Airminded was down for a couple of days recently, and it now has a new look. The reason for this is that it was hacked, and nuking the entire site from orbit was the only way to be sure. To be more specific, I noticed last week that Google searches for Airminded were throwing up […]
… are all very far away. But for now, there’s a nice write-up by Emma McFarnon of my commercial bomber research in the news section of History Extra, the website for BBC History Magazine.
So, I want to construct a knock-out blow wargame. In my PhD/book, I define an ideal knock-out blow from the air as having six key characteristics. Three of these describe the attack itself: surprise, scale, and speed. Three describe what it destroyed: infrastructure, morale, and civilisation itself. Starting with the attack, as this will define
Joanna Bourke. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. A now-classic gender analysis of the impact of the First World War on masculinity — mostly in social and cultural terms, but the first chapter is entitled ‘Mutilating’ so sometimes the impact is quite literal. Other topics
This is the poster produced by the Navy League in 1913 as a key part of its campaign to force the government to increase the amount it spent on military and naval aviation — or as the poster itself puts it, rather more succinctly: THE NAVY LEAGUE DEMANDS £1,000,000. FOR AERIAL DEFENCE BRITONS WAKE UP!
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
