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Reading List More from A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
Hey folks! The conclusion of our look at the Siege of Eregion in Rings of Power will have to wait a week because I am off to a conference this week, the annual meeting of the Society for Military History, this year in Mobile, Alabama! I’m set to talk about how Roman military commanders were … Continue reading Gap Week: March 28, 2025 →
This is the fourth part of our [five? -ish? I, II, III] part series on the Siege of Eregion in Amazon’s Rings of Power. Last week, we took the opportunity presented by Adar’s absurd plan to dam a river using catapults to collapse a mountain to discuss the capabilities and functioning principles of historical counterweight … Continue reading Collections: The Siege of Eregion, Part IV: What Siege Equipment? →
This is the third part of our [I, II, I don’t know, a few more?] part series looking at Rings of Power‘s Siege of Eregion from a military history perspective. Last week, we discussed the remarkably bad siege preparation of both sides: Adar’s complete lack of a fortified siege camp and Eregion’s complete lack of … Continue reading Collections: The Siege of Eregion, Part III: What Catapults? →
For this week, I want to take a step back (we’ll be back to our series on Rings of Power next week!) and talk about the craft of history: we’ve talked about “How Your History Gets Made” from the perspective of the different people who do it – research historians, public historians, educators and so … Continue reading Collections: What Do Historians Do? →
This is the second part of our [your guess is as good as mine] part series looking at the Siege of Eregion from the second season of Amazon’s Rings of Power. Last week, we saw how the logistics of this sequence absolutely do not work: Adar’s army has to cover an absurd amount of territory … Continue reading Collections: The Siege of Eregion, Part II: What Siege Camp? →
More in history
LAST OCTOBER I published a short breakdown of four geopolitical ‘schools’ that might shape China strategy under Trump. That piece was a pre-election preview of a much larger report I was writing for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. I published the preview as security: Trump might not win. If so I had better publish something before election day while interest in Trumpworld was guaranteed. Trump won. Interest in GOP debates did not abate. I continued to work on the report. As of this week the full thing is out. You can read it, in all its twenty-page glory, over at the FPRI website. What follows are some of its key points:
Civil rights icon Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr was shot and killed on April 4, 1968, on a motel balcony in Memphis. One of the earliest successes of the civil rights movement was a boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to … Continue reading The Assassination of Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr →
From Dwarfs to Wise Men... What's Up With the Number 7?
Ever thought about whether the world is there only because you think it is? That’s what George Berkeley meant with his philosophy of idealism. The 18th-century philosopher came up with a pretty wild idea: “To be is to be perceived.” According to him, we don’t find objects, and the world exists separately from our […]
Despite its status as one of the most widely known and studied epic poems of all time, Homer’s Iliad has proven surprisingly resistant to adaptation. However much inspiration it has provided to modern-day novelists working in a variety of different traditions, it’s translated somewhat less powerfully to visual media. Perhaps people still watch Wolfgang Petersen’s […]
