Jarrow, a shipbuilding town on the Tyne opposite Newcastle, was attacked from the air on the morning of 19 February 1938. Or rather, its inhabitants thought so, briefly.
This poem took up about an eighth of page 3 of the 9 August 1918 edition of the Perth WA Sportsman, preaching revenge on Germany for its air raids on Britain (the last of which, until the next war at least, had just taken place). It’s prefaced by a claim that ‘the Allies expect to
Exactly six months ago today, I posted about some aerial theatre in the time of coronavirus. That was the first time I mentioned the pandemic on Airminded, and it is, of course, still here (Victoria is — hopefully — nearing the end of its second wave, with 42 new cases reported today, down from a
Here’s my contribution to last night’s livetweet of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow for #HATMAus. It was fast, furious and not always particularly accurate — much like the film itself… Spoilers follow (though equally there are also a lot of tweets that don’t make sense without seeing what was on the screen at
At 8pm AEST/GMT+10 this Sunday, 30 August 2020, I’m co-hosting the Australian version of Historians At The Movies (#HATMAus) along with fellow historians Joel Barnes and Chelsea Barnett as we livetweet the 2004 science fiction film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and dissect it for fun and (alternate) history. With an all-star star
https://twitter.com/Airminded/status/1288659222431817729?s=20 I’ve made a new Trove bot to accompany @TroveAirBot and @TroveAirRaidBot: @TroveUFOBot. The name is somewhat misleading, since it doesn’t search Trove Newspapers for the keyword ‘UFO’ at all, which turns out to be a bad keyword. Firstly, it’s so short that it frequently turns up whenever the OCR is bad and a random
A few months back I wrote about alternatives to the (still missing, still missed) FlightGlobal archive of Flight magazine, a key source for aviation history (for me, anyway). I forgot to mention that Flight‘s great rival, The Aeroplane (founded and edited by the egregious C. G. Grey), is also partially accessible through the Internet Archive.
The ‘flight’ — The machine reached the edge of the slope, shot out a few yards into the air with the impetus it had acquired, and then dropped with a crash onto the rocks.1 I am very nearly done with N. R. Gordon, who built at least five completely unsuccessful flying machines over a period
Alexander Rose. Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World. New York: Random House, 2020. The two men of the title both led a great aviation enterprise. Both dreamed of spanning the world with their passenger aircraft. Both struggled at times, and prospered at others. But one was
