[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 15 May 2013. I’ve come up with some absolutely terrible titles for Airminded posts, but I like this one very much.] Roland Garros is today mainly known for having given his name to the home of French tennis. But long before then he was […]
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 31 August 2011. This is one of a number of posts from Airminded’s 7th year making an interesting or original point which probably deserve a wider audience somehow, but which either fall a bit outside my comfort zone or aren’t quite big enough for
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 3 March 2011. Sometimes, blogging takes time. Which reminds me, there are at least two posts I need to finish writing… one day.] A recent comment by J Campbell raised the question of whether Nevil Shute’s 1949 novel No Highway was in fact a
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 25 April 2010. My first substantial, and I think still my most effective, critique of Anzac.] It’s Anzac Day once again. On Anzac Day, Australia remembers some things but forgets others. We remember the sacrifices of the original Anzacs at Gallipoli, but forget that
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 29 August 2008. This is the first post of my day-by-day blogging — postblogging — of the Sudeten (or Munich) crisis; the others can be found here. I was briefly a pioneer of this kind of thing, but it’s a pretty obvious idea which
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 17 May 2008. I reuse these visualisations of the Blitz and the knock-out blow from the air, especially the second one, all the time — they’re in my book and just this week I showed them in a lecture and a conference paper. So
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 22 December 2006. My first attempt to set out a scholarly justification of my fascination with mystery aircraft.] On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: ‘a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’1 of
[Part of a celebration of Airminded’s 10th anniversary; originally posted on 22 December 2005. Some people liked it, but Andy suggested that ‘Your a prat who likes to distort history and I bet you wear sandels Brainwashed little moron’.] I was in the bowels of the ERC library at Melbourne Uni the other day, scavenging
It’s 10 years to the day since I put up Airminded’s first post, imaginatively entitled ‘First post!’ That is a long time ago, a very long time in internet years. Still, Airminded wasn’t one of the first history blogs. In fact, Ralph Luker (of Cliopatria fame, alas long since retired from blogging) made a start
These are (lightly edited) topic notes I wrote for a unit I’m teaching into in a few weeks, HIST332/HIST432 History as Film. The basic format is that students watch a historical film chosen by an academic to fit a specific theme, who also gives a lecture and leads a seminar discussion on the film. My
