Rumours have a bad reputation, especially in wartime. They are at best unreliable, at worst flat-out lies. They are distractions from the war effort, if not actually undermining it. They can create unreasoning suspicion and fear or equally unjustified hope and optimism. In short, nothing good comes from them. Unless you’re a historian, of course. […]
The following article appeared on p. 4 of the 15 June 1914 issue of the Broken Hill (NSW), newspaper, the Barrier Miner: AIRSHIPS AGAINST THE MAD MULLAH Aden, Saturday. Naval Lieutenants Boothby and Richard B. Davies are at Berbera, investigating the feasibility of utilising airships for the purpose of an expedition to subdue the Mad
The Guardian has published a very interesting piece by Owen Hatherley on the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ phenomenon, an extract from his new book, The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity. He persuasively locates the poster within the context of an ‘austerity nostalgia […] a yearning for the kind of public modernism that, rightly or
In my previous post on the possible airship panic of 1915, I used n-grams for ‘Zeppelin’ and ‘rumour’ derived from the British Newspaper Archive to try to work out when exactly it was. The answer was that it began in late December 1914 and finished in early February 1915. But is the answer right? Is
My peer-reviewed article ‘The phantom airship panic of 1913: imagining aerial warfare in Britain before the Great War’ has now been published in the Journal of British Studies, and can be found here (or here, for the free, self-archived version). This is the abstract: In late 1912 and early 1913, people all over Britain reported
In order to start characterising the possible airship panic of 1915, let’s generate some n-grams and do some distant reading to get a basic overview of press interest in Zeppelins during the early part of the war. Here are the number of articles per month in the British Newspaper Archive for 1914 and 1915 mentioning
The May 2015 issue of Fortean Times (a periodical I warmly recommend) has a fascinating article by Daniel Wilson about a type of radio interference known as oscillation, which afflicted radio broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, about which, I’m ashamed to say, I previously knew nothing at all.1 What’s fascinating about oscillation is not
I’m very pleased to announce that the Journal of British Studies has accepted my article, ‘The phantom airship panic of 1913: imagining aerial warfare in Britain before the Great War’, for publication. This is exciting for a number of reasons. Naturally, one reason is because it’s another peer-reviewed article (number six, by my count). That’s
This photograph purportedly shows a squadron of Italian Savoia-Marchetti S.55X flying boats over the Alps on 1 July 1933, during the second and last of the long-distance formation flights led by the Fascist air minister, Italo Balbo (hence ‘balbo‘, briefly in vogue to describe a large formation of aircraft), Rome to Chicago and back. These
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
