11–20 of 41 posts
Have enjoyed this series a lot. His whole blog is great and you can easily spend hours reading through his lengthy, well-researched posts if you have an interest in premodern military history or topics that brush up against it (i.e. strategy video games, fantasy literature, etc).
I'd love to read something similar about how taxation and the management and securement of (moving or fixed) gold/money reserves worked back then in practice.
Agreed. The author makes a few comments in the second part of the series about how ships of gold were the main way to ferry money around and how if that went wrong it had sweeping consequences, too. Would be a really interesting series fro this author.
There's also the series on the defense of cities, the series on bread and the one on clothing.
Oh, and the series on steel production.
You know what? Just read everything he's written.
Amazing work from Bret as usual, but very sad that this kind of popular/actually useful history is completely unrewarded in academia. This is far more valuable than whatever top university press book most historians write.
I think Bret rightfully treats it as a secondary career and that his patrons are very right to support him.
This has been one of my favourite of his series. I've been thinking about making a game with some of my friends to model the complexity of moving an army around.
Let the user decimate units for indiscipline and stuff too. or hang cheating officers to win troop loyalty. Could be a real favorite of sadists and masochist.
Amazing work from Bret as usual, but very sad that this kind of popular/actually useful history is completely unrewarded in academia. This is far more valuable than whatever top university press book most historians write.
It’s entertainment. Academia shouldn’t be entertainment, at least that is my opinion. I’ve seen more than a few erstwhile respected professors turn into talking heads without much substance by sudden media fame. One of the better stories was the one that started bringing in his own newspaper clippings to the universities media department in order to rank higher on the yearly media ranking. After that he rented an apa…
Complete disagreement here. Informative writing may serve as entertainment, but if it's done well, that's not all it is. It helps people understand the world, which can provide all kinds of benefits beyond keeping them from being bored for a few minutes.
In fact, this type of work is precisely how people learn almost everything, right up to grad school, which means it's the way the overwhelming majority of education is conducted. Most people going through that aren't doing it for entertainment. Hell, Spivak's Calculus is more on this level—presenting findings to non-experts—than it is an academic endeavor, and no one dismisses that as just being entertainment.
It may not be valuable to people who are already experts in a field, so may not be properly "academic", but this categorization of acoup (and anything like this work) as simply entertainment is going way too far.
Amazing work from Bret as usual, but very sad that this kind of popular/actually useful history is completely unrewarded in academia. This is far more valuable than whatever top university press book most historians write.
It’s entertainment. Academia shouldn’t be entertainment, at least that is my opinion. I’ve seen more than a few erstwhile respected professors turn into talking heads without much substance by sudden media fame. One of the better stories was the one that started bringing in his own newspaper clippings to the universities media department in order to rank higher on the yearly media ranking. After that he rented an apa…
The tl;dr is basically that part of an academic's job is to educate not just the professionals but also the lay public. By using fantasy and other pop culture works, he's introducing pretty important military history and theory concepts to those who wouldn't otherwise attempt to wade into it--and if they enjoy it, they might come back for some more pressing and serious can't-sugarcoat-this topics such as the implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In general, I would say that academics all too commonly forget the need to engage with people outside of their narrow disciplines, and in doing so, you can cede the field to engaging writers who are way out of their depths and horribly wrong about what they are writing (e.g., Jared Diamond).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s entertainment. Academia shouldn’t be entertainment, at least that is my opinion. I’ve seen more than a few erstwhile respected professors turn into talking heads without much substance by sudden media fame. One of the better stories was the one that started bringing in his own newspaper clippings to the universities media department in order to rank higher on the yearly media ranking. After that he rented an apa…
Bret actually has an entire thread on this in Twitter ( https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1513255197597966341 ), responding to someone calling him "the orc logistics guy". The tl;dr is basically that part of an academic's job is to educate not just the professionals but also the lay public. By using fantasy and other pop culture works, he's introducing pretty important military history and theory concepts to t…
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the Diamond example here, but I think of him as precisely a cautionary tale for academics, of what can go wrong when they try to go too far in the pop-science, big-picture, broad-audience direction. Diamond is solidly an academic, not some kind of outsider... he's held a professorship at UCLA for 50+ years. But later in his career decided he wanted to write "big history" interdisciplinary synthesis for a popular audience.
I suppose one could try to write for a popular audience without going that far outside your own discipline/expertise though.
Amazing work from Bret as usual, but very sad that this kind of popular/actually useful history is completely unrewarded in academia. This is far more valuable than whatever top university press book most historians write.
It’s entertainment. Academia shouldn’t be entertainment, at least that is my opinion. I’ve seen more than a few erstwhile respected professors turn into talking heads without much substance by sudden media fame. One of the better stories was the one that started bringing in his own newspaper clippings to the universities media department in order to rank higher on the yearly media ranking. After that he rented an apa…
Academia ostensibly has a dual focus, on both research and education. But the really is usually different from that messaging.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bret actually has an entire thread on this in Twitter ( https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1513255197597966341 ), responding to someone calling him "the orc logistics guy". The tl;dr is basically that part of an academic's job is to educate not just the professionals but also the lay public. By using fantasy and other pop culture works, he's introducing pretty important military history and theory concepts to t…
> In general, I would say that academics all too commonly forget the need to engage with people outside of their narrow disciplines, and in doing so, you can cede the field to engaging writers who are way out of their depths and horribly wrong about what they are writing (e.g., Jared Diamond). Maybe I'm misunderstanding the Diamond example here, but I think of him as precisely a cautionary tale for academics, of what…
Also - generally speaking, I think being able to speak (or write) in a manner that's compelling for audiences across broad backgrounds, rather than just their niche community is a skillset to be admired.
Science does nothing if people do not believe in it, or do not engage with it.
I definitely agree that this does not give academics license to veer entirely outside of their expertise and use their credentials in the field to hide this (eg: Diamond). But I think not trying at all is worse. Far worse.
Amazing work from Bret as usual, but very sad that this kind of popular/actually useful history is completely unrewarded in academia. This is far more valuable than whatever top university press book most historians write.
I think it is fair to say that the marginal value of one extra ACOUP sized blogpost of high quality popular education material is probably higher than one extra book, but that comes down to the relatively lack of high quality popular education material.