Dr Beachcombing of Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog kindly dropped me a line to alert me to his post about Public Service Broadcasting, a British music duo who draw on old propaganda and information films for inspiration and samples. A number of these are from the Second World War period, including ‘Spitfire’, ‘London Can Take It’, […]
After the AHA, I stayed in Adelaide for a few days to see the sights. I have a bit of a thing for maritime museums, so the South Australian Maritime Museum at Port Adelaide was an obvious choice. It became even more obvious when I discovered that the National Railway Museum and the South Australian
Operation Millennium was the RAF’s first ‘thousand bomber raid’, on Cologne on the night of 30 May 1942. By making a maximum effort and by using aircraft and aircrews from training units (since the Admiralty did not consent to the diversion of Coastal Command aircraft), Air Vice-Marshal Harris was able to scrounge a total of
On 17 July 1917, the London Gazette published a proclamation by George V: We, out of Our Royal Will and Authority, do hereby declare and announce that as from the date of this Our Royal Proclamation Our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, and that all
Michael Molkentin. Flying the Southern Cross: Aviators Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2012. Molkentin’s first book, Fire in the Sky, was an excellent history of the Australian Flying Corps; and this one looks promising too (not to mention the two he’s got planned, and he’s still got a PhD
Last week, the Australian Historical Association held its 31st annual conference, hosted by the University of Adelaide. The last time I was at an AHA was in 2008 (I didn’t have to go far, since it was in Melbourne); it seems to have got bigger since then. Around four hundred delegates, if memory serves; up
After six years, I’ve decided to try out a new look for Airminded by switching to the Elemin theme. There’s still a bit more tweaking to be done before I decide whether it will stay or not, but I think it’s a pretty clean and minimalist style. It’s also ‘responsive’, which means it reformats gracefully
I’ve updated my list of online sources for early twentieth century British newspapers. There are forty new titles, bringing the total up over one hundred, and more years are available for another couple of dozen newspapers. Most of the new titles are from the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), which now has a very helpful list
Dan Stone. Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933-1939: Before War and Holocaust. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 [2003]. As in cultural and intellectual responses, more than diplomatic and military ones; and not just positive responses (e.g. from fellow travellers of the right) but negative ones too. The chapter on ‘the place of war
This image and the one below are selections from the The National Archives’ collaboration with Wikimedia Commons, so far comprising 350 examples of war art from the Second World War. These particular ones are propaganda posters (or draft versions of same) but there are also more informational ones as well as portraits and caricatures of
