Periodicals

1900s, 1930s, Books, Periodicals

Winged gospels

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] I’ve been reading Joseph Corn’s The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950, a classic study of airminded culture in the United States — which was very different to that in Britain. The “winged gospel” is the term used by Corn to describe an intense complex of hopes and expectations […]

Games and simulations, Periodicals

Thanks for playing

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Niall Ferguson has an article out in the New York Magazine, on the use of computer wargames in learning about history and strategy. (Via ClioWeb). It’s a frustrating piece. As a sometime wargamer myself, I do agree with him that they can have their uses. But I think he fundamentally,

Books, Periodicals

Stop me if I’m boring you

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Recently, I read a book review which has left me scratching my head. It’s by Trevor Wilson (English Historical Review, 71 (2006), 629-31) and is about, among other books, K. W. Mitchinson, Defending Albion: Britain’s Home Army, 1908-1919 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) — according to the publisher, ‘the first published

1940s, Periodicals

Score Zero

Regarding the Japanese Air Force, which many people, he said, were inclined to discount as a second-rate body equipped with obsolete aircraft and lacking skillful and daring pilots, Air Vice-Marshal Pulford said that he certainly does not underrate its capacity. When it was suggested to him that it might be compared with the Italian Air

1930s, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Radio, Space

From Munich to the planet Mars

There’s an interesting article on the rise of radio news in the United States in the late 1930s, in the February 2006 issue of History Today: “On the right wavelength” by David Culbert. One thing I learned from this article was that it was the Munich crisis in September 1938 which made radio news reporting

1910s, Periodicals, Words

The first knock-out blow?

Currently, I’m tracing the evolution of the idea of the knock-out blow, the massive aerial bombardment that could knock a country out of the war. Though the idea intself has earlier antecedents, the first use of the phrase itself in this context that I’ve found so far is this, in a well-known (at least to

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