Recently the Samurai Archives devoted a few episodes of their podcast to dissecting the relationship between military history and Japanese studies. The lead discussant on the program is Nathan Ledbetter, who blogs once a year or so at Sengoku Field Manual but comments regularly at the Samurai Archives forums. In these episodes his focus is […]
What does Darwin have to do with terracotta warriors, samurai armies, or Napoleon’s conquests? Quite a lot. Or at least this is what I argue in a paper I finished back in April. I anticipated refining it with extra research in the months since then. This hope was not realized. Other projects have consumed my […]
. “Hadrian’s wall at Greenhead Lough” by Velella,Image Source: Wikimedia In a recent War on the Rocks piece Iskander Rehman argues that the United States should not favor a foreign policy of retrenchment because United States policy makers are simply too daft and out of touch with the world to play the part of a modern day Castlereigh: […]
Image Source. Yesterday’s post, “Pre-Modern Battlefields Were Absolutely Terrifying,” has proven immensely popular. The sheer number of responses to it on social media, web forums, and other websites has been a bit overwhelming. My favorite of these was written by Lynn Rees, co-blogger over at Zenpundit. In a personal message to me he describes how […]
Image Source. “Man does not enter battle to fight, but for victory. He does everything that he can to avoid the first and obtain the second” –Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies: Ancient and Modern Battle, trans. John Greely and Robert Cotton (or. pub. Paris, 1870; trans. edition, New York, 1921), pg. 1. Of the many […]
Many of the Stage’s readers will be familiar with the work of “Pseudoerasmus,” currently the internet’s best blogger working on both economic development and macro-history. His most recent post is titled “Where do Pro-Social Institutions Comes From?“ I strongly urge you read it. In essence, Pseudoerasmus’s post tries to answer two questions: Why do humans cooperate? […]
A “Family Temperance Pledge” from 1887. Group pledges such as these were central to the success of the temperance movement. Source: Library of Congress. “An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera.” 2004. In the comment thread of the post “Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood: Three Centuries of American Political Culture” a […]
“Concentrate on Charkha and Swadeshi,” bazaar art, 1930’s Image Source. The ever interesting Omar Ali, who blogs and tweets about Islam, genetics, and all things Desi, forwarded an interesting essay to me the other day. It is a long piece by Brooklyn philosopher Samir Chopra on a growing movement in Indian academia led by Rajiv […]
I was delighted to receive Marjorie Garber‘s Shakespeare After All in the mail this morning. Garber’s book is a thousand page review of everything Shakespeare ever wrote, with each play claiming its own chapter length analysis. The introduction of Shakespeare After All is a fascinating tour of Shakespeare’s reputation though the centuries, describing how Shakespeare’s […]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.(1929 – 1968) stands in front of a bus at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott. Montgomery, Alabama December 26, 1956 Image Source Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who penned The Righteous Mind, wrote an important blog post a few days ago responding to a paper by sociologists Bradley Campbell […]
