The indefatigable David Silbey has posted Military History Carnival #26 at Cliopatria. The link which inspired this post’s title is at Military Times and concerns the fate of HMS Caroline, a light cruiser which was commissioned in 1914 and remains in service as a floating (albeit permanently moored) headquarters and training ship in Belfast. She […]
A while back, The National Archives made all Cabinet papers from 1915 to 1980 freely available for download. Now TNA Labs have created a visualisation tool for said papers, allowing you to see clouds of the 25 most frequent words and contributors for any year (month in wartime) or, using the ‘flexible querying’ mode, any
A recent comment by J Campbell raised the question of whether Nevil Shute’s 1949 novel No Highway was in fact a prediction of the De Havilland Comet airliner’s metal fatigue problems, which led to two crashes (‘hull losses’, in industry parlance) in 1954. My response was that it seemed unlikely that Shute had any particular
A couple of recent tweets from @zunguzungu (Aaron Bady): I had to include this disclaimer: “The Scout Association does not endorse Mr. Bady’s article or the use of air power against civilians” in my upcoming article. It’s a marvelous sentence. It is indeed. But what would B-P think?
Jan Rüger. The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. A book I cited in my thesis. I don’t see why the library should have all the fun.
I’ve previously posted some of Gorden Cullen’s artwork for the Tecton Group’s 1939 book Planned A.R.P.. Here are some more of his cute drawings dealing with an awful subject. In this case, he is illustrating the ‘general agreement among experts’ on the threat posed by the bomber. (a) The range, speed, and carrying capacity of
Charles Sowerwine. France Since 1870: Culture, Society and the Making of the Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Second Edition. French history is one of my weak points. If I’d taken one of Chips’ classes — he retired from my former department a few years ago — I might not have needed to buy his book.
One sub-species of military intellectual is the retired field marshal (or admiral, or air marshal) who, at the end of a long career, sets down their thoughts on the future of warfare for the interested reader. Even though they may be quite famous, their essays into futurism are nowadays read less often than that of
A tweet from William J. Turkel alerted me to the possibility of using 18th century-style fonts in LaTeX. The most noticeable difference from modern typesetting is the long s, but there are different ligatures too. There are a number of ways to do it but the easiest way is with the inbuilt Kepler Fonts package.
Airminded has been archived by the British Library’s UK Web Archive, which ‘contains websites that publish research, that reflect the diversity of lives, interests and activities throughout the UK, and demonstrate web innovation’. It’s one of (at present) 487 blogs, 461 history websites, and 47 international relations, diplomacy and peace websites thus indexed. As you
