P.D. Smith, author of Doomsday Men, on mad scientists and the dream of the superweapon.
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This is the weblog and online home of Rob MacDougall, Two-Fisted Historian.The Good Old
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The Unit Upgrade
Mark Rayner’s latest is a funny in-joke for recovering Civilization addicts like myself. Related: uh-oh.Liberal Arts Education or Sleep Aid, You Decide
I generally mistrust blogs whose every post is a list of stuff from elsewhere, but this is a nice (big) collection of history lectures you can watch online.Did Alexander the Great Fight the Yeti?
As my man Head 58 says, “I don’t want to live in a world where he didn’t.“Holden's History of the United States
At Hilobrow, for J. D. Salinger & Howard Zinn.The Black Pyramids of Georgia
BLDGBLOG on messianic architecture, by way of Tama-Re, the Egyptian city built by an Afro-supremacist UFO cult in rural Georgia.Sticky Meme
The always worthwhile Zunguzungu is on a Teddy Roosevelt kick of late. Here he goes looking for the origins of Teddy’s big stick.Everything Was Open-Source, Once
This blog post at Attic #42 hits several of my sweet spots: telephone history, KGB surveillance, a plea for open-source technology, and a gripe about PDFs.Secede, Suppress, Survive
Not especially funny as Onion articles go, but it actually could be a TV show: New Alternate Reality Series on Island Where South Won Civil War.The Other KKK
Mystic anti-war boy scouts? Fascist futurist theosophists? What was up with the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift?The Red Peril
Snarkout’s annual post is as keen as ever: an appreciation of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians becomes a link-happy history of literary invasions right back to Saki and Wells. Behind the Curtain
© 2001–2009 Rob MacDougall
2 responses so far ↓
1 Jess Nevins // May 18, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Um…he’s not quite got it right, as far as 19th & 20th century reaction to super-weapons. You have only to look at the English public’s reaction to news of what the Maxim gun was doing to see that this disquiet with super-weapons is by no means confined to the 20th century, nor is the glorification of those weapons a 20th century phenomenon. And Wells meant Moreau as a hero gone only slightly mad, not as a villain.
Oh, sorry: [/quibble]
2 Rob // May 23, 2008 at 3:11 pm
On this subject, Jess, you’re like E.F. Hutton: when you quibble, people listen.
I actually just got a nice email from Peter Smith – he says that the book (unlike the blog post) does go back to the 19th C and earlier. It’s on my list to check out.
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