Joan Beaumont. Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2013. With the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War looming, it’s high time we had a book like this: a synoptic overview of the whole of Australia’s war, from the fighting overseas to the conflicts at home, from […]
As I discussed recently, Philip Sabin’s Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012) is primarily about using wargames to understand past wars. This is sensible; apart from the obvious benefit of helping us to understand history better, there’s also the useful featurethat there are some facts to go on
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] If I had to recommend one military history book I’ve read this year it would be Philip Sabin’s Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012). Admittedly, this is not your usual military history book. Sabin ranges at will from the 5th century
While archival research can be slim pickings, I suspect that this may not be such a problem for my Great War panics project, given that on my recent trip the UK I found some really good examples without even trying. The following is an excerpt from a letter dated 7 June 1915, sent to the
I’ve been awarded a small grant by the University of New England to fund research into ‘Popular perceptions of the German threat in Britain, 1914-1918’. I’m very fortunate to have received this and very grateful. The basic idea is this: This project will investigate the British public’s reaction to the threat of German attack during
Now that I’m back home, it’s time to sum up what my UK sojourn achieved. The short answer, at least in terms of my immediate research objectives, is that it yielded only mediocre results. The ostensible purpose for the trip was to attend the Empire in Peril workshop at Queen Mary and to give a
Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eds. An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. Sometimes the origin of the First World War seems overdetermined, there are so many theories to account for it. Other times, it seems like, as in the
This must be about the strangest image to have ever appeared on this blog. How to explain it? First of all, it was published in Review of Reviews, May 1913, 457, accompanying the second part of a two-part article by Count Zeppelin on ‘The conquest of the air’. However, apart from the obvious aviation theme
Karl Baedeker. Great Britain: Handbook for Travellers. Old House, 2013 [1937]. As I said, I’m a sucker for facsimile editions, and this one has many nice foldout maps. As the cover doesn’t fail to tell you, this is the version supposedly used by the Luftwaffe to plan the Baedeker raids. At any rate, if you
C. G. G. [C. G. Grey], ‘A real aerial defence’, Aeroplane, 12 June 1913, 670: It has been brought to our attention — it comes from the City, so it must be true — that Britain has at last acquired a real means of enforcing the Aerial Navigation Act. It is alleged that a great
