Robert Graves. Goodbye to All That. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960 [1929]. Another of the classic war books, that I should already have read. David Powell. The Edwardian Crisis: Britain, 1901-1914. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 1996. New books about Edwardian Britain are pretty thin on the ground (over here, anyway) so I got excited when I […]
Orac at Respectful Insolence has called attention to the attempted arson attack on The Holocaust History Project, and called for other bloggers to link to the THHP home page as a show of solidarity. There’s no proof as yet, but the suspicion is that Holocaust deniers are responsible. Holocaust denial is pseudohistory, a pathological and
There’s an interesting article on the rise of radio news in the United States in the late 1930s, in the February 2006 issue of History Today: “On the right wavelength” by David Culbert. One thing I learned from this article was that it was the Munich crisis in September 1938 which made radio news reporting
Yesterday was the 63rd anniversary of the Bethnal Green Tube disaster. On the evening of 3 March 1943, 173 people — men, women and children — died at the Bethnal Green Tube station, the greatest loss of life of any single incident during the German bombing campaign against Britain. The tragedy took place during an
A most interesting query and ensuing discussion over on the H-War mailing list, about the so-called “Cuzaux effect”, which I haven’t heard of before: In short, [the Cuzaux effect] is the side ways deviation of a projectile trajectory when fired from a weapon in motion. In the late 1930’s, according to the article, it was
A new addition to the historioblogosphere — and one very close to my own interests! It’s called The Blogger will always get through… and is the work of the indefatigable Peter Hibbs, who runs the amazingly exhaustive and informative NBCD (Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defence) site, primarily (but not exclusively) covering Britain in the era
A few months back, I posted about my decision to use LaTeX for writing my thesis, in preference to Word or something of that ilk. I seem to get a few Google hits from other people interested in using LaTeX in the humanities, so I will occasionally post useful things I’ve gleaned, even though it
In his comment on my previous post, Alex mentions the “bolt from the blue” strategy as possibly related to the knock-out blow that is my current obsession (and he’s right, in my opinion). My reply started to get long, so I decided to turn it into a post instead … In Edwardian debates about the
Currently, I’m tracing the evolution of the idea of the knock-out blow, the massive aerial bombardment that could knock a country out of the war. Though the idea intself has earlier antecedents, the first use of the phrase itself in this context that I’ve found so far is this, in a well-known (at least to
A report from the 14th annual conference of the National Federation of Hairdressers, which opened at Blackpool on 31 May 1915: A Swansea delegate said the trouble was not now. The trouble would be when the war was over, because men who had enlisted would have been trained to shave themselves. The result would be
