…irst: Pemberton Billing’s short-lived Aerocraft has that honour). I’ve actually already looked at Flight, which is available at the SLV, so I would rather have had the harder-to-find Aeroplane put online instead; but Australian holdings of the early issues of Flight are fragmentary so this is good too. There are no charges for access, at least for now, which is surprising (and welcome). No indications that this will change in future, but it would…
…University of Newcastle, 14-17 July 2015. ‘Scares, spectacles and the aerial apocalypse: reflections on research’, Aviation Cultures: Science, Technology and People, University of Sydney, 27 February 2015. ‘Folk strategy, Maubeuge platforms and Zeppelin bases in Britain, autumn, 1914’, New Research in Military History: A Conference for Postgraduate and Early Career Historians, University of Wolverhampton, 22 November 2014. ‘The Australian mystery…
…erp – does it undermine my point or support it? Gavin? *NB – I know essentially sod all about this, so I’m just guessing and please don’t hold it against me. But I’d like to be corrected if I have the wrong idea. Chris Williams Blimey, that previous post is not half full of typos Para 1 ln 1 for ‘Hang’ read ‘Hang on’ ln 1 for ‘your’ read ‘yr’ ln 4 for ‘with’ read ‘which’ ln 5 for ‘buidings’ read ‘buildings’ Para 3 ln 1 for ‘Compare’ read ‘Given’ l…
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 Bombsights: British Bombing in World War I, William Edward Fischer’s The Development of Military Night…
…link is here.They clearly don’t like static, human-readable URIs at Imperial College, so if the above links don’t work, try going through the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine home page. This is good to see; it’s an important book for my area of study (though I already have a copy of my own, natch!) and one of the few to try to step back and see the bigger picture of how the aeroplane fits into English society, culture, p…
…rom the 1920s.) Finding this inspired me to do a bit of a search for other online historical maps of Britain which similarly attempt to cover the whole country. (There’s a useful list of out-of-copyright maps here.) Old-maps.co.uk has been around a while and uses OS maps from the late 19th century. Vision of Britain (which site has lots of historical statistics which you can slice various ways, and which I must explore more thoroughly one day) is…
…. Churchill (by private notice), Mr. Churchill (Stretford) and so on. It’s all experimental at this stage, so these issues will presumably be addressed in future. (LibraryThing lets its users do a lot of the work for similar problems, but I doubt a HansardThing would ever reach the critical mass needed for that to work.) But in it’s current form, it’s easy to use and is laid out in an admirably clear and uncluttered fashion. The little histograms…
…the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), which now has a very helpful list of all newspapers they have along with the range of years available. But I’ve noticed that those ranges are misleading because the years in between the start and end dates have not necessarily all been digitised. So the BNA describes Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser, one of the new titles, as being available for the years 1833 to 1949. But the only years actually availa…
…ll be fatal to Christian civilisation, the one hope we have is that the Powers may be gradually brought together to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world as a result of their great strength a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace. Source: Lord Lytton, BBC Empire Service broadcast…
…August’, its growth will be ‘enormously accelerated’ over the next year.He also revealed the existence of two new British aeroplanes, the Beaufighter, ‘for long-range fighter operations and for night-fighting’, and the Halifax bomber, which joins the Stirling and the Manchester as Britain’s heavy bombers: All three of these have already proved their worth, the first [Stirling] against enemy targets. Bomber Command has so far conducted 300 raids on…
