Military History Digest #376

David Silbey Blog Post


Ancient:

    The Emergence of Irregular Warfare in Prehistory: Tactics Employed in the Trojan War and Lessons Learned | Small Wars Journal https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/emergence-irregular-warfare-prehistory-tactics-employed-trojan-war-and-lessons-learned


Medieval:

    Charlemagne's Defeat in the Pyrenees | Amsterdam University Press https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463721059/charlemagnes-defeat-in-the-pyrenees

    Violence as Global Practice in the Early Medieval Western Mediterranean - Medievalists.net https://www.medievalists.net/2024/01/violence-as-global-practice-in-the-early

Soren Kierkegaard and Existential Realities as tied to Time (and Tense): Implications for Military History

By John T. Kuehn

This hand grenade treads a new path through the environment of flying explosions that are sometimes witnessed at this locale.

So here goes.

First, Kierkegaard 101.   The Danish Christian existentialist philosopher forged a new trail in the evolution of philosophy in the 19th century.  His greatest contribution was the idea of levels of being.

That is, there are levels of being, which are tied to levels of sentience (or lack of it), but for his purposes he confined himself to

In this post for the H-CivWar Author's Blog, Daniel Farrell shares research on and discusses the challenges of interpreting people’s behavior through the lens of age and age differences. Ultimately, how much emphasis should historians place on tangents, however interesting?

During some recent archival research, I came across what I considered to be a somewhat humorous letter. In September 1863, a Marylander, Samuel Freeland, petitioned the War Department to release his son, a Confederate soldier imprisoned at Fort Delaware. His rationale? His son was allegedly weak-minded and easily tricked –

The Fringes of Imprisonment Policy

Daniel Farrell Blog Post

In this post, Daniel Farrell, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Cincinnati, reflects on alternative ways to think about Civil War era arrests and imprisonment.

During a research trip over the summer, I came across several letters written by William Wooden, a Missourian charged with disloyalty and sentenced to prison. Wooden’s personal experience is not what piqued my interest, but instead his administrative route through incarceration. In June 1863, the military held Wooden at the “Crobea Hotel” in Buchanan County, Missouri, before spending time in both Gratiot Street Prison in

July Handgrenade--Generals Don't Matter (?)

John Kuehn Blog Post

July 2019 Handgrenade

Generals Don’t Matter (?)

John T. Kuehn

            A very interesting article appeared in the last month that has a lot of folks buzzing and chattering. Its title is “Do Generals Matter?” by Cathal Nolan.  Thus my title—a restatement of the thesis, which is –not really. The author presumably goes into far more detail on this score in his much longer, and we are told award-winning, book The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press).   The publication venue, the online War on the Rocks, was “proud to announce its first