This day in 1947, India became an independent state from Great Britain, and August 14th, 1947, Pakistan had also become independent. How is this information useful? Understanding these two countries helps us understand the region, and current events. Let’s learn more… End of the empire Prior to independence, the Indian subcontinent had been under British…
Tag: Great Britain
Museum: The National WWI Museum
Kansas City, Missouri is home to the National World War I Museum, and I visited while I was attending the annual conference of the Society for Military History. Let’s take a look at what makes this museum tick: Quality of research The availability of technical specs for the weaponry on display, and the broad strokes…
Book: The Monuments Men
How to thwart a pillager With his book, The Monuments Men, Robert Edsel has brought a little-known piece of the Allied effort in World War II to the front of our consciousness. The MFAA, or “Monuments Men” were a tiny group of American, British, and French soldiers who scoured Europe for the thousands of pieces…
Museum: War birds brought to life
In Addison, Texas, north of Dallas, you can find a gem of a museum. The Cavanaugh Flight Museum specializes in air-worthy historical planes, and is the home of the Commemorative Air Force’s heavy bombers. I last visited the Cavanaugh in December, 2013. Quality of research The Cavanaugh museum has well-researched narrative, especially from a technical…
Get lost in digitized maps
Do you enjoy staring at old maps? The University of Richmond has produced a digital and interactive version of Charles Paullin and John K. Wright’s Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, originally published in 1932. You can find it here: http://dsl.richmond.edu/historicalatlas/ This is a broad collection of maps – it includes information…
World War I: Not just trench warfare
One of the conventional ideas about World War I (especially the Western Front), is that technology outpaced tactics. We wrap up the war’s problems this way: Commanders had a pre-machine-gun idea of how battles worked, and they were now living in a post-machine-gun world. In Andrew Weist’s Haig: The Evolution of a Commander, one paragraph…