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 […]
Alan Allport. Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939-1945. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Alan’s –– since he’s a longtime friend of this blog I feel justified in the slight informality — last book looked at what happened to the British soldier when he went home after the Second
An Australian view of the 1913 phantom airship scare in Britain, from the Sydney Globe, 8 March 1913, p. 7: A scare was created in England last week by the reported appearance of a mysterious airship at night over the East Coast. Two residents of Ipswich separately saw the searchlight of the airship, and one
David Clarke. How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth. London: Aurum Press, 2015. Clarke is a journalist and academic who has also worked with the National Archives on the declassification of Britain’s official UFO files. Here he takes a wider view, providing a social history of ufology (a subject he has
The Australasian Association for European History is, by widespread acclaim, the best conference series ever, and so I’m pleased to report that I will be speaking at the next one, to be held in July at the University of Newcastle. The title of my talk is ‘Zeppelinitis: constructing the German aerial threat to Britain, 1912-16’,
Blaine R. Pardoe. Never Wars: The US Plans to Invade the World. Fonthill: 2014. NB: ‘Plans’ is a noun, not a verb! This is a summary and analysis of various war plans made by the United States between the 1900s and the 1940s, from the Azores to Mexico. Two versions of War Plan Red, war
At 10:45am on 25 April 2015, a RAAF Hornet (possibly a Super Hornet) flew 500 feet over my house. Ordinarily my response to something like this would be: COOL. But this day was a bit different, because it was, of course, Anzac Day; and not just any Anzac Day, but the long-anticipated centenary of the
For my twelfth (and last?) contribution to ABC New England’s Road to War series, I spoke about what was undoubtedly the most important battle to take place in late April 1915, the Second Battle of Ypres in Flanders. The reason why this was so important is because it opened with the first successful, large-scale poison
David Payne sent me this great photograph of Malaya XV Cheon Teong, Ngoh Bee, a B.E.2c which was donated to the British war effort as part of the Imperial Aircraft Flotilla I blogged about last year. David’s grandfather, Arthur Chapman, is in the cockpit; he was an engineer at Shorts on the Isle of Sheppey,
In my eleventh contribution to ABC New England’s Road to War series, I took another look at how the economic war at sea was working out. My particular focus this week was the sinking of the Dutch freighter Medea (above), the first neutral casualty of Germany’s unrestricted U-boat campaign. I also discussed the difficult position
