Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics

1910s, Australia, Books, Nyang Week, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Publications

Self-archive: ‘The enemy at the gates’

In 2016 I contributed a chapter on the 1918 mystery aeroplane panic to Australia and the Great War: Identity, Memory and Mythology, an edited collection published by Melbourne University Press. While I’d already published a peer-reviewed article on the same topic, this was broader in scope as it attempted to provide a transnational narrative and […]

1930s, 1940s, Books, Civil defence, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Rumours

Air panics of the British Raj

As long-time (and very patient) readers of this blog will know, I am fascinated by the historical evidence for what I term air panics. Most obviously this includes phantom airship and mystery aeroplane panics, but also rearmament panics, Zeppelin base panics, red balloon panics… anything and everything which provides evidence for what the British people

British Journal for Military History
1910s, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Publications, Rumours

Publication: ‘Constructing the enemy within’

The latest issue of the British Journal for Military History is out, and with it my peer-reviewed article ‘Constructing the enemy within: rumours of secret gun platforms and Zeppelin bases in Britain, August-October 1914’: This article explores the false rumours of secret German gun platforms and Zeppelin bases which swept Britain in the early months

Portable airship hangar, Farnborough
1910s, Air control, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Travel 2013

The portable airship hangar at Farnborough

Exactly three years ago I was visiting the National Aerospace Library at Farnborough, the historic home of British military aviation going back to 1904 through the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Cody’s first flight, and the Army’s Balloon Factory. The site now seems to consist largely of a series of business parks — though the famous air

1910s, Books, Conferences and talks, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Publications, Videos

Seminar: ‘First World War Studies @ UNE’

On Remembrance Day, 11 November 2016, I was privileged to be part of a joint seminar with Dr Richard Scully and Dr Nathan Wise, highlighting the teaching and research we do around the topic of the First World War (Richard is the author of British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860-1914, Nathan of

White Australia and the Empty North (1909)
1900s, 1910s, Art, Australia, Ephemera, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Plays

Australia and the airship — IV

The previous post in this series was supposed to be the last. But in the course of taking two months to write it, I managed to forget about another, earlier association between a White Australia and an Australian airship. This one wasn’t a real airship; it was a fictional one which appeared in Randolph Bedford’s

zeppelin+rumour, daily, normalised, smoothed
1910s, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Plots and tables, Tools and methods

The airship panic of 1915 — VI

So I half-promised a final post in this series about the airship panic of 1915. There are a couple of methodological points I’d like to make. The first point is that this is an unusually well-attested panic. There are panics with more sources, but not with so many different kinds of sources. Here, there are

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