Investigations of a Dog

I’m planning to finish my Winter in Windsor series of posts while it’s still winter, but in the meantime here are some links:

• Skulking in Holes and Corners is a relatively new blog by Jamel Ostwald, who has written a book about Vauban and is writing another about Marlborough. The blog ‘hopes to facilitate communication between the rarest of beasts, early modern European military historians (EMEMHians – but please give me a better idea for a name)’. He’s made a very good start, so go and read it, comment on it and link to it.
• My book is going to be published on 21 August 2012, and you can already read the blurb. Just proofreading and indexing to go.
• Andrew Hickey has written a brilliant short story about Shakespeare which skewers the snobbery of Oxfordian conspiracy theories.
• Ben Brumfield reports on the 2012 American Historical Association conference from a software developer’s perspective.
• History SPOT has a podcast of Ben Worthy’s IHR seminar paper on the impact of the Freedom of Information Act.
• Zotero 3.0 has been released. It can now run as a standalone program as well as a Firefox extension and has lots of new features. I couldn’t have written my book as quickly (or at all?) without Zotero to manage my bibliography and citations.
• The latest version of the Spotify client crashes whenever I search for Kim Carnes. Bug or feature?

The blogroll is back again and Google Reader shared items have gone because Google is about to destroy the sharing features in Reader. This is apparently an attempt to force us to switch to Google Plus but in my case it just means that I’ll switch to Liferea, which is a perfectly adequate RSS reader from the Ubuntu repository. I’ll miss the sharing but I’ll also have more time to do constructive things, and I’ll be slightly less dependent on Google services, so it’s not all bad.

Dealing with this has taken up the time I was going to use to write a proper post, so here are some acquisitions instead. Remember there’s still another week to take advantage of the Ashgate sale.

1. Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon Catholicism, gender, and seventeenth-century print culture (Notre Dame, Ind., 2005).
2. Peter Doyle, British Army Cap Badges of the First World War (2010).
3. Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London, 1637-45, illustrated edition. (1997).
4. Lien Luu, Immigrants and the industries of London, 1500-1700 (Aldershot, 2004).
5. Brian Manning, ed., Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973).
6. Jason McElligott and David L. (David Lawrence) Smith, eds., Royalists and Royalism During the English Civil Wars (Cambridge, 2007).
7. Mark Philp, ed., Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797-1815, illustrated edition. (2006).
8. Nehemiah Wallington, The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618-1654: A Selection, David Booy (ed.) (Aldershot, 2007).

Today this blog has made it to five years, although there have been some significant gaps so it’s not exactly five years of continuous blogging. My book has now passed peer review and I’ve got until the end of November to make the final revisions, so I’ll be able to post a bit more frequently now. For now here are some quick links and random thoughts:

• Brett Holman has made a free ebook version of his series of posts on the Sudeten crisis. Highly recommended: going through newspaper reports day by day gives a very different perspective on events.
• TARDIS Eruditorum is blog which offers intelligent and entertaining critiques of Doctor Who stories. It started working through them in chronological order from An Unearthly Child and is now into the Tom Baker years. There’s also a forthcoming book compiling expanded versions of all the Hartnell era stuff.
• Meanwhile Andrew Hickey has just started blogging his new book about Doctor Who, and has nearly finished another one about The Monkees.
• I’ve finally got the hang of the British Library’s computer ordering system for manuscripts, but I wish they had card readers like the PRO. I still don’t get what makes the difference between select manuscripts and normal ones. It seems completely arbitrary.
• I’ve found out that I have ancestors from the Isle of Man who can apparently be traced back to the 17th century. Plenty of material for future blog posts there.
• I’m not sure what to make of this Daily Telegraph report about a jug supposedly made from the skin of Oliver Cromwell’s horse. I’m usually sceptical about Cromwell relics, not least because it seems unlikely that puritans would have approved of something so idolatrous. Also the names of warhorses in the civil wars are almost never mentioned in contemporary records.
• The Common Swings has a new serialized story in progress involving a mysterious 1970s TV series.
• The National Archives are planning to digitize all of the WW1 war diaries in WO 95 and are looking for volunteers to help sort them out.
• Bench Grass continues to be brilliant.

It’s now four years since I started blogging. Last year I said I might stop today, but I’m not going to now. I need a blog to promote my forthcoming book, I’m not ready to do anything completely different yet, and blogging is still a useful way of trying out new ideas and keeping in touch with people. I’ve somehow gone for nearly three months without posting anything because I’ve been so busy. Before I can even start writing the book I have to work on a chapter for an edited collection and also finish building a roof. And there’s an article which is probably going to get revise and resubmit soon. Posts should get more regular from now on, but in the meantime, here are some links and news:

• Bench Grass is a new military history blog, with some great posts on armoured warfare. One of the few people who really gets cavalry.
• At Airminded Brett Holman has finished (for now) post-blogging the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. One of the many surprises thrown up by his experiment is that there wasn’t a clear division between the two at the time. The press seem to have been more optimistic than the present myth of The Few would suggest (and it was a big shock to discover that Churchill was mostly talking about bombers in that speech), and some people wanted the Germans to try and invade Britain because they knew it would fail. Despite knowing that German bombs wouldn’t defeat them, the British seem to have massively over-estimated the effectiveness of their own bombing of Germany. Meanwhile Daily Mail readers, then as now obsessed with impractical and morally dubious solutions to exaggerated problems, demanded more reprisal bombings of German civilians.
• The Institute of Historical Research has launched a digital consultancy service and announced a digital editing system called ReScript.
• PhDork at The Pursuit of Harpyness looks at “An Anti-Suffrage Monologue”, in which American suffragette Marie Jenney Howe mercilessly exposed anti-feminist hypocrisy by putting contradictory arguments against equal voting rights next to each other, ostensibly so that readers could pick the one they preferred. This kind of hypocrisy hasn’t gone away. Early-modern women’s historians are faced with Lawrence Stone’s objection that elite women are not worth studying because they’re not typical, and David Starkey’s objection that ordinary women are not worth studying because they had no power. Opponents of women serving in combat roles say that a woman wouldn’t be strong enough to drag her wounded male comrades to safety, and that male soldiers would spend too much time looking after their female comrades instead of fighting.
• Pink Parts is a webcomic set in a strip club and written by Katherine Skipper, who used to work as a stripper. It’s intelligent, honest, funny and really has something to say. Good to see a stripper’s point of view being put across in a medium which is far too dominated by privileged white men. It ties in well with Catherine M. Roach’s book about stripping, which I reviewed last year.
• Comic genius Kate Beaton gives her own interpretations of courtly love and King Lear.
• PEP! is a magazine about comics, music, politics, Doctor Who and other things, edited by my friend Andrew Hickey. It even includes some articles by me. I tried to push myself do something different from my blogging and academic writing, which wasn’t entirely successful but I’m all about failing better. In issue 1 (available as free PDF download or expensive print on demand) I gave an argument in favour of political extremism (from a feminist and postmodern angle) which made some good points and one bad point which went up a blind alley to do with Zeno’s paradoxes, but since it provoked a rebuttal from the editor I must have done something right. In issue 2 (PDF; print version available soon) I took a long and exhausting (but nowhere near exhaustive) look at lazy journalism, bad science and gender ideology relating to spatial reasoning abilities. Since I wrote it in March it’s been superseded by some other things (especially Cordelia Fine’s new book Delusions of Gender, and a new report which disproves gender differences in maths ability) but I’m still pleased that I managed to write something outside my comfort zone.
• Andrew has also written a book about the Beatles. I found the blog posts that this grew out of really interesting, even though I don’t like the Beatles.
• And finally, you can have minutes of fun looking for film and TV locations on Google Streetview. Here are Baywatch headquarters near Santa Monica and Baywatch Hawaii headquarters at Haleiwa.

• The latest Military History Carnival is up at Wig-Wags.
• The Institute of Historical Research is carrying out a survey to find out what people think about the possibility of podcasting/vidcasting research seminars. Go and tell them what you think. Their digital seminars project also has its own blog.
• Ross Mahoney linked to a UK National Archives project which involves post blogging the Second World War on Twitter using cabinet papers: @ukwarcabinet
• Meanwhile, the National Archives wiki Your Archives is starting a project to  create a glossary of historical terms. See the current list of wanted terms, sign up and add what you know.

As I’ve been too busy with “proper” writing to come up with any blog posts, here are some links instead:

• Andrew Hickey and Mat Bowles explain why you should vote Lib Dem in the general election and how it can make a difference. The short answer is: electoral reform. No other problems can get fixed until our awful electoral system gets fixed. The Lib Dems are the only party with the means, motive and opportunity to do it.
• If you’re not from the UK and don’t understand why we’re getting so excited about the election, Debi Linton explains it all.
• Brett Holman at Airminded looks at the influence of the Boer War on air power history, which is more relevant than you might think.
• Nick Poyntz at Mercurius Politicus has had an article published in Midland History about a “crowd action” in Cirencester at the start of the English Civil War, and has posted an open access version for anyone to read. (Personally I prefer to call these things riots because it sounds cooler. Can you imagine Joe Strummer singing about a “white crowd action”? Would Sleater Kinney have been as good if they were crowd action grrrls?)
• The Common Swings is an indescribably odd and brilliant comic/fanzine written and drawn by Chris Browning. You should find something in it to amuse you if you like Viv Stanshall, Absolutely, vintage crime novels, H. P. Lovecraft or old railway posters advertising trips to dull seaside towns. You can order a print on demand version from Lulu or a hand made version direct from the author.

8th March is International Women’s Day, and March is National Women’s History Month in the US (it would be nice if there were more of them in a year, otherwise we have 11 men’s history months and 364 men’s days by default, but you can’t have everything, especially if you’re a woman…). The theme of this year’s Women’s History Month is Writing Women Back Into History. I’ll probably write some posts about women’s and gender history later in the month. But right now seems like a good time to announce a new website/blog:

They Really Do Exist “aims to be a directory of women who are active in traditionally male arenas”, “for all those people who are sick of hearing ‘But there ARE no women in that sector!’ when they ask why the media or other publicity downplays the role played by women in any given area”. The site was the idea of Jennie Rigg, a female political blogger who is, in her own very apt words, “FUCKING SICK” of being told that there are no female political bloggers. What I find most striking about this situation is that many male political bloggers (even liberal ones) try to delegitimize feminism by claiming that it isn’t really politics. In contrast, anti-feminist academics are more likely to delegitimize feminist history by asserting that it is political and therefore doesn’t meet their standards of (false) neutrality. This double standard gives patriarchy the best of both worlds and makes things even more difficult for feminists. Maybe part of the problem of patriarchal equilibrium is that feminists are intellectually honest and abhor hypocrisy, whereas patriarchy thrives on it. Anyway, if you know of a woman who should be included in the list, leave a comment at the submit page.

Inspired by Jennie’s example, I’ve expanded the scope of the War and Gender Zotero group to include works on any aspect of military history written by women. There are now two sub-collections in the group library: one called “About Gender” which includes any works about the intersections of gender and sexuality with war written by anyone (which is what the group was originally limited to), and one called “By Women” which includes anything relating to wars and armed forces written by women. The new collection is still in its early stages. So far it only contains works by women that were already in the group library. There are lots more items in my personal library which need to be added. I’ve almost certainly made some embarrassingly wrong assumptions about people’s gender based only on their forenames, despite being trained by the Cambridge Population Group not to do that. [ETA 13 May 2011: I stopped doing this because it was too much trouble!]

And finally, here’s a photo of a nurse and some “munitions girls” from the First World War:

It’s now three years since I started this blog (by some coincidence I started the day before Tenured Radical). There isn’t much to reflect on since the last anniversary as it’s been a fairly quiet year. This year I seem to have got more political (but when is anything not political?). Looking back at my style of writing three years ago I can’t believe how reasonable and equivocal it is. I might also be slightly less postmodern. Since reading Judith Bennett I’ve realised that strident empiricism can be the perfect companion for strident feminism. The Military History Carnival seems to have more or less died, and it looks like history carnivals in general might be on the way out. Not organising a carnival is kind of a relief as it’s freed me from the shackles of even-handedness. For me, the most exciting development in the history blogosphere was the horse in history and culture group blog, which grew out of that most rare of things – a genuinely interesting and enjoyable conference. And all the cool kids are on Twitter now, but I’m not.

This week I decided to make a few changes to my blog. Most radical is that the blogroll is now gone. It occurred to me that it wasn’t much use because it kept getting out of sync with what I was actually reading, and I doubt that many people take much notice of it anyway. Instead I’ve imported my shared items from Google Reader, which should give a more accurate impression of what I’m reading and what I think is good. Also there’s now a Publication Archive in the page links on the sidebar. As it’s well over a year since my first article was published in War In History the terms of my contract allow me to publish a self-archived version. In this case you can find two versions: as well as the final version, which is more or less the same as the published version, I’ve uploaded the original submission. If you’ve got too much time on your hands it might be interesting to compare them to see how peer-review and revisions changed the article and made it better. If you want to cite the article you’ll still need to use the official version, not least because the page numbers are different. There’s always room for more improvement (I wish I’d engaged with Malcolm Wanklyn properly, mentioned more women, and not used the word “bias”), but I still think it’s not bad for a first attempt.

As for the future, the coming year could be the last year of Investigations of a Dog. After the fourth anniversary I might want to stop it and do Something Completely Different. Or I might not. In the meantime things probably won’t change much.

I’m very pleased to announce a new group blog: The Horse in History and Culture. This grew out of last month’s horse conference at Roehampton, which was easily the best conference I’ve ever been to. If only a fraction of the people who were there get involved it could potentially become one of the best group blogs around, so I hope it takes off and carries on.

The conference was in honour of leading horse historian Pete Edwards, who is retiring this year. I first met him when I started my PhD in 1997, and he’s given me lots of help and encouragement over the years – showing me the ropes at the PRO, giving me notes and references, commenting on my writing, and being the first person to cite my thesis in print. Also it was at his house that I first heard Kick Out The Jams by the MC5, which is possibly more important. Therefore it was fitting that the conference turned out so well. It was not like the conferences I’ve experienced before. There were interesting papers presented by confident, natural speakers who knew how to engage with an audience. There were worthwhile discussions which didn’t devolve into people getting their cocks out. I even had some good conversations in the coffee breaks! The prospect of meeting Erica Fudge and Bruce Boehrer was exciting and scary, but they turned out to be very nice in person and not at all scary. There were also some other people whose work I hadn’t come across before but who are worth checking out. In particular Kevin de Ornellas and Sandra Swart are both god-like geniuses and really cool people. So overall a fantastic experience. Can we have another one please?

It’s now 2 years since I started this blog. In that time I’ve started a blog carnival, got an article published, and finally got a job. I can’t really think of much to say about this anniversary, but here’s an arbitrary selection of some of my best/favourite posts. They’re in chronological order as ranking them any other way would be too difficult. It at least gives a rough idea of what I’ve been doing with Investigations of a Dog over the last couple of years. I’m now moving towards shorter posts which get straight to the point as I don’t have time to write 2-3,000 word posts, and I doubt that many people have the time to read them either.

19 October 2006, Grand Narratives of Global War: Postmodernism that you can actually understand, illustrated by the problems of working out when the Second World War started.

5 December 2006, The Bing Bong Boys: The first time I posted about my great-grandfather’s experiences in the First World War. A little bit of family history led to me digitizing the battalion history and learning a lot about XML.

13 December 2006, Cavalry Charges: Shock: Destroying some myths about horses crashing into each other. I’ve changed my mind about some things in the light of new evidence, but this is still a good introduction to why the “equine battering ram” is impossible.

25 May 2007, Everyone knows you can’t make a World War I game: Some lazy journalist wrote some rubbish about computer games and the First World War. Esther found ‘em and fixed ‘em, then I flanked ‘em and finished ‘em. Maybe would have been better without the unsubstantiated “long periods of boredom” bit, but mostly bang on target.

18 October 2007, FPS is good for you: Just reporting what someone else said, but it’s really important. Gender differences in spatial reasoning are not fixed and can be changed easily by playing games.

6 December 2007, Book Review: Malcolm Wanklyn – Decisive Battles of the English Civil War: All about how Malcolm Wanklyn is coming out with some of the most exciting work on the civil war.

13 December 2007, Cows: A still unsolved mystery about Londoners who supposedly hadn’t seen cows before.

4 April 2008, Glenn Burgess On Revisionism: Maybe a bit too dense and esoteric for a blog post, but I think I made some good points about some very big historiographical issues.

10 August 2008, Saddlers Wills: A bit of a lazy post as it was just edited highlights from some documents I’d been transcribing, but I liked it and so did some other people. Shows some of the interesting things you can find in wills, and how digitization and wikis are making it easier to share interesting information.

29 August 2008, Cavalry Generals: Cromwell and Balfour: Comparing Oliver Cromwell’s early military career with the criminally ignored Sir William Balfour to show that they were both good at commanding cavalry.

And an honourable mention for “To the disgrace of all womankind”, which is the most popular post for Google searches…