkshire and Warwickshire. Several major London dailies — all politically conservative — devote substantial amounts of column space to the mystery; half the main news page, in the case of the Standard. Only it’s not regarded as a mystery
Last week was a relatively quiet one for the phantom airships, but today they receive the most press coverage yet. The main reason for this is a cluster of sightings reported from Yorkshire on Friday, along with another sighting from Warwickshire about 100 miles inland. In fact, there are so many reports that no one
