[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] I know. Writing about Wikipedia is so 2006. And yes, finding errors in Wikipedia articles is not exactly difficult. But I have a bee in my bonnet which needs releasing. Wikipedia’s page on the Blitz has a section entitled ‘Commencement on September 6’. This is how it currently reads (sans hyperlinks and […]
The word ‘reprisals’ popped up during my 1940 post-blogging quite frequently. After one post I had the idea of checking whether it could be used as an index of British attitudes towards the bombing of Germany throughout the rest of the war. The short answer is: not really. But it was still worth trying. With
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
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Since graduating I’ve become what they call an ‘independent scholar’, meaning I currently have no academic job but still have the irrational desire to do research. I’d certainly like to be a dependent scholar, but it turns out they don’t hand out jobs with your testamur.1 Who knew? So there are things
One quite inadequate response to the paywalling of bibliographies is to set up your own, which I’ve made a start at here. It’s a little narrower in focus than the RHS bibliography, being limited to works relating to the history of British aviation up to 1941 which I looked at in the course of my
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] The Royal Historical Society has for some years maintained an online bibliography of British and Irish history, updated three times a year. It currently has over 460,000 records. It’s a fantastic resource for scholars interested in any aspect of the history of the British Isles, not least because it’s free. But from
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Recently, I followed Gavin Robinson’s lead and tried out the British Library’s EThOS beta. EThOS stands for Electronic Theses (dissertations) Online Service, and it’s just what you’d expect from that — an electronic thesis delivery service. There’s not too much new about that, but EThOS does have some very impressive features. First
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell’s maps
Partly in lieu of the thing itself, but mainly just for fun, here are some word clouds of my thesis (generated with Wordle). So the above image shows the 75 most frequent words in the entire document, with the biggest word being the most common. (So it’s something to do with air and war and
A question about the phantom airship scares which has bothered me for a while is, how accurate are the press reports of people seeing something strange in the sky? That is, did people actually see something strange in the sky, or were the press reports made up or otherwise distorted? There is some evidence from
