Alright, there's not enough ancient warfare on my feed, so let's fix that.

Let's talk about how you raise a 'barbarian' army in places like pre-Roman Gaul and Spain!

After all, these non-state societies punched well above their weight in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC! 1/ Most students pretty intuitively grasp how state societies raise armies, because we live in state societies, so we're familiar with mass conscription or paid professional soldiers as concepts.

But what if you don't have a centralized state in the first place? 2/

Now to make the other half of my Twitter angry, these campus protest crackdowns, often effectively preemptive, seem wrong and counterproductive.

In particular, I'm not seeing a lot of effort by many of these universities to show that the protests were destructive or threatening.

https://twitter.com/PetreRaleigh/status/1783520674205544638

Many of these are private universities, so declaring student-protestors are trespassing and kicking them off campus is legal, I guess, but pretty damn inconsistent with state university missions for things like free debate and open inquiry.

One observation from conferences (this latest SMH and others) is that if I compiled a petition signed by every person who tells me it is 'absurd' or 'inexplicable' or 'shameful' that I don't have a job yet, I could assemble a pretty impressive list. To my non-academic followers: no, it would not help. The median professor is quite assured of their ability to spot promising candidates (despite evidence to the contrary) and proud of it - more likely to be offended than impressed by the suggestion to 'let the field decide.'

Ok, this one is just going to break me if I don't tweet about it.

English 'disciple' comes from Latin 'discipulus' which means...wait for it...'learner.'

The English word is a direct transliteration from the very literal Latin translation. It means 'learners.'

https://twitter.com/naomirwolf/status/1780387005110555087

The etymology of discipulus is actually a bit unclear; older works assume it is disco ('to learn') + a diminutive root of puer ('boy') to mean 'schoolboy, learner.'

More recent work suggests older, dis+capio, a 'taker away' in the sense of 'the key takeaway is'...so 'learner.'

Writer who struggled unsuccessfully to make sense of 19th century legal English imagines she can probably swing first/second century ancient Koine Greek without training and show how everyone else has been translating wrong.

Mmmhmmm. Good luck with that.

https://twitter.com/naomirwolf/status/1780385997416497153

For what it is worth if you actually can read Koine, the entire Greek New Testament (Westcott and Hort text, which is a bit old but not wildly different from the current standard Nestle-Aland) is on Perseus, paired verse-by-verse w/ Vulgate and ASV ().perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?do…

The other observation I suppose I'd make on DD2 is that, as with the first game, the writing shares a minimalist style with FromSoft's offerings (Elden Ring, Dark Souls, etc), but I think fails to grasp how FromSoft builds stories around that style which fit it. 1/

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1779990603893293071

So, when I say 'minimalist' style, what I mean is that the dialogue is generally pretty minimal (often to the point of being kind of cryptic), with the player-character barely speaking.

NPCs talk at you, you don't get to, say, ask obvious questions. 2/

Now seems like a good time to re-up my essay on How Your History Gets Made () as a reminder that public funding of universities is what makes technical, scholarly research in history possible, which in turn makes public-facing history work possible.acoup.blog/2020/07/09/col… Good, scholarly work in history requires resources, after all: a good university library which can chase after rare books for you, research time and access to other materials (e.g. time to go to archives).

That really only happens within the university environment.

So, folks say that everything is stagnant, but today I plugged my pocket-computer into my car so it could give me real-time traffic updates on my drive to campus while playing my custom playlist, while my car automatically kept distance on the car in front of me on the highway. I also dropped my little kiddo off at daycare, which has an app that checks her in and out and gives me live updates on her activities and occasionally pictures.

She made this trip in a carefully designed, rear-facing car seat far safer than anything they had when I was a kid.

Truman was absolutely right to fire MacArthur.

"I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the president. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals." - Harry S. Truman

https://twitter.com/GrayConnolly/status/1778506746644021290

MacArthur attempted to freelance US foreign policy (against the wishes of the president), as US diplomatic intercepts, then quite classified, showed as well as attempting to end-run the president's policy through Congress (the famous Martin-letter).

Firing him was correct.

I think as a historian I essentially have to broadly agree with this take. Ask almost any historian, 'when in the past would you like to have lived?' and you'll get back, "how close to now can I go? Like, last week?"

As a military historian, well, war is way down. Way down.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1778373282267369526

Folks complain about 'forever wars' and the 'endless wars of neoliberalism,' but actually the rate of warfare has gone way down - take for instance Our World in Data's chart of state-based (read: war related) deaths:

I am going to scream.

Facial reconstruction BASED ON WHAT!? It looks like they started with her coins, but those a tiny, flat images in profile with no colors - so good luck with hair, skin or eye color. But they also toned down the hooked nose she has on those coins, so 🤷‍♂️

https://twitter.com/whencyclopedia/status/1777811480236163340

Calling this a 'reconstruction' while perhaps technically correct in some narrow sense is, I think, intentionally misleading - the implication is that we can be sure of all of these details, when we can be sure of almost none of them.

Finally getting around to reading @adam_tooze's Wages of Destruction (2007, I know) and while of course there are a lot of horrible things - it is a book about the Nazi economy, after all - the thing that just kind of broke me is how they financed the Volkswagen project. 1/ Because the project was just obviously economically non-viable within the confines of the Nazi political project, part of the financing scheme was to encourage workers to deposit 5 marks a week in a no-interest savings account, promising that when it reached 750, you got a car.2/

I want to speak to one objection to this piece, that this mode of promoting history is somehow morally suspect.

Ideological purity is a prestige good of the secure.

I am committed to saving my discipline and if I must 'speak the language of neoliberalism' to do it, I will. 1/

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1766887442609582496

Or alternately doing history dealing with the military is somehow icky.

You know what might make our military - & foreign policy in general - more humane, more responsible & more effective?

Better history! The military establishment isn't going away - but it could be better! 2/

A few days late to this debate, but I think part of the reason satirical depictions of fascism, especially in sci-fi settings, often struggle and are adopted by fascists is they tend to make the fascists good at war, a thing fascists value, but were historically rubbish at. 1/ Fascism and fascists place great value on war - the endless, almost atavistic pursuit of heroism that Umberto Eco notes - but, you know, suck at it.

I mean, remember that major war the fascists won? Of course you don't, they almost always lose. 2/

It isn't news that he fundamentally doesn't understand how anything works, but it still astounds me that Trump conceives of NATO as a tributary empire, where states pay us for protection, rather than, you know, an alliance where we all pay for our armies & fight together.

https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1756460423111422043

It is equally striking that his audience is either too ignorant, too stupid or too deep in the cult to notice that the guy they're listening to doesn't appear to understand how alliances work.

This is making the Twitter-Marxists very mad, but on reflection...no, I think I am comfortable with this judgement, especially if we're limiting the set to 'European colonial empires, 1917-present' though of course even then the competition for awfulness is stiff. 1/

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1753515758276243886

First, was the USSR a colonial empire?

Yes, obviously! If the Russian Empire was, why wouldn't the USSR - which spent its first years violently reincorporating Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, etc. - why wouldn't it be?2/

Whenever I talk about the jobs situation in History, I get a lot of folks telling me why it is.

And I would very much like if y'all took your neat theories and please looked at the chart below of the actual pattern of PhDs and jobs and asked, "does my theory remotely fit this?" Oh, it's probably declining overall enrollment!

Eeeexcept that sorting out the odd years of 2010 (economy sucks, go back to college) and 2020 (COVID stucks, stay home), university enrollment has been flat, not falling.

I guess we're doing this now too.

The issue with the original tweet is twofold: the first problem is of 'Latinity' - sure the Romans have a word, but how do they use it? Is it common? What are its most common uses?

The second is the failure to grasp Roman self-perception. 1/

https://twitter.com/latinedisce/status/1742833714466300031

So is 'virilitas' a common Latin word, the sort of word that might underpin some major Roman social value, strongly held belief in their culture?

No. As the Lewis&Short notes, it doesn't seem to be used at all in the Republic, so it's a late-appearing word. 2/

One thing I've noticed in teaching and public scholarship is that folks tend to think about 'development' in really binary terms: places and periods are either backwater dungpits or brilliant shining citadels of civilization and never in between. The split is most obvious with pre-modern Europe, which must either be the cradle of civilization or else the armpit of the world, rather than what it was: an unusually fragmented but otherwise unremarkable part of the 'settled zone' of agrarian states stretching over Eurasia.

My thought re: the Colorado decision - I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know how the law will turn.

But a lot of people seem to be waiting for the law to save them from Trump and as a historian I can comment: the law won't save you from a tyrant if the political will isn't there. 1/ Here I think the failure of Sulla's reforms to stabilize the Roman Republic is instructive.

After violently seizing power in 83, L. Cornelius Sulla tried to put in place a range of political reforms aiming in part to prevent someone from doing exactly what he had done. 2/

One thing that irritates me are folks now crying 'stalemate' in Ukraine to justify pulling aid.

Ukraine has launched 3 offensives, 2 of which succeeded, 1 stalled.

Would these folks have been calling for US surrender in Feb, 1943 after the Battle of Kasserine Pass? Wars have fast-moving phases and attritional phases. Winning sides in wars often have losing campaigns, sometimes many of them. The Allies spent most of 1942 getting clobbered.

There is an arrogance to assuming that quick victories are the only kind.