[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 […]
Field Marshal Jan Smuts, prime minister of South Africa, broadcast a speech on the BBC on 29 September 1946. He talked about the prospects for peace in the post-war world, a subject on which he could claim some authority, since he had helped unify Anglophones and Afrikaners after the Boer War, and was involved in
I’ve just had a go at working out who held the influential position of aeronautical correspondent (or air correspondent, in later years) for The Times for its first third of a century or so. No names were used in the articles themselves, so the easiest way to find them seems to be through the obituary
Cardiff Castle was just the first of many Welsh fortresses I visited. In fact, the next day I was at two more: Caerleon, a Roman legionary headquarters, and Caerphilly Castle, the second-largest castle in Britain.
So we’ve seen American claims of a British secret air defence weapon in the Battle of Britain; American claims of British secret air defence weapons in the mid-1930s; and American ideas for superweapons to break the deadlock of the First World War. What do I mean suggest by these examples? Why have I called these
The Electrical Experimenter was an American science magazine, founded and edited by Hugo Gernsback. These covers were published during the First World War, and illustrate ways in which science could be used to create new weapons and new defences. Many of them are just a little far-fetched, such as the land ironclad shown above.
Peter J. Bowler. Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009. How and what the public learned about science was important in an age of technological warfare, and this has a decent number of entries in the index under ‘military applications of science’. Tom Buchanan.
All of a sudden, my time in Cornwall was over. But it was hard to feel too sad, because my next stop was Cardiff, capital of Wales (and, incidentally, scareship central). Cardiff is perhaps not as pretty as the places I’d seen in Cornwall, but it has plenty of culture which kept me occupied. And
… to nominate for the 2009 Cliopatria Awards for history blogging! There are six categories: Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. Nominations close at the end of November.
In June 1935, the Daily Express ran a story about three ‘secret British air devices’. The source was a story in the Chicago Tribune by that paper’s London correspondent, John Steele: The devices are declared to be a new “mirage” smoke screen, a new seventeen-foot long anti-aircraft rifle, and a robot airplane which, controlled by
