I’m giving a talk next Wednesday as part of the History Department’s Work In Progress Day, and that’s the title I would have given it, had I been the least bit imaginative the day I wrote the abstract. Instead I have a nothing title (“Airpower and British society: plans and progress”), and to go along […]
P. R. C. Groves explains why, in his view, Britain in the early 1930s was possessed by a ‘national defeatism’, namely the idea that war was immoral and should be banned, and the nations disarmed: The origins of the malady may be summarized as: the Voluntary System, the Somme and Passchendaele. The sacrifice of the
John Feather. A History of British Publishing. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 2nd edition. Most of my primary sources, so far, are books; this will help me understand the economics and the ideologies of the book publishing industry. Corey Robin. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
Welcome to History Carnival 31! Mr Wells’ celebrated Time Traveller voyaged into the distant future, but we will have the levers on our time machine set firmly in the reverse position — less chance of running into a Morlock that way. To help us navigate the currents and eddies of the historical ether, we read
It’s 80 years to the day since the end of the 1926 General Strike, which lasted just nine days. It had long been anticipated or feared (depending on ideology) as the precursor to a socialist revolution, on the 1917 Bolshevik model, but this turned out not to be the case. It was begun, in somewhat
I have been finishing off a long-ish post that I’ve been meaning to write for a while, but now I don’t think I will post it. This is because I came to realise that it’s actually stuff I want to write about more formally at some stage, in my thesis or in a paper. Generally
Airminded is hosting the 31st History Carnival on 15 May, a week from today! I already have a good number of nominations, but I need more. Please send your suggestions for the best recent posts in the historioblogosphere to me by way of the form, or drop me a line through the contact page. And
Air University Press, the publishing arm of the USAF‘s Air University, has most of its books available in PDF format for free download. As one might expect, the subject matter is mostly American and recent, but some are on-topic for me, including Williamson Murray’s Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe, 1933-1945, George K. Williams’ Biplanes and
Stephen Dorril. Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism. London: Viking, 2006. I’m always up for books on British fascism. This one is perhaps aiming to do a Kershaw — a sort of history of the BUF through a biography of its leader. ‘[I]mportant and controversial’, according to the blurb. Medical Manual of Chemical Warfare.
This is my reading list for the next month or so, all from the period 1932-1941. After that, I’ll be back at the State Library to read some more. There’s about twice as many books as there were for the preceding period (1917-1931), though not all of these will turn out to be of great
