Recently I linked to The Wapenshaw, a new early-modern military history blog. This is an exciting addition to an area which is under-represented in the history blogosphere (how I hate that word, but I cant think of anything better). There was a noticeable gap here in the first Military History Carnival. Although I found a reasonable number of early-modern posts, most of them focused on America, and only one covered Europe. Another reason why I’m pleased to see this blog is that Rich is paying a lot of attention to me (every blogger is a narcissist!). His first two posts comment on my posts from last year about cavalry charges and drill books. This is a useful coincidence, as I need to write a proposal for a conference paper on this topic by the end of this week, so in this post I’ll trying to get my thoughts into some kind of coherent order. Trying: the post itself is quite incoherent and probably contains some total nonsense, but that’s part of the value of a blog.
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There will be an early modern edition of Carnivalesque at Siris on 29th April. Send submissions (on any aspect of early modern history or culture, posted since 24th February) to branemrys[at]yahoo[dot]com or use the Carnivalesque submission form.
The next History Carnival will be hosted by Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb on 1st May. Send submissions (on any aspect of history, posted since 1st April) to jeremy[AT]clioweb[DOT]org or use the History Carnival submission form.
And the second Military History Carnival will be hosted at Victoria’s Cross? on 13th May. Send submissions to $gary$@$breathinghistory$.$com$ (but remove the dollar signs!) or use the Military History Carnival submission form.
News of all history related blog carnivals can be found at the History Carnivals Aggregator.
I’d like to welcome The Wapenshaw to the military history blogosphere. Rich will be taking a critical look at late medieval and early modern warfare, and combining military history with his interest in philosophy. His first post debates some of the issues raised by my posts on cavalry charges and raises some more questions about the meaning of the word “shock”.
Meanwhile I went to Cambridge on Saturday for a conference on “The Experience of Authority in Early Modern Britain”. I’m kind of ambivalent about my experience of the conference. While I would have found all of the papers stimulating if I was reading them in a journal, many of them were let down by poor delivery. This wasn’t really a question of volume — I could hear the words and understand them — it was just that they didn’t really grab me because they were spoken in such an uninspiring way. How can you expect anyone to be interested in your work if you don’t sound interested yourself? I completely agree with Bill Benzon that it’s a terrible idea to write your paper in the style of a written article and then read it out word for word. Steve Hindle was competent as you’d expect, and Helen Good and Rhian Wyn-Williams had the personality and stage presence to get their presentations across well, but only Andy Wood sounded really natural and spontaneous.
In summing up, Andy Wood made some good points about the future of political and social history, particularly the need to integrate gender issues more fully, and to take more notice of the experiences of emigrants to America. I was slightly disappointed that he didn’t mention animals (surely the Next Big Thing?) , but maybe it’s good that I’m ahead of the game. I could write a whole post taking issue with his claim that “politics isn’t about bus queues” if I get time.
Edit: I’ve just remembered that I saw a T-34 in a farmyard near Ely. Dan Todman also saw a T-34 recently.
Welcome to the first ever Military History Carnival, starting an eclectic monthly round-up of the best and most interesting posts on everything related to wars and armed forces from the ancient world to the end of the 20th century. To get things started I’ve put together a huge selection of posts which demonstrates just how broad and inclusive military history can be, and how big the impact of war on history has been. It should be obvious that the military history blogosphere is in a very healthy state, and that many bloggers who wouldn’t consider themselves to belong to military history are writing on relevant topics.
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Over at Victoria’s Cross, Gary Smailes posted a link to an article about the history of memorialisation from the Imperial War Museum. The article includes a photo of the memorial to the royalist officers Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, who were executed on the orders of Sir Thomas Fairfax after the siege of Colchester in 1648. The article presents English Civil War memorials in terms of “deeds of heroism”, and by omitting the background to their execution perhaps unintentionally implies that Lucas and Lisle were victims or even martyrs. It’s worth pointing out that they were both executed for breaking their parole — they had previously surrendered to Parliament and promised not to fight again. Even so, this is quite an unusual case, and might be explained by the bitterness and frustration engendered by the siege of Colchester. Another interesting aspect which the article doesn’t mention is that there was a long running feud between the Lucas family and the borough of Colchester, which makes it ironic that the town now has a memorial to Sir Charles.
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The first Military History Carnival will be held here one week today (Thursday 12th April). I’ve had a good number of submissions, but there’s always room for more. You can submit your own posts or posts written by someone else — anything which falls within my broad definition of military history (but remember history stops on 1st January 2001!). So far the American Civil War isn’t over-represented so there’s still room for more ACW posts.
Use the Blog Carnival submission form or e-mail links to mhc1@4-lom.com
Meanwhile, I’ve finally resubmitted the article I was working on. It’s a relief to get it out of the way, and I’m reasonably confident that I’ve countered the reader’s criticisms adequately. Next week I’m going to a conference in Cambridge about authority in early-modern England, which is quite exciting as I haven’t been to a conference since 2001. I’m also working on a proposal for a conference about books in military history. I’m thinking along the lines of “Shock, Firepower, and Intertextuality”. Or maybe not…
I nearly called this post “the Great War on Flickr” but that could easily have been misunderstood…
It’s really about using the photo hosting site Flickr for photos and other documents from the First World War. I’ve uploaded some photos of my great-grandfather here as an experiment in digital history. Flickr is much more than just an image hosting service. I’ve been trying out some of its advanced features to see how useful they can be to digital historians, and what the limitations might be.
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