‘Everybody’s Doing It’ was the name of a popular revue which opened in the West End in February 1912; the music and lyrics (including a near-eponymous song) were co-written by Irving Berlin. It was also the Manchester Guardian‘s stab at a contemporary pop cultural reference to describe just how widespread the phantom airship scare had […]
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] Despite appearing in the Times Literary Supplement a month ago, Eric Naiman’s astounding exposure of independent historian A. D. Harvey’s fraudulent scholarship seems to have been little remarked upon by historians. (Naiman’s piece is quite long, but worth the read; for a much shorter version try here.) Admittedly,
The planet Venus normally sticks close to the Sun and so can only be seen very shortly after sunset, to the west (or before sunrise, to the east, when it is a morning star). But every 584 days, when it reaches maximum elongation in its orbit, it is far enough from the Sun in apparent
View Scareships, 1913 in a larger map Here’s where the 1913 phantom airship sightings took place. Actually, there are a few from late 1912 (including the Sheerness incident), the blue ones. Red indicates sightings in January 1913, green February, cyan March, and yellow April. A quick visual inspection shows that the density of sightings was
Peter Bowler. Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2013. I figured I should put my money where my mouth is and at least buy this, and hopefully even read it. Bowler uses a counterfactual approach in an attempt to elucidate how important Darwin was to the development of
John Ptak recently pinned a 1964 science fiction magazine cover depicting a ruined Statue of Liberty, predating the more famous ending of Planet of the Apes by four years. He wondered about earlier images along the same lines, and after a bit of digging I found not many at all. The above is the only
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] Today is Anzac Day, the anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli of Australian (and New Zealand, though my remarks here mostly pertain to my own country) troops on 25 April 1915. In the last two decades Anzac day has increasingly been seen as marking the coming of age
Yesterday’s post was, thankfully, the last entry in my post-blogging of the 1913 phantom airship wave. I’ve searched the available (to me) primary sources up until the end of April 1913 and can find no further references; and Watson, Oldroyd and Clarke’s exhaustive compilation of phantom airship sightings has only 7 entries from May onwards.
A rather belated mystery airship report appears in today’s Aberdeen Daily Journal (p. 4): It was reported a few days ago that on the evening of the 9th April [1913] an airship, steering north-west, was seen from the island of Stronsay, Orkney. Doubt was felt at the time as to the reliability of the report,
The Economist follows up last week’s third leading article about the airship scare with the fourth leading article today (an extract from which also appears in the Manchester Guardian). This time around the subject is ‘THE “DAILY MAIL’S” MANSION HOUSE MEETING FOR AIRSHIPS’ (925), which is planned for 5 May and will feature speeches by
