Roll it!

From the New York Times At War blog: MINGORA, Pakistan — The Taliban are gone in Swat, and one of the best illustrations of their absence was on display a few days ago at a local cinema: the movies are back. The men began lining up at 10 a.m. Forty-five minutes later, they began surging past a security guard into the courtyard through a side gate. They sidestepped the ice cream...

The Pennsic War, July-August 2009

A while back Will McLean posted a video on the most recent Pennsic War. It rather got overshadowed by the Staffordshire Hoard, but now I will embed the video, a classy job by Voice of America. (No, I'm not in i...

Staffordshire hoard website

R.S. Nokes passes on the link for the clearinghouse websi...

Galactic center, Milky Way

From Astronomy Picture of the D...

More on the Staffordshire hoard

The BBC has a good article.Excerpt: ... there are two main possibilities. The first is that this treasure has been purposefully deposited, like an offering to a god. But, from my 21st-Century perspective, I find it bewildering that someone could shove so much metalwork into the ground...

What I said about Spain and India -- a follow-up to the "Bad Samaritans" post

Ha-Joong Chang said in his book Bad Samaritans that "cultural explanations" of economic development often seem to be self-justification based on 20/20 hindsight. Here's what I said in 2005 at a conference at the Political Science Department of the University of Delhi about how similar discussion of the world history of democracy often misses the point.What we need, as the record...

Bad Samaritans, by Ha-Joon Chang

I just discovered this book, which came out a couple of years ago, thanks to Brad DeLong, who provided a link to a pre-print to chapter 9, "Lazy Japanese and Thieving Germans- Are Some Cultures Incapable of Economic Development?"Phil Paine and I have been working from a similar set of ideas when we discuss the world history of democracy (or political systems of other kinds). If...

Boxes and boxes of gold

That's what one expert said about the biggest Anglo-Saxon treasure trove ever found -- a huge collection of items, many of them stripped off weapons. This has got to be the hidden wealth of a king or a very successful army at the end of a string of luck. The image above, from...

Terminology

I am writing a book on 14th- century men-at-arms based on Geoffroi de Charny's Questions on the joust, tournaments and war, especially the war section. As was the case in my 4th-year seminar last year, I am wrestling with terminology, especially the words "chivalry" and "knight."...

Just doing our job, ma'am

If they fix things in your neighborhood, consider yourself luc...

Gregory of Tours and Obama

A fine little essay from Magistra et Mater. An excerpt:Historians once largely believed what Gregory of Tours wrote in his ‘Ten Books of History’ (which is how the History of the Franks is now more accurately referred to). Gregory might be naive (all that reporting of miracles), but his artlessly gory portrayals of Merovingian life told us all we needed to know about the horrors...

Scenes from the last Afghan war

...done in ballpoint pen by a Russian soldier. From English Russ...

Then there is this...

Behind the Veil, a video report on women in Kandahar from the Globe and Ma...

Meet the Afghan Army: Is It a Figment of Washington's Imagination?

This is one title of an article by Ann Jones in Tomdispatch.com and the Huffington Post that simply must be read. Will any Canadian MP have the guts to ask the Government where the Afghan Army is?The killer excerpt (lots more, it's a long and detailed article):The Invisible MenWhat is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk...

Book review Sunday: Europe's Barbarians AD 200-600, by Edward York

Leonard Lipschutz over on MEDIEV-L contributes this:Last month Edward James, author of The Franks (1988) published an outstanding new scholarly work, Europe’s Barbarians AD 200-600 (2009). The first chapters provide an up-to-date chronological survey, and analytical chapters expertly review current debates, on ethnicity, archaeology, reception by Rome, migration, assimilation,...

The Long Morning of Medieval Europe, ed. by Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick

I didn't know about this book until a few minutes ago, but I take a positive review by Jonathan Jarrett on such a subject pretty seriously. Here's how it starts:Yes, I know I was writing about something else but this is important. If you’re working on the early Middle Ages, especially the Continental early Middle Ages, you need to get hold of a copy ofJennifer Davis’s and Michael...

This (among many other things) is Communist China, 60 years on

The National Grand Theatre, lit and surrounded by wat...

Geoffroi de Charny, VIP

Those of us who have read and enjoyed Geoffroi de Charny's 1350s treatise The Book of Chivalry quite naturally think that he was a pretty important guy. But while writing the introduction for my book Men at Arms it really hit home to me how an extraordinary a figure he was.In evaluating the past it is sometimes hard to avoid overrating people who wrote or were written about in...

A linguistic anthropologist delivers his spiel

Stephen Chrisomalis at Glossographia revisits an old debate. A couple of tasty passages:I do not believe there are any grounds at all to believe that there is such a thing as ’science’ to be made clearly distinct from ‘the humanities’ – that at best these are used to designate semi-useful collocations of perspectives, and at worst, they are self-serving labels used to isolate...

Play along

Driftglass sends us this Penn and Teller piece on the game "Greatest Human Being." Got another candida...

From the NYT: Fashion in Iraq now

I was reading a short time ago about the visible spread of conservative dress among Iraqi women over the last decade. Now things may be swinging the other way.Image: Engineering students in Baghd...

Froissart lives!

Will McLean says:Eric Jager's The Last Duel (New York, 2004) is written in the spirit of Froissart. And I don't mean it in a good way. I mean that just like Froissart, Jager likes to present a vivid and compelling narrative full of convincing detail, and he doesn't mind making stuff up to do it.And then Will goes on, correctly, to critique Jager's account of "the big fight scene"...

Out of the East: Spices and the medieval imagination, by Paul Freedman

This book was a real treat, and not just because much of it was about food and dining. It's one of the best-written medieval/early modern history books I have read in a long time, and one of the most original.If you have ever eaten, tried cooking or just read about aristocratic food...

Historical re-creation, up close and personal

From a recent joust in Ontario. Click the pic for an even closer impression.Thanks to Kyle Andre...

An episode in universal history: the face of war

Someone told me this story this evening.A Hungarian woman carrying bread passed by an internment camp where Polish PoWs were being held. Some of the prisoners called out to her and she gave them some of her bread. The German guards were incensed and began to shout at her. The...

More discouraging news from Iraq

Many of my readers are academics or students and naturally have their complaints about their educational institutions. McClatchy's Inside Iraq has a story that may be hard for most of us here to match:One of the old story that I heard was about the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was when one of his advisers told him that corruption had invaded most of the ministries....

The burning planet

The Station Fire north of Los Angeles seen from orb...