Catherine Warr, a Yorkshire-based historian, recently posted a video on the British phantom airship panic of 1909 which you can watch on YouTube, or right here: This is terrific public history: engaging and fun while being informative and accurate. Catherine has dozens more videos on her channel, including a bunch of airminded ones (e.g. British airships; […]
A cloud of smoke billows up from a building during a low level bombing attack carried out by biplanes. The First World War? Air control in the Middle East? Fascist bombers over Spain, or Japanese bombers over China? No, it’s an air raid carried out by the RAF against Nottingham on 15 May 1938. Of
A few weeks back I previewed my cohosting of the 1943 Disney film Victory Through Air Power for History at the Movies Australia and Aviation Cultures Mk.V. Both the conference and the livetweeting went splendidly (I think!), but I didn’t get around to lazyblogging the latter… until now. The evening began with the half-hour short
This stirring scene is the cover for the sheet music for a song published in 1913, Britannia Must Rule the Air, written by Frank Duprée and composed by Charles Ashley. It shows a reasonable (if stubby) approximation of a Zeppelin in the process of being destroyed by gunfire from two aeroplanes, a Farman-type biplane and
Since last I posted, COVID-19 has continued its spread: the Guardian is currently reporting 378,000 cases worldwide, 16,500 deaths, and 101,000 recoveries. (I post these figures not so much for the information of anyone reading at the present time, but more as context for future readers.) Like most people, I think, I’m coping: healthy, but
[With apologies to Gabriel García Márquez and Ben Wilkie.] It’s not that long ago that I was posting about the Australian bushfires; now it’s the turn of the coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s worldwide. Social media is an essential tool in such times of crisis, but it also can be a misleading one. Here’s
Last Friday I was privileged to be at the Airways Museum for the world premiere of Out of the Blue? How Aviation Accidents Shaped Safer Skies: Centred on accidents in the vicinity of Sydney’s Mascot Aerodrome, this movie outlines developments in Australian aviation safety from the 1920s to the 1970s. It combines original research, interviews,
From the climactic set-piece at the 1927 RAF Display at Hendon, the destruction of an ‘Eastern village’ by Fairey Foxes — in GIF form:
In two weeks from today I’ll be leaving Armidale for good, and heading back to Melbourne, my hometown. It’s mostly for excellent personal reasons, but in part it’s also because of the usual early-career academic story of precarious employment. My colleagues at the University of New England have supported me as much they could, but
What could be more American than football, cheerleaders, and country music? According to Hank Williams Jr in 1989 [edit: more like 1996 — thanks, Robert Farley], only football, cheerleaders, country music, and air strikes on US national monuments (which magically transform them into symbols associated with football):
