Publications

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Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis

After knocking together The Scareship Age, I started working on turning my Sudeten crisis posts into an e-book version. I knew there'd be a fair amount of work, but I underestimated the value of 'fair'. Finding and cleaning up formatting errors is a very slow and tedious business, as is creating an index (though it helped to have done a PDF version already). Anyway, the EPUB and MOBI versions of Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis: The British Press, August-October 1938 are now available from the downloads page.

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The Scareship Age, 1892-1946

A couple of months ago, Alun Salt did a very nice thing for me: he unexpectedly assembled some of the posts I've written here about phantom airships into an e-book. Using that as the basis, I've had a go at learning how to do e-books myself. (Alun recommended using Jutoh, an e-book project manager, and I'm glad he did.) So I've tweaked things a bit; added a few of the recent phantom airship posts I've written recently, played with the cover image, and the result is The Scareship Age, 1892-1946, available in the two most common e-book formats: EPUB, an open format, and MOBI, the format used by Amazon's Kindle. You can download them here, from the Downloads page, or from the sidebar on Airminded's front page. They are of course free, as in Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.

I have tried this sort of thing before, with my Sudeten crisis posts, but that was as a PDF which is not really suited for e-books; and with all the images it turned out to be quite bloated at 5.6 Mb. The Scareship Age comes in at 0.5 Mb for the EPUB and 0.9 Mb for the MOBI, which is much better. Now that I have a better idea about how e-books work, I'll have another go at the Sudeten crisis. But not now!

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Flightpath, vol 22 no 4

I have an article in the May 2011 issue of Flightpath, an Australian warbirds magazine. It's on one of my pet interests, the fear of the commercial bomber between the wars. James Kightly, who will be familiar to regular commenters here as JDK, contributes a complementary look at the reality of transport-bomber conversions. There are many other articles of interest, including one on Tiger Force (also by James), along with some glorious photographs, so get into it! It's available in all good newsagents in Australia and New Zealand, and I suspect really, really good ones overseas.

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BBC History Magazine, September 2010

I haven't seen it yet but the September 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine (out now in the UK, probably in a couple of months in Australia) should have an article of mine in it. It's not quite the cover story but is one of several articles on the Battle of Britain. Mine looks at how British civilians at the time perceived the Battle -- meaning not just the daylight operations but the start of the Blitz and the threat of seaborne invasion. It's the first time I've been commissioned to write on a particular topic and I quite enjoyed the experience. Hopefully readers of BBC History Magazine will enjoy reading the result!

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I've put the series of posts I did a couple of years ago on the Sudeten crisis into one big PDF file called, rather grandiosely, Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis: The British Press, August-October 1938 (147 pages, 5.6 Mb). It's freely available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. It's very bloggy in style, but I've also added a basic index and put in internal links between the chapters (posts). My Sudeten posts are probably the best thing I've done with this blog, and they've been linked to from a few educational sites as well as Wikipedia. So by putting them into this format I hope they'll be made accessible to a wider audience. (I've been inspired in this by the work Evangeline Holland has been doing over at Edwardian Promenade.)

The conversion was done using a nifty tool called WPTEX. This is some PHP which hooks into WordPress's functions and reads out and formats your posts into LaTeX format. It didn't quite do what I wanted but with some PHP and LaTeX hackery I think it turned out pretty nice in the end.

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I've just had another article accepted, this time by the Journal of Contemporary History: 'The air panic of 1935: British press opinion between disarmament and rearmament' (the panic in question being over the creation of the Luftwaffe). It should appear in early 2011. And it was a difficult article, actually. I originally carved it out of two chapters of my thesis, with a 'theoretical' part and 1935 as a case study. But while the referees thought it had merit overall, they weren't convinced by the theory and thought the case study too weak. So I decided to ditch the theory, do some more research and focus on the 1935 air panic. I spent most of the summer rewriting it, and luckily it's paid off! Although I'm allowed to put a pre-peer review copy on the web, I've decided not to because it has very little in common with the final version. But I'm sure the world can wait to read it!

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I'm pleased to announce that my first paper has been accepted for publication, by War in History. It's about the international air force idea and is entitled 'World police for world peace: British internationalism and the threat of a knock-out blow from the air, 1919-1945'. It won't actually appear for some time, but under the terms of the publishing agreement I'm allowed to make the originally-submitted version (i.e. before peer review) available for download. It can be found from my publications page.

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Last year I wrote a post in which I tried to work out the identity of Neon, the author of an eccentric but popular diatribe against aviation entitled The Great Delusion (1928). I concluded it was 'probably' Bernard Acworth, and not his third cousin (by marriage) Marion Acworth, as is usually suggested. Giles Camplin kindly offered to reprint my post in Dirigible, the journal of the Airship Heritage Trust which he edits. I took the opportunity to do some more research and reflection, which just confused the issue! To cut a long story short, I still think Bernard was Neon, but suggest that Marion did have input to or at least influence on The Great Delusion. And if you do want the long story, see the Summer 2009 edition of Dirigible!

Not surprisingly, there are a number of articles on interesting subjects in this issue: an obscure airship built in Staffordshire in 1909 by a Mr Deakin; the almost-equally-obscure story of the Britannia Airship Committee, an attempt to fund and build a rigid airship for the Navy in 1913-4; Zeppelin raids on England; sound detectors of the north-east coast; and more! Well worth a read.

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Earlier this year, I mentioned that I had joined the editorial collective of Melbourne Historical Journal. Well, against all odds (or so it seemed at times!) we produced what I think is a pretty good issue. Lynette Russell graciously launched it this evening at the Re-orienting Whiteness conference, and it's now available for purchase. (Or if you can somehow restrain yourself for the moment, and you have access, it will be available on Expanded Academic ASAP in due course.)

Here's the table of contents:

Features: The Historical Significance of the Apology to the Stolen Generations

Duplicity and Deceit: Gary Foley’s Take on Rudd’s Apology to the Stolen Generations

Apologising for Stolen Time
By Chris Healy

The Apology & the Man at the Funeral
By Robert Kenny

Articles

New Perspectives on the Past: YouTube, Web 2.0 and Public History
By Megan Sheehy

'Lest We Forget': Creating an Australian National Identity from Memories of War
By Clemence Due

Babeuf and the Gracchi: A Comparison of Means and Ends
By Peter Russell

There's also a range of book (and exhibition) reviews, including one by me, of Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War, by Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007) and The Battle of Britain on Screen: 'The Few' in British Film and Television Drama, by S. P. MacKenzie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Don't buy it on that account, though -- in fact I can sum up my conclusions as follows: they're both excellent, though Britain Can Take It probably isn't worthwhile if you've got the previous edition.

Editing the journal was a great experience, and I think helped me with my own writing. Good luck to next year's collective!

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I've got an article in the current (November 2008) issue of Fortean Times (named, of course, after Charles Fort). It's not at all airminded, it's not really historical either -- it has more to do with my shady astrophysicist past. It's about the famous Betty and Barney Hill abduction incident in New Hampshire in 1961 -- that's alien abduction, supposedly. In a hypnosis session a couple years later, Betty recalled being shown a star map on board her abductor's craft, supposedly of nearby space. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish used the latest astronomical data in a prodigious effort to match the map to real stars near the Sun. And eventually she found a good match, which has been touted by some ufologists as scientific proof of the reality of alien visitation, possibly from Zeta Reticuli.

Except that nobody ever checked Fish's model against new astronomical data gathered over the last three decades, in particular the parallax observations made by the Hipparcos satellite in the early 1990s. When you do this, the Fish interpretation falls to pieces! Using her own assumptions and the new data, six of the fifteen stars chosen by Fish must be excluded, which is no match at all. And that's what my article is about. So I think this makes me, officially, a dirty debunker. Or maybe a noisy negativist.

I have an erratum: a footnote I added late in the editing process didn't make it through. It should have come after the word 'collapse' in the fifth sentence in the last column on page 51:

Since writing the above, I have been made aware of an unpublished and thorough analysis of the Fish interpretation by Charles Huffer of MUFON, which also uses Hipparcos data to reach conclusions similar to mine.

Anyway, I promise there will be some aeroplaney stuff soon :)