No sooner is one conference over than another one looms. The one which is over is the Australian Historical Association annual conference for 2014, which was held last week at the beautiful St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland. I spoke on the topic of invasion, Zeppelin and spy scares in Britain during the […]
Alison Bashford. Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. This was launched at the Australian Historical Association conference this week and looked like fun — an intellectual history of eugenics, birth control, food supply and, of course, world population, from the 1920s to the 1960s — so I
Free books! The Earl of Avon. The Eden Memoirs: Full Circle. London: Cassell, 1960. I already have the volume of Eden’s memoirs covering his life up until 1938, so it’s nice to complete the set. This one covers his postwar career; it’s interesting to note that it was actually published first, out of chronological order,
So my book is a thing that now exists. But although it was formally published on 18 June, many online bookstores have waited until today to actually ship it. (I recommend using Booko to find the cheapest prices, or you can get a 10% discount by ordering directly from Ashgate.) To mark this auspicious day,
The New Zealand government, despite its lack of a homegrown air arm, was little inclined to get involved in the Imperial Aircraft Flotilla. Even though a local Over-Seas Club president happened to have a seat in Cabinet, official participation was largely confined to forwarding money collected by New Zealand individuals and organisations to the Over-Seas
As of May 1916, the Imperial Aircraft Flotilla consisted of 91 machines purchased with funds donated by Britons overseas, 69 for the RFC and 22 for the RNAS. The RFC donations were organised through the Over-Seas Club — £1500 for a B.E.2c and £2250 for a Vickers F.B.5 — and were as follows.1 The Imperial
Brett Holman. The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. :D
We are familiar enough with the Spitfire Funds of the Second World War, in which patriotic individuals and groups could buy aircraft for the nation. There was a fair amount of precedent for this. In the early 1930s, Lady Houston more than once offered the government hundreds of thousands of pounds for air defence, though
Eric Hobsbawm. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991. London: Abacus, 1995. I’ve just been rereading Hobsbawm’s trilogy on the long 19th century, and realised I hadn’t read his book on the short 20th century, and so here we are.
With my book’s publication imminent and my return to the job market beginning to, if not loom, then at least creep up, it’s time to think about what’s next in terms of a research programme. I had been thinking of something to do with mystery aircraft, and indeed my next small research project, on scares
