[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] It’s been a good year for reading military history, but then it always is. If I had to recommend one military history book I’ve read this year it would be David Stevenson’s With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London: Penguin, 2012). Stevenson’s previous […]
With war comes confusion, and with confusion comes a need for clarity. So it was with simple, determined messages like this that the National Office of Information kept the undersieged civilians of Britain in a robust frame of mind during the teething pains of the Second World War. The language may be arcane, but the
The XXIII Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History will be held at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in July 2013, and I’ll be presenting a paper with the following title and abstract: ‘What are the Germans up to?’ The British phantom airship scare of 1913 In late 1912 and early 1913,
It was less than two months ago that my peer-reviewed article ‘The shadow of the airliner: commercial bombers and the rhetorical destruction of Britain, 1917-1935’ was accepted by Twentieth Century British History, but it’s already available online, thanks to the journal’s advance access policy. (So while the article has been typeset, the page numbers are
There’s been a huge amount of interest on Twitter and in the media about the new Bomb Sight website, developed by the University of Portsmouth with assistance from the National Archives and elsewhere, and deservedly so because it’s fairly excellent. In short it’s an interactive map of the London Blitz compiled from a number of
Christopher Clark. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. London: Allen Lane, 2012. Who doesn’t need another book on the origins of the First World War? Not me! This particular one focuses on the Balkan quagmire and its role in Great Power politics. Unlike some other recent interpretations (such as William Mulligan’s), Clark
[The views stated here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Society for Military History or the Journal of Military History. Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] While they only apply to journals published in the UK, the recommendations of the recent Finch Report on open access
I may be the only person now living to have read all three of Hamish Blair’s novels, published in 1930 and 1931 — I’m certainly the only person on LibraryThing to own any at all.1 I wish I could say that the rest of you are missing out, but you’re really not: they are tedious
Peter J. Dean, ed. Australia 1942: In the Shadow of War (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013). A collection of essays originating in a Military History and Heritage Victoria conference held in Melbourne earlier this year, which I’m now regretting not having attended. There are contributions on the Australia-Japan relationship before the Second World War
Over at The Appendix, ‘a new journal of narrative & experimental history’ to which you can subscribe, Felipe Fernandes Cruz has reproduced some intriguing declassified US documents from the early 1940s concerning rumours of clandestine German airfields in Brazil. The reason for the US interest in any evidence of German activity in South America, apart
