“You may have horses…. But remember this: if you have horses everything will be changed for you forever.” -Cheyenne Myth quoted in Pekka Hamalainen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” Journal of American History, vol. 90, no. 3 (December 2003), p.841. “The historian of the early military must first see how a […]
The side-bar of this blog declares that the Stage is a space to discuss “the intersections of governance, ecology, demographics, and culture.” [1] This casts a wide net–at times, too wide of a net. It would be much easier to maintain a blog devoted solely to exploring the ‘dynamics of human civilization,’ chronicling the decline […]
As Lexington Green says, if you are not reading John Robb‘s new website, then you should be.Mr. Robb has a unique biography. Titles like USAFA cadet, SERE school grad, Yalie, astronautical engineer, counter-terrorism operator, military theorist, tech analyst, software executive, and best selling author have been given to Mr. Robb at one point or another. […]
Scott Reinhard, Expert Button (February 2010). Print at Scott Reinhard Co. Image source. Last month Tom Nichols, professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a well regarded authority on Russian foreign policy and American nuclear strategy, published a thought-provoking essay on his blog titled “The Death of Expertise:” […]
A Taureg nomad in the Sahara. Photograph by Carsten Peter, National Geographic. © “The nomadic strategy is one means by which people adapt to thinly spread resources and to the variability of the resources across space and over time. It is also a strategy for avoiding other deleterious environmental conditions, such as extreme heat […]
The world before the Mongols. Map Created by Thomass Lessman for Wikimedia “I will now tell you all about the Tartars and how they acquired their empire and spread throughout the world.” – Marco Polo, The Travels [1] I suspect the Mongol Empire needs no introduction to the readers of The Stage. No conquests so […]
A popular 10th grade world history book by Elizabeth Ellis.Image Source. Earlier this week Al West wrote two short posts about world history and world history books that I found interesting. World history books? Mr. West does not like them: “Usually, they’re lacking in archaeological nous, have little or no accurate prehistoric content (a big […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. TOP BILLING “How To Lose a War: A Primer“Mark Safranski. Zenpundit.com. 28 July 2013. Since Pakistan is now attempting to get its victory over the United States in Afghanistan formally ratified, now seemed to be a good time to reflect on the performance of American […]
No time for substantive commentary tonight, but I wanted to point my readers to four articles worth their time. All concern life before the Neolithic Revolution – that is, human society before the advent of agriculture and the civilizations built upon it. There are many common misconceptions about hunter-gather societies. This is partly because there […]
This post was originally published in December 2010. A comment thread at Zenpundit’s place has inspired me to resurrect it. I recently read a book by survivalist blogger James Wesley Rawles, How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It. This reading has prompted a few thoughts on the aims and validity of […]
