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Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Just a quick note to say that I'm post-blogging 1940 at my blog. By 1940 I mean the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, and by post-blogging I mean a series of regular posts designed to give a sense of the way some historical event evolved over time, in real time. The first entry is for 25 August 1940. I won't cross-post them here as they will clog up Cliopatria for the next month or two, but please join me at Airminded if you'd like to follow along. There are also a number of other 1940 and Second World War post-blogs underway which are listed here (or here).

Posted on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 9:26 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Nobody could have foreseen this

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

Albeit for very large values of 'nobody'. In 2006 I wrote the following, with regards to John Ramsden's Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890:

[...] what’s with having the endnotes not in the book itself but on a website? Do they think websites are permanent? Will the 10 pages omitted from the book really improve its profitability by that much? It’s better than none at all, I suppose, but it does potentially diminish the book’s useability for research purposes, now and in the future. For shame, Little, Brown, for shame.

And of course, four years later the website no longer exists; the domain name is not even registered any more. It doesn't help that Ramsden died last year, so there's probably nobody looking after his electronic-academic legacy.

Luckily this is a trend which hasn't taken off -- at least not that I've noticed in recent book purchases. But Guy Walters at the Daily Telegraph disagrees (citing Ramsden's website too, which floored me since his post seems to have gone up this very day!) He thinks that the practice of moving footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies from books to the web is becoming more common. I do hope he's wrong.

Posted on Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at 8:53 AM | Comments (3) | Top

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Why don't I care about strategy?

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

The new Military History Carnival has been posted at Wig-Wags. One of the featured posts, The state of strategy at Kings of War -- which looks at the great strategic thinkers of history and wonders why there seem to have been relatively few in recent times -- inspired the above title. It's posed as a question, not a statement ('Why I don't care about strategy') because I'm not sure that my not caring is a good thing for a military historian, especially since I do deal with strategic thought in my work on early twentieth-century airpower. But I find myself uninterested in the eternal principles of strategy, or how to win the war in Afghanistan, or whether China will replace the United States as the world's superpower, or whether Clausewitz was right or Douhet (or vice versa, or neither or both). Or at least, I find some of these things interesting sometimes, but as somebody who lives on this planet, not as an historian.

When I first started researching my area, two of the first books I read were George Quester's Deterrence Before Hiroshima and Robin Higham's The Military Intellectuals in Britain, and I still find the latter especially useful. As it happens, both books were published in 1966, and both reflect their Cold War context very deeply. Both Quester and Higham were concerned to use their studies of the interwar fear of the bomber to draw conclusions for military thinkers in their own day. To some extent this distorted their analysis: they were much more interested in those ideas and events which seemed to parallel the development of nuclear strategy, rejecting those which did not as wrong or just uninteresting. So I think I am wary of indulging in a similar presentism. (Not that I have a gift for it.)

But is this realistic, sensible, or even defensible? Isn't part of the point of history to learn from it? Conversely, isn't it possible that I could learn something about history by studying the present day? Professionally speaking, aren't there possible gains for a military historian in fostering closer contact with those creating the military history of the future (applied military history, perhaps)? Is this simply a distaste for the reality at the core of my study -- killing, dying, suffering? Do historians of crime similarly distance themselves from their closest present-day analogues (criminologists)? Labour historians? Gender historians? Or maybe it's just me?

Posted on Sunday, June 6, 2010 at 7:54 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Australia forgets

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

460 Squadron RAAF, 8 December 1944

It's Anzac Day once again. On Anzac Day, Australia remembers some things but forgets others. We remember the sacrifices of the original Anzacs at Gallipoli, but forget that it wasn't only Australians who suffered. We remember the many thousands of young Australians who have fought in foreign wars since then, but forget to ask why they were there. We remember that war can bring out the best in people, but forget that it can also bring out the worst.

One thing we tend to forget is Australia's part in the bombing of Europe in the Second World War. There are a few memorials and exhibits, but when we think of Anzacs we usually think of slouch hats, not flying helmets.

Posted on Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 3:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Intertextuality

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

Watching this:

made me think of this:

Posted on Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 8:59 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Monday, February 15, 2010

Military History Carnival 21

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

Welcome to the restored Military History Carnival, a round-up of the best military history blogging of the last month. Since history is just one damn thing after another, let's try this as a chronology.

327-5 BCE: Alexander the Great's army fights yeti in India.
122 CE: Construction of Hadrian's wall begins in order to amuse 20th century children.
1202: Venice builds a fleet of Landing Ships (Knight) for the Fourth Crusade.
1861-5: Black Confederates probably don't exist, but if they did here's what it would take to convince reasonable historians.
1914-9: The First World War sees horses used in a wide variety of roles. Men and women had their roles too.
1915: The many burdens of the poor bloody infantry.
1915: The first Zeppelin raid on Britain.
1915: Fighting at Gallipoli inspires a British sailor-poet to write of ancient Ilium.
1915: An earlier American intervention in Haiti.
1918: Gladys Wake, a Canadian nurse who died on active service in France.
1931-7: Why Metrovicks got into gas turbine research.
1939: 'Keep Calm and Carry On': then an unused morale-boosting poster, now a wildly successful internet meme.
1939-45: Why most RAF war dead served in bombers.
1940: Coventry and the aeroplane.
1942: George Herbert Walker Bush becomes the youngest American naval aviator to fly solo.
1948: President Truman sets a precedent for today by ordering the end of segregation in the US armed forces.
1948-9: An earlier international humanitarian airlift.

This edition of the Military History Carnival was brought to you by the year 1915. Thanks go to all those who sent in suggestions. If you'd like to host a future carnival, please contact the Battlefield Biker.

[Update: fixed an embarrassingly-bad description which suggests I barely bothered to read the link. Sorry Gavin!]

Posted on Monday, February 15, 2010 at 7:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, January 31, 2010

The trumpet calls

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

The Trumpet Calls

Airminded is hosting the next edition of the Military History Carnival on 15 February. Please send me suggestions for the best military history blogging since 17 January, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by twitter (@Airminded or tagged #mhc21). Thanks!

Image source: Wikipedia.

Posted on Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 11:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, January 9, 2010

To-day and to-morrow

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

'To-day and To-morrow' was a series of over a hundred essays on 'the future' of a diverse range of subjects, which were published in pamphlet form by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. between 1924 and 1931. The authors are equally varied: some were acknowledged experts in their fields, others seem to have been chosen for their ability to provoke. Some of the 'To-day and To-morrow' essays have since attained classic status; most have been forgotten. But as a whole they are an impressive testimony to a vibrant, wideranging (and idiosyncratic) kind of British futurism, and I think they deserve more attention. Some of them have been reprinted from time to time, and if you're rich you can both nearly all of them in collected volumes through Routledge, but otherwise there are so many they are are hard to track down. So I've tried to compile a definitive list of the series' titles (which are mostly classical allusions) with links to online sources for the texts and some sort of author biography, where available. Google Books has many of them, but only snippets or previews, so I've linked to other sources where possible. Additions and corrections are welcome.

Physically, they were very small books (pott octavo, to be precise), easy to slip into a pocket, and numbered only a hundred pages or so, in large type and generous margins. Their price was 2/6, about the same price as a cheap novel, but five times the price of the later, hugely successful Penguins. So they did not attract a mass readership, but do seem to have been much read by the chattering classes. (See Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009), 139.) Many of the titles went through multiple impressions. And at least one was discussed in the House of Commons.

Posted on Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 10:48 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

After; and before?

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

Since graduating I've become what they call an 'independent scholar', meaning I currently have no academic job but still have the irrational desire to do research. I'd certainly like to be a dependent scholar, but it turns out they don't hand out jobs with your testamur.¹ Who knew?

So there are things I need to do. One is to keep an eye out for jobs. In Australia, we don't have anything like the AHA interview-fests, which sounds like a slightly terrifying (if hopefully worthwhile) experience for recent/almost graduates. Nor does Britain, as far as I know. So job-hunting is presumably less seasonal. We do have the usual job search sites, such as UniJobs.com.au and jobs.ac.uk.

Once into the job application and interview process, one useful site to keep an eye on is the Academic Jobs Wiki, especially the history section. There are also places to share good and bad interview experiences, or simply to vent. The entries are mostly about North American universities, but it being a wiki there's no reason why that can't change.

Posted on Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at 1:42 AM | Comments (2) | Top

Monday, October 26, 2009

A question answered

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

A few days ago, a new article popped up in my RSS reader: R. M. Douglas, 'Did Britain use chemical weapons in mandatory Iraq?', Journal of Modern History, 81 (December 2009), 1-29. This was slightly odd, because it's only October and the rest of the December issue isn't online yet. The editors of JMH clearly think they've got an unusually significant paper here, one worth publishing early and with an accompanying press release. And I agree.

The question in the article's title is one I've asked before. After the First World War, Britain gained control of Iraq (or Mesopotamia) from the Ottoman Empire, not as an outright possession but under a mandate from the League of Nations. Some of Iraq's inhabitants disapproved of British rule and from 1920 rebelled. A new form of colonial policing known as air control eventually suppressed the revolt, but in the meantime the (rapidly demobilising) Army and the Royal Air Force had their hands full just containing the situation. Hence the attraction of using chemical weapons such as mustard gas against tribesmen with no experience of and no protection against this new form of warfare.

Posted on Monday, October 26, 2009 at 5:00 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, October 10, 2009

The non-atrocity of Getafe

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

While in Wales recently I chanced upon a copy of Robert Stradling's Your Children Will Be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). My description at the time was that this book 'Argues that the memory of Guernica has obscured earlier atrocities, especially the 1936 bombing of Getafe near Madrid'. Now that I've read Your Children Will Be Next, it's clear that I seriously misrepresented Stradling's argument in one crucial respect: he doesn't believe the Getafe atrocity ever actually happened, or at least if it did, there's no good evidence for it now. And that, nevertheless, this non-event had important consequences for the propaganda battle in Spain, for the subsequent memory of the Spanish Republic, and for our own reactions to the use of airpower against civilian targets. It's such an interesting and important book that it's worth correcting my mistake, and digging bit deeper into Stradling's thesis.

Firstly, what was supposed to have happened at Getafe? I must admit to not having heard of the incident before. It was claimed (mainly in the foreign left-wing press) that on 30 October 1936, Nationalist (meaning German) bombers deliberately bombed civilians in Getafe, a small town near Madrid, flying low to mark their victims and killing dozens of children. Photographs of their bodies, with identification labels on their chests, were used in several Republican propaganda productions, the best-known of which is shown above: 'If you tolerate this, your children will be next', a combined appeal to humanity and self-interest. Stradling traces the propagation and influence of The Poster, as he calls it: it was used by both the Communists and the Labour Party in Britain for their pamphlets (below is the Imperial War Museum's copy of the latter's). It helped turn opinion in the democracies against the Nationalists in this crucial early part of the war, when a swift victory by Franco had seemed assured. Memoirs and poems from the period attest to the power of its imagery.

Posted on Saturday, October 10, 2009 at 12:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Zeroth World Wars

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

A couple of interesting posts at The Russian Front suggest that the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 should be thought of as a World War Zero, or alternatively that the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 should be. It's often useful to play around with the names we give to historical events and phenomena, because it reminds us that they are just names. And this is an old game for historians (as Dave Stone notes) -- the Seven Years' War is sometimes considered to be the first world war (if not the First World War). But I'm not sure in what sense the Russo-Japanese and Russo-Turkish wars qualify as world wars. Shouldn't the primary determinant of this be that they were fought on a world scale? Even the epic, doomed voyage of the Baltic fleet to Tsushima isn't enough to make the Russo-Japanese War a world war, as all the actual fighting was localised to a relatively small region in Manchuria (if you set aside a few potshots at British trawlers).

But in his post, John Steinberg does give a list of reasons for his argument regarding the Russo-Japanese War (which comes out of research for a two-volume work he co-edited entitled The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero). It seems to me that most of them are not actually about geographical extent but rather other sorts of scale -- of battles, of casualties, of finance, and so on. That is, in Steinberg's formulation the Russo-Japanese War sounds something like an approach towards total war, not a world war. If that's the case then I find this statement surprising:

As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.

I thought the Russo-Japanese War was well-known among western military historians (if not among contemporary western military staffs) for its bloodiness. Hew Strachan, for example, refers to it quite often (well, on 30 pages out of 1139) in volume I of The First World War. It's also a common element in diplomatic histories of the war's origins, for Russia's defeat had a tremendous impact on the strategic calculations of all the other Great Powers. So it seems to me that western historians are quite comfortable in seeing the Russo-Japanese War as a step along the road to total war and/or to the First World War in several respects. I think I must be missing something here.

Posted on Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 10:01 AM | Comments (6) | Top

Monday, August 3, 2009

A dispatch from Harvard by the Yarra

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

'Harvard by the Yarra' is actually the University of Melbourne, Australia (the Yarra being the major river hereabouts, though the university is not actually anywhere near it). Some wag coined the phrase to describe (and deride) the aspirations implicit in the Melbourne Model, a radical overhaul of undergraduate teaching announced in 2007. Instead of many specialised undergraduate courses, there are now (or soon will be) only six, which will be more general and will serve as feeders for professional postgraduate courses. So whereas students used to be able to enroll in a law or medicine degree straight out of high school, for example, they now must complete an undergraduate degree first. This is more like the US tertiary education system than the British one, which provided the model for the first Australian universities in the 19th century. Hence 'Harvard by the Yarra'.

But there's another similarity to Harvard. Melbourne, like most Australian universities is publicly-funded. However, like Harvard, it is a (relatively, in Australian terms) old and prestigious institution, and so it has also attracted a (again, in Australian terms) large endowment from various benefactors. You might think that this is a good thing to have in a global recession, but apparently not. A slump in the value of the university's investments combined with several other factors (for example, the loss of fees from local students) has lead to a budgetary crisis, and an announcement by the vice-chancellor of a plan to cut 220 full-time equivalent jobs over the next few years, about 3% of the total workforce, to fall on both academics and administrative staff.

This doesn't come at a good time for the Faculty of Arts, which has already been struggling to deal with its own deep budget deficits over the last couple of years. This is partly due to curriculum changes imposed by the Melbourne Model, but also to a shift in the way funds are allocated by the university. There has been much publicity about this in recent months, as Arts tried to reduce salary expenditure by encouraging academic staff to take early retirement or go on long-term leave without pay. It's lost about 65 academics through these measures. The School of Historical Studies, where I completed my PhD studies, has been the focus of much of this attention. What was perhaps the leading history department in Australia is being slowly strangled by the need to do more with less. And with the recent spate of bad news, a recovery in the near future seems unlikely.

Posted on Monday, August 3, 2009 at 8:32 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

The best things in life were free

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

The Royal Historical Society has for some years maintained an online bibliography of British and Irish history, updated three times a year. It currently has over 460,000 records. It's a fantastic resource for scholars interested in any aspect of the history of the British Isles, not least because it's free. But from 1 January 2010 it won't be: it will be rebranded as the Bibliography of British and Irish History which will be sold by Brepols, with subscriptions available for institutions and individuals.

This is a shame, of course. A resource which was freely available to anyone with an internet connection will now only be open to those who can afford to pay. Presumably that includes big universities and libraries (although even librarians at Yale, of all places, are complaining that digital resources are getting to expensive, according to this H-Albion post), but what about smaller universities, local libraries, schools, independent researchers? There is the individual subscription, but there's no information about pricing yet and it seems unlikely to be cheap.

The reason for this move is the end of government funding for the bibliography. That's understandable; the money has to come from somewhere. The fact that it has been funded by British taxpayers does raise the question of why a commercial entity should be allowed to profit from that expenditure. But as I'm not a British taxpayer it could equally well be asked why I should benefit from that expenditure. So I don't really have a basis for moral outrage here. It's just ... a shame.

But it seems to me that must be some other way to do this -- crowdsourcing, scraping, some combination of both? There are some sites which show the potential of crowdsourcing by way of people uploading and updating their own bibliographies, such as Librarything, or in a more academic context, CiteULike and Mendeley. Given a critical mass of users, a crowdsourced bibliography would be close to up to date. Scraping could be used to automatically feed in journal articles via RSS (books would be harder -- though maybe not). There are many difficulties inherent in such an approach, but I'd rather see something like this be the future than an ever-increasing array of paywalls.

Posted on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 4:41 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Slap the Jap and make the Hun pay

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

Or, Australia strides onto the world stage.

Today is the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Versailles Treaty and thus of the Covenant of the League of Nations (which formed the first thirty articles of the Treaty). This was a fateful moment, with heavy consequences for those who lived through the next quarter-century. But as all of that is well-known (and still debated), I want to draw attention to something that isn't: Australia's role in the Paris Peace Conference, which formulated both the Treaty and the Covenant. While Australia had existed as an independent nation since 1901, most Australians would consider the ANZAC participation in the Dardanelles campaign in 1915 to be its true coming of age. Australian forces went on to serve with great distinction on the Western Front, Palestine and elsewhere, a shedding of blood which earned Australia a place among the peacemakers in Paris. But what use did Australia make of its first opportunity to influence the future of the world?

Posted on Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 9:14 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Monday, June 1, 2009

History Carnival 77

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

It's just short of three years since I last hosted a History Carnival, so it's about time I did another. And here it is! Herein you will find such diverse topics as:
The Maltese dragon of 1608.
Anti-vaccinators of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The lives of disabled British children around the turn of the 20th century.
An innovation in plumbing from 1963 which never caught on.

Firstly, though, can you help these history bloggers?
Can you add any 19th century female utilitarians to this list?
Do you know any examples of medieval stained glass windows in film?
What Great War gesture is that?
When did violence in war become 'kinetic'?

Technology. We all use it, but maybe we could be using it more?
Why you should use Flickr.
Why you should not be scared of using Wikipedia.
Mashing up Google Maps and the British Library's sound recordings.
A heartwarming story of digital collaboration between archives in five countries.
An equally heartwarming story of digital aggregation within one country.
Medievalists and the early internet: a reminiscence.

Ideas. We all have them ... no, I'm not going to keep doing this!
How to get from Vietnam to Dungeons & Dragons.
When dinosaurs roamed the Earth alongside humans.
A freethinking biology textbook from the 1970s.
Interwar eastern Europe and speed.

Posted on Monday, June 1, 2009 at 7:37 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Your nominations will bring us a History Carnival

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

Airminded is hosting the next edition of the History Carnival on 1 June. Please send me suggestions for the best history blogging since 1 May, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by del.ici.ous (tagged historycarnival). Thanks!

Image source: Weapons on the Wall.

Posted on Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 1:40 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, May 8, 2009

Guernica, mon amour

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

A couple of years ago I outed myself as something of a philistine by admitting that I didn't 'get' Guernica, and thought that direct representations -- photographs -- of the ruined city were more powerful, more affecting than Picasso's masterpiece. My incomprehension generated a fair degree of discussion, which was useful, but it was having to teach Guernica this week in tutorials which finally helped me make my peace with it. More specifically, learning something of Picasso's process of design and composition, and the politics of his commission from the Republican government, led me to a better appreciation of its symbolism. Although it depicts -- or rather is inspired by -- the bombing of a city, it seems to be set inside as much as outside, somehow. The woman holding a lantern could be leaning out of a window, one who survived the destruction but suffers from what she has seen. Or she could be leaning in, perhaps symbolising the inaction of the international community after seeing what had happened to Guernica. Creative ambiguity, indeed.

But the other source the students looked at this week was the 1959 French-Japanese film Hiroshima mon amour. And while I've come to understand something of Guernica's power, figurative and non-literal though it may be, I now have a problem with Hiroshima mon amour. In the most simplistic terms, it is a love story between a French woman and a Japanese man, who have a doomed affair in Hiroshima, ca. 1957. But the romance is not the point. Marguerite Duras, author of the screenplay, later wrote that:

Nothing is 'given' at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning. And this is one of the principal goals of the film: to have done with the description of horror by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese themselves, but make this horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special and 'wonderful', one that will be more credible than if it had occurred any where else in the world a place that death had not preserved.

But if she wanted 'to have done with the description of horror by horror', then why did she and director Alain Resnais include -- at times harrowing -- documentary footage of the ruined city and the victims of the atomic bomb? (Starting from 7.53, continued in the second clip.)

Posted on Friday, May 8, 2009 at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, April 20, 2009

Total war and total peace

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

A random thought while sitting in a lecture today: if there is (or can be) such a thing as total war, does that imply that total peace is a meaningful concept?

Firstly, what is total war? One definition, drawn from the ubiquitous set of conference proceedings edited by Stig Förster et al (and more directly, from today's lecture notes), goes something like this. Total war consists of:

total aims: e.g. the destruction of an enemy nation
total methods: e.g. bombing cities
total mobilisation: e.g. conscription for both the armed forces and for labour
total control: e.g. censorship, dictatorship

More briefly, total war is the subordination of every other consideration (law, custom, morality, etc) to the prosecution of war. Total war is an ideal form of warfare, something which can be approached more or less closely, but which can never actually be fully attained. Well, hopefully not, because that would be bad.

So what would total peace look like? I don't think it can simply be the absence of total war; that's just peace generically. Total peace must be total in some sense.

Posted on Monday, April 20, 2009 at 11:18 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

There were giants in the earth in those days

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

Recently, I followed Gavin Robinson's lead and tried out the British Library's EThOS beta. EThOS stands for Electronic Theses (dissertations) Online Service, and it's just what you'd expect from that -- an electronic thesis delivery service. There's not too much new about that, but EThOS does have some very impressive features.

First is the scope: nearly all British Universities are participating (with two very major exceptions, unfortunately: Cambridge and Oxford). What's more, any thesis ever accepted in Britain is eligible for inclusion in the database, possibly going back to the 1600s, according to the FAQ. This could become a rich vein of primary source material for intellectual historians. Second is the fact that the theses have been OCRed, not just scanned. This means that you can do keyword searches on the PDFs, for example. Third is the fact that they are free! Mostly, anyway. If you only want an electronic copy, it's free (hardcopy costs, obviously). If the thesis you want hasn't been scanned yet, then you may be asked to contribute towards the cost of that, but in most cases, not. And it doesn't appear to matter whether you are in the UK or not (which is good, because I'm not).

Posted on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at 6:30 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, March 15, 2009

The canals of Mars, 1962

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

Mars map (1962)

Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell's maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi's more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick's brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I've seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.

A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor's old observations to compile MEC-1. So it's no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn't live to witness Mariner 4's flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.