I’m honoured to have been asked to be a member of the new Society for Military History Blog. The other members are Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bateman, Mark Grimsley, Jamel Ostwald, and Brian Sandberg. I’ve been involved in a couple of previous group blogs; this one is obviously more focused in topic (albeit ‘military history’ is […]
I’m pleased to say that Twentieth Century British History has accepted my article ‘The shadow of the airliner: commercial bombers and the rhetorical destruction of Britain, 1917-1935’ for publication. It should appear online by the end of the year and in print some time after that. Conceptually, though not really intentionally, this article links with
The phantom airships seen over Britain in the early months of 1913 had their counterparts in Europe. It’s hard to reconstruct what happened from the scattered references in English-language sources, but it seems that far fewer were seen than in Britain, even in toto. Here are the ones I’ve been able to find mentioned in
Today I attended the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Arts eResearch forum 2012. This was in two parts: firstly, a talk by Tim Sherratt, down from Canberra for the day, entitled ‘Digital Disruptions’, where he exhorted us to find new ways to break things; followed by short spiels by local academics on some of their
Another update to my list of early 20th century British newspapers online. There are a number of new titles available: Dundee Courier Gloucestershire Echo Hereford Times Herts Advertiser Lincolnshire Echo Surrey Mirror Yorkshire Gazette In addition, the coverage for another dozen titles has been increased, though in some cases only by a year. There’s additional
Robert Boyce. The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A big new (well, not so new by now) history of the way the Great Depression (or Slump) wrecked the international order, paving the way for Hitler and the rest of it. So it’s not just about
Very sad news today. On Monday, VH-UXG, a De Havilland DH.84 Dragon owned and flown by Des Porter, went missing on a flight from Monto to Caboolture in Queensland. A distress call and an emergency beacon were heard briefly, but then nothing more was known until today, when VH-UXG’s wreckage was found in rugged terrain
In my discussion of the ill-fated Sykes Memo, I noted that it included proposed force levels for the Dominion air forces, which I haven’t seen discussed before. This is interesting because it came at an interesting moment. It’s early December 1918, with the Empire was in the flush of victory and all things seeming possible
Recentlyish, someone called dedonarrival left the following comment here on a post about the British demand for reprisal bombing of Germany in return for the Blitz: Such gross ignorance. Google: British terror bombing and note when it started and when Germany retaliated with its twin engined medium bombers and range limited fighter escort . I
Mark Atherton. There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. With The Hobbit published 75 years ago this very day and the (first of three!) movies coming out in a couple of months, this is very well-timed. The author is, like Tolkien, an Oxford
