I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: It’s amazing what one can find on the Internet.

In the summer of 2005, the city of Moscow played host to a photographic exhibit honoring the 60th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War. Titled, “1418 Days,” the exhibit drew upon a collection of rare wartime images contained in the archives of the Moscow House of Photography (Московский Дом фотографии) to tell the story the USSR’s wartime experience.

Not surprisingly, most of the images concerned the battlefield heroism of Red Army soldiers at the front. But the exhibit included more than a few photographs drawn from the rear as well including scenes of factory life, public demonstrations, the air-raid shelters in Moscow’s metro, and bears (no, really).

The material from the 2005 exhibit (including a 40-minute video produced for the occasion) is available for viewing on-line. As is so often the case with these types of things, English-language translations are few and far between, so non-Russian readers will find themselves at a disadvantage.

To view the photographic collection in chronological order, click HERE.

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About this time last year, The Journal of the Historical Society published an essay of mine devoted to recent trends in the field of Russian history. Although the article (”Scholarship at the Crossroads: The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America”) was commissioned by the Journal’s editor, George Huppert, for the purpose of introducing non-Russian historians and general readers to developments in the field, I believe that many of the issues raised in the piece may be of interest to specialists as well.

Beginning late tomorrow and continuing over the course of the next ten days or so, I will post a series of installments containing the main text of the JHS essay. I welcome TRF readers to comment on the points made in the article or, at least, to think about the developments that the article addresses.

The TRF version of “Scholarship at the Crossroads” does differ from the original in several respects. For example, I have eliminated many of the footnotes appearing in the journal article by providing direct links to works mentioned in the text. In other cases I have updated (or added) information to reflect more recent events.

[Note: The definitive version of this essay is located at: www.blackwell-synergy.com. To access it, click here.]

In the months that followed, air shows multiplied across the Continent in places like Brescia, Nice, Monte Carlo, and St. Petersburg, as local aviation enthusiasts sought to duplicate the excitement and success of the French event.

America’s first international air show commenced on 10 January 10 1910 five months after Le Grande Semaine. It was hosted by the Aero Club of California at site just outside of Los Angeles in Dominguez Hills. The Dominguez Hills air show attracted some of the world’s most famous aviators including the first man to cross the English Channel in an airplane, Louis Blériot, the winner of the first cross-country air race, Louis Paulhan, and American favorite son Glenn H. Curtiss, who had claimed the $5,000 Gordon Bennett Trophy Race held at Reims.

Attendance at the Dominguez Hills meet surpassed expectations. Over the course of the ten-day show an estimated 226,000 spectators converged on the airfield, generating more than $137,500 for the event’s sponsors and helping to launch the aviation industry on the West Coast.

The Department of Archives and Digital Collections at California State University, Dominguez Hills has available on-line an excellent assortment of photographs, postcards, slides, news clippings, and programs from the 1910 meet. To view these materials from America’s first air show, visit CSUDH’s 1910 Los Angeles International Aviation Meet Research Collection.

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According to Hansen, the emphasis placed by very large numbers of amateur writers and aviation buffs on the airplane as an artifact had produced an excessively antiquarian edge in the writing of aviation history in the United States. With only a few notable exceptions, books about aviation history tended to adopt a near sacred reverence for the machine itself in which facts, figures, data, and diagrams dominated historical writing to the exclusion of analysis and interpretation. The result was a plethora of books containing reference information and technical minutiae, but little guidance that might help readers understand the broad and complex roles that machine-powered flight had played in shaping modern culture and society (and vice versa).

In the years that have passed since the publication of Hansen’s article, the subfield of aviation history has grown considerably. A number of major new works have appeared which fulfill quite well Hansen’s call for flight historians to adopt a “wider view.” Although much still remains to be done before the history of flight technology will be as squarely situated in the professional “mainstream” as, say, military, diplomatic, or political history, aviation (and aerospace) history is, today, in much better shape than at any time in the past.

As such, it might now be “safe” to say a few things about the continuing important role played by amateur historians and aviation buffs to the field. At least, that’s what I increasingly came to think this past week as I undertook work on a class that I’ll be teaching in the spring of 2008 (”History of Flight Culture”).

One of the key challenges that I am facing in preparing the class involves the time-consuming process of tracking down the visual records that I will need to enable students to see for themselves the personalities, planes, and events that shaped the “aviation imagination” in the twentieth century. Here, I have found the ubiquitous presence of aviation enthusiasts on the internet to be an overwhelmingly positive and immensely helpful thing.

One case in point is the UK-based website “Those Magnificent Men.” Devoted to the history of European aviation between 1910 and 1914, the site contains a terrific collection of historic images as well as handy information summaries about the planes (and some major early events) that were so crucial to shaping the “dawn of aviation.”

The site’s proprietor, Tom Brearley, is a private pilot, airplane buff, and amateur historian who clearly knows well and enjoys the subject. I’m looking forward to including his site in the list of internet resources that I’ll be recommending students visit next spring.

In the end, I think that James Hansen was absolutely correct in calling for a “wider view” in the study of the aeronautical past that moved beyond the antiquarian tendencies of many aviation enthusiasts. Even so, professional scholars should not overlook the contributions that continue to be made by amateur historians and airplane buffs. Few other subfields can boast of so large a group that so frequently provides helpful resources and handy information.

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Domestic Archives
As I noted last week in the first part of this post, the use of archival sources is one of the chief characteristics that distinguishes “professional” from “popular” history. The materials that were incorporated into DotA came from both American and Russian archives. Although the latter were clearly more important than the former, I was able to glean a great deal of useful information from two US collections in particular.

National Air & Space Museum
The documents housed at the National Air & Space Museum represent a treasure trove for scholars working on aviation-related topics. Although the Air & Space collection is most useful for those focusing on American issues, regardless of one’s national/geographic specialty, the Museum’s library contains immensely useful resources. More important still are the curators and historians who work at NASM. Their collective knowledge of things aeronautical is unsurpassed. Anyone researching the history of aviation should plan to spend some time at Air & Space.

National Archives (Washington, DC)
In addition to providing me with a clearer understanding of America’s own aviation programs, the Records of the Bureau of Aeronautics provided extremely useful contemporary assessments of Imperial and Soviet developments from the perspective of US aviation experts. Meanwhile, correspondence from the Office of Naval Intelligence (America’s leading intelligence agency in the years prior to WWII) and the Defense Intelligence Agency was invaluable for documenting the Soviet Union’s extensive infiltration of American aviation businesses and industry during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

Russian Archives
Naturally, the vast majority of archival research for DotA was conducted in the Russian Federation. As very few readers have any need for a detailed description of Russian archival holdings relating to aviation, here I’ll simply provide samples of the more important materials that I uncovered during the course of my research.

Russian State Military-Historical Archive (RGVIA): The Russian State Military-Historical Archive is the principal repository for materials relating to the history of the Imperial Russian military. From the standpoint of my own work, the archival records of the General Staff and the Military Ministry’s budget office proved to be quite valuable. In addition to containing memoranda and reports on the tsarist government’s efforts to build a military air fleet, the latter collection contained correspondence that shed light on the relationship between the state and the private airplane manufacturers with which it negotiated contracts for the domestic construction of aircraft.

Russian State Military Archive (RGVA): RGVA houses Soviet military records from the Civil War to the eve of the Second World War (1918-1941). The archive is extremely important as materials contained in the various collections of the Revolutionary Military Committee enabled me to document the origins and development of the Red Air Fleet during the early 1920s. Recently declassified reports contained in the RGVA collection also revealed the numerous manufacturing and production crises besetting the USSR’s aviation industry during the decade preceding WWII.

Russian Archive of the Economy (RGAE): Along with documentation relating to Soviet planning commissions, RGAE provided a wealth of information concerning Communist Party efforts to popularize aviation among the USSR’s citizens. The two most important collections in this regard were the Main Inspectorate of the Civilian Air Fleet (fond 9527) and the “Maxim Gorky Agitational Squadron” (fond 9576) which contained reports and memoranda regarding domestic propaganda (or, “agit”) flights from the late 1920s through the mid 1930s.

State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF): Of all the Russian archives that I visited, GARF proved to be the most valuable. This is not surprising given that the archive’s collection contains the records of the USSR’s various “voluntary societies” devoted to aviation: the Society of Friends of the Air Fleet, Dobrolet, Aviakhim, and Osoaviakhim.

As the preceding descriptions are only intended to serve as glimpses of the kinds of materials used in writing DotA, I encourage graduate students and other researchers interested in visiting these archives to contact me for specific information regarding the collections and current working conditions.

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Analytical Works
The number of analytical secondary sources written for popular audiences is much smaller. Generally speaking, these are books written by journalists or professional writers who, while they may have an interest in aviation, are also widely published on other subjects as well. What sets these sources apart from the “aircraft inventories” is that they begin to consider the airplane within a broader historical context, or they advance a novel argument/thesis about aviation. Recently, a number of very good popular analyses have appeared. Near the very top of the list is Stephen Budiansky’s excellent Airpower, a survey of military airpower doctrine from Kitty Hawk through the Second Gulf War. Others examples include Richard Overy’s short work on The Battle of Britain and Lee Kennett’s The First Air War, 1914-1918.

Scholarly works
The final group of secondary sources are those written by professional historians and published by academic presses. In contrast to analytical popular histories, these works undergo a rigorous process of “peer review” before they’re accepted for publication. The manuscripts are sent out to two other professional historians who are experts in the field. These reviewers then check facts, challenge arguments, and offer detailed written assessments for revising, expanding, or otherwise improving the manuscript. To encourage an honest and candid assessment of the manuscript, the peer review process is “blind”. This means that the identity of the reviewers is kept secret from the author. He (or she) receives the evaluations of the manuscript not knowing who wrote them.

[Note: It is not uncommon for a manuscript to undergo not one, but two rounds of review, as the author, reviewers, and editor(s) debate the contents of the reviews and the author's responses to them. The blind peer review process explains, in part, why it takes longer to publish an academic history than it does to publish a "popular" one. This additional layer of "quality control" can add anywhere from 4-8+ months to the publication process.]

Although the number of scholarly works about aviation is nowhere near as large as the number of “inventories” and popular histories, scholarship on aviation and flight has really “taken off” over the course of the last decade. Many of the newer works [including Dictatorship of the Air] are devoted to what I refer to as flight or aviation “culture” (and others call “airmindedness“). Inspired by Joseph Corn’s path-breaking 1982 study, The Winged Gospel (now available in a 2002 reprint) these histories have paid increasing attention to the cultural, social, and political influence that aviation and the airplane have had in shaping the twentieth century.

Particularly noteworthy in this regard has been the contribution of UCLA professor Robert Wohl who is currently at work on the final installment of his three-volume trilogy concerning “Aviation and the Western Imagination.” The first two volumes, A Passion for Wings (1996) and The Spectacle of Flight (2005) have set the standard for historians focusing on Western European and American aviation.

Other leading professional aviation historians include: John D. Anderson, Roger Bilstein, Tom Crouch, Richard Hallion, Peter Jakab, Michael Neufeld, Dom Pisano, and Robert van der Linden.

Last (but certainly not least!), Von Hardesty, writing widely on both the Imperial and Soviet eras, has proven to be Russian aviation’s most prolific historian. In addition to having published numerous articles and essays on military aviation, Reina Pennington is author of Wings, Women, and War, the definitive account of Soviet women aviators in the Second World War. Insightful analysis of the contemporary, post-Soviet scene can be found in the writings of Jake Kipp and Benjamin Lambeth.