A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
A look at history and popular culture
Last time, we introduced the factors that created the trench stalemate in the First World War and we also laid out why the popular 'easy answer' of simply going on the defensive and letting the enemy attack themselves to death was not only not a viable strategy in theory but in fact a strategy which … Continue reading Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate
This week (and next) I want to build a bit off of our discussion of Victoria II and talk a bit about World War I and in particular the trench stalemate on the Western Front. That trench stalemate is, in many countries, synonymous with the war itself. Of course the war was much larger than … Continue reading Collections: No Man’s Land, Part I: The Trench Stalemate
This post is now available in audio format here. Note from the Editor: This week, Michael Taylor joins us to present A Defense of Classics. The last decade or so has seen Classics (the study of Mediterranean antiquity or more narrowly the study of Greece and Rome) in a hard sort of quandary. On the … Continue reading Meet a Historian: Michael Taylor on Why We Need Classics
This is the third and final part of a three part series (I, II) examining the historical assumptions of Paradox Interactive's 19th and early 20th century grand strategy game, Victoria II. Last time, we looked at how the game's models for the industrial revolution and warfare interacted: by simulating (even in a fairly limited and … Continue reading Collections: Teaching Paradox, Victoria II Part III: World’s Fair