"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux)

Ah, great man theory. There's a reason most remotely competent historians abandon this model of reasoning by the end of their first year of graduate study. <span class="quote-card" data-quote-index="0"></span>...

So I don't know this is directed at me, but I also don't know anyone else whose done this exact thing and when I google "Minas Tirith Logistics" I am results 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6. So I think this is directed at me? So, if it is, let me explain the concept of a 'teaching tool.' 1/ <a target="_blank" h...

I suppose we're doing this again. This is incorrect: the Roman army relied heavily on non-citizens throughout nearly the whole of Roman history, including the periods of its greatest success in the third and second centuries, when Rome came to dominate the Mediterranean. 1/ ...

Worldbuilding/history chatter: the Nights Watch from ASoIaF/GoT/HotD don't actually make a lot of sense. The basic problem here isn't fantasy at all: how to keep a permanent security presence on a distant and potentially inhospitable border is an old problem. 1/...

How exactly diversity is strength: a 🧵. The ideology of xenophobic extremism in the USA is back in the discourse for terrible reasons and I want to address one part of it - the idea that diversity is weakness - from the perspective of a military historian. 1/...

One of the things in visual representations of the past, especially a 'fantastic' past (e.g. fantasy medieval Europe) is the tendency to skip over the period when mail was the dominant heavy armor, from roughly the second century BC to the 13th century AD. So let's talk mail. 1/...

So this tweet and the attached video has been making the rounds (again, in the case of the vid) and getting a range of responses, so it is worth talking about it, because for various reasons, no, I do not think this is a good example of the 'devastating power of cavalry.' 1/ <span class="quote-card...

Appreciate this being called a shield wall rather than a phalanx or testudo or some more specific term. I should note that despite such overlapped, vertically stacked (two rows) shield walls showing up a lot in fiction/movies, that's not how they worked historically. 1/13 <span class="quote-card" ...

It is interesting to see folks try to apply game logic (particularly board game logic) to try to understand the failure of Russian forces to achieve their objectives so far - assuming clever, complex ruses and sacrifice plays. But war isn't a board game. 1/...