History

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Playing at the World 2e, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson

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Playing at the World 2e, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson

Few books have impacted me quite as much as the first edition of Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World. A 700 page self-published brick of a history on the origins and influences of Dungeons and Dragons was exactly the kind of deep nerd lore that I craved. I devoured it while working on my PhD, and even snuck in a little reference to it on my footnotes. Now long out of print, it was a book I would recommend but with many caveats around people having to really be into this kind of thing specifically. Thankfully, Peterson has seen fit to put together a revised second edition, now available via MIT Press, and Playing at the World has never been so approachable. While a weirdo like me can’t help but miss some of the first edition’s idiosyncrasies, even I must admit that this is altogether a more polished history of the origins of D&D and roleplaying games in general.

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Wargaming Korea: 1950-1953

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Wargaming Korea: 1950-1953

Partly inspired by some potential changes in my own life and partly because this year marks the tenth anniversary since my grandfather passed away, I’ve found myself with a newfound interest in the Korean War. I’m resisting the urge to turn this into a research/game project of a similar scale to We Intend to Move on Your Works, but I intend to at least dip my toe in and I would like to have a little structure as I dive deeper. With that goal in mind, I recently read The Coldest Winter and I’ve a short reading list to tackle over the rest of this year. In terms of games, I’m focusing only on operational games that look at the whole Korean peninsula – nothing tactical for the moment. I don’t want this to balloon into a huge life consuming project, so I’m only planning to play at most a handful of games.

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Remembering Pearl Harbor

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Remembering Pearl Harbor

Before he passed away in 2014, my grandpa wrote down a few short pieces about some of his memories from the years 1941-51. These were written for a cousin of mine as a way to record and share some of his stories. For most of my life he had been relatively quiet about these topics, but as he passed through his 80s and into his 90s, he opened up a bit more about it. One thing that struck me, though, was how when remembering Pearl Harbor and the entry of America into WWII what stuck in his mind 60 years later was not FDR’s speech or the horror of an attack on America. It was what America did to its own people. The stories below reflect the specific circumstances of growing up in relatively diverse rural communities in central California, and how what happened there shaped his memory of December 1941.

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We Intend to Move on Your Works - The Lost Cause in Games on the American Civil War: A Project

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We Intend to Move on Your Works - The Lost Cause in Games on the American Civil War: A Project

I am a scion of the Great Commonwealth of Virginia, the Old Dominion, and the son of an avowed Civil War buff so you can probably imagine that my childhood featured a lot of information about the American Civil War. In School I didn’t learn any history after 1865 until I was fourteen. The period between Jamestown and the end of the Civil War was the high point of Virginian hegemony and the school system was perfectly happy to dwell within that temporal space for as long as possible. During my childhood I was frequently taken to battlefields to play - I’ve been to Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Gettysburg, and many smaller sites more times than I can count. I even have a favourite obscure American Civil War site (it’s the Confederate Breastworks in West Augusta County, Virginia - although more for its scenic views and lovely hiking trail than its historical importance). Few historical events loomed as large in my life as the American Civil War and this has given me a complicated relationship with it.

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[Malta Month] Cutting Room Floor - The Great Siege of Malta

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[Malta Month] Cutting Room Floor - The Great Siege of Malta

The Great Siege of Malta in 1565 was not the first time that the Knight’s Hospitaller clashed with the Ottoman Empire, nor even the first time they had fought against the sultan Suleiman I, The Magnificent. Forty years earlier in the winter of 1522-3, at the very start of the sultan’s reign, he had driven the knights from their previous home on the island of Rhodes. The 1522 Siege of Rhodes is just one in a series of famous Ottoman sieges, starting with the Siege of Constantinople in 1453, then the less talked about 1480 Siege of Rhodes during which the Hospitallers drove off the forces of Suleiman’s father, and the later Siege of Malta in 1565. Suleiman opened his reign by driving the hated Knights Hospitaller, a military order with its roots in the eleventh century and which had participated in nearly every major crusading conflict, from the eastern Mediterranean and opened the sea for future Turkish expansion.

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Cutting Room Floor: The Bagler War

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Cutting Room Floor: The Bagler War

The Norwegian Civil Wars were a period of near continuous unrest that lasted for over a century, from1130 until 1240, and saw over twenty kings, pretenders, and claimants battling for control of the kingdom. Amidst this turmoil the reign of Sverre Sigurdson, who claimed the Norwegian throne in 1177 but only ruled as Sverre I from 1184 until his death in 1202, contains an interesting anecdote in the history of the crossbow.

Sverre’s rule was one marked by near constant conflict. He had originated as a pretender to the throne before eventually achieving legitimacy through warfare. An account of his reign was provided by the Sverris Saga, a poetic account of his life probably written by Karl Jónsson, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Munkaþverá in Northern Iceland. Jónsson died in 1213, meaning that the saga must have been written nearly contemporary to Sverre’s life. The saga says that Sverre’s initial group of followers consisted mainly of “vagrants, outcasts, and robbers who are primarily interested in plundering farmers.”

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Cutting Room Floor: The Calais Garrison

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Cutting Room Floor: The Calais Garrison

In the immediate aftermath of his famous victory at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, King Edward III laid siege to the city of Calais in Northern France. The siege was long and lasted through the winter, but in the end the city could not hold out and there was no sign of a relief army coming from the French king. In the subsequent decades Calais would provide a valuable foothold for the English on the European continent as well as granting them greater control over the English Channel. By the late fifteenth century the Pale of Calais, which consisted of the city of Calais and several nearby fortresses, was the last area in France still held by the English monarchy after King Charles VII’s reconquests of Normandy and Gascony. Defending Calais was a high priority, even during the upheaval of the War of the Roses. The soldiers defending Calais represented as close to a standing army as England had in the Middle Ages, and the information contained in the detailed records left by the garrison and its treasurers provide insight into the extent of crossbow use by the English during the era of the longbow.

When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History by Matthew Restall (HarperCollins, 2018)

When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History by Matthew Restall (HarperCollins, 2018)

I only very recently began improving my knowledge of the history of Spanish colonisation of the Caribbean and Mexico and must confess to still being quite the novice on the subject. My interest was spurred by intermittent brief references to the use of crossbows by Spanish conquistadors. I was intrigued and wanted to learn more, but I also knew that I couldn’t just dip a toe into the subject. The colonisation of Central and South America is a heavy subject and includes some of the worst genocides in human history. Even if what I was interested in was some niche facts about an old weapon, I couldn’t completely ignore that side of the history.

Matthew Restall has published many books on the Spanish in sixteenth-century America. I had previously read his Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, which is a great introduction to the subject of Spanish colonialism, and I would recommend it to anyone. That was a large part of why I was inclined to pick up When Montezuma Met Cortés, that and a Google Books search indicated that he at least mentioned crossbows a few times so I could be killing two birds with one stone.