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Hon wa watashi no meiyodesu
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Jan 28, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
This is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it as a precursor to American or Canadian history, or if you are interested in early modern maritime history.

It details the inner workings of the Hakluyt commercial circle and Sebastian Cabot before Virginia. Image The rise of Antwerp had severely undercut revenues from England’s wool and manufactured cloathing export. Exports had fallen by 85% and the Baltic/Atlantic trades were already too busy. The envisioned Northeast Passage to Cathay was hoped to save the English export economy. ImageImage
Jan 27, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
I think, having finished this book, Pekka has failed in many aspects of his sell by leaning too heavily into pan-nativism to tie his narrative together in the 19th century and beyond. The first part of his book, the 17th-18th century, handled this better. What is believable power for the Iroquois to posses in the 18th century is imperfectly transferred to the Lakota in the 1880s. His other books probably have more room to describe the apex and decline of the pastoralists, but they feel rushed and confused here.
Dec 19, 2022 7 tweets 4 min read
Listening to Pekka Hämäläinen’s books rn. Will post a few excerpts below, so far really good for ethnographic-national history angle to early American (ethnic) history, because it restores geopolitical power to the history of peoples like Iroquois, Creek, Lakota etc. Despite the title, this is no “Pan-Native” look into a “Indian vs White” moralistic framework. This book is summarizes a lot of important points about Amerindian warfare and struggles for power before, after, and centuries after contact with Europeans.
Nov 2, 2022 33 tweets 23 min read
ImageImage Mexica nobility acquired their tastes for human flesh as a ritual staple food after the empire had been solidified and ritual sacrifice became formulaic. Earlier this practice would have been less systematic.

Sexual morality was strictly enforced in Mexica society. ImageImage
Aug 4, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
It’s definitely one of the hardest problems in the history of the English or Americans to get over, since the ethno-confessional aspects of the national divide, taken as a given from the 17th- early 19th centuries, have lost much of their relevance in the wider masses since. Perhaps just a natural occurrence from the ever wider scope ascribed to “political nationality” and “national history” in the English speaking world, combined with ever intensifying and amorphous dissent against dissent supplanting both papacy as it was and dissent as it was.
Aug 4, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
Enjoyed being on for this, one point I didn’t make but wish I had is that Jefferson and a number of other founders could easily tell you of the significance of Edward the Elder, Æthelstan, and Edmund and had their own ideas of “alt history” where William was defeated at Hastings. Despite their dislike of the Plantagenets and Toryism, both formed a fundamental viewpoint in what America should be as an inversion of “Normanism” and everything associated with it. Jefferson banned and then rewrote Hume’s History of England before reintroducing it to UVA.
Jul 11, 2022 19 tweets 15 min read
After over a year of waiting, I got scans of Anton Denikin’s unpublished and unfinished book “Slander on the White Movement” which is actually just an extended rage post about General Golovin’s 12 volume work that has some negative things to say about Denikin in 1918 ImageImage Russian Dissertations on the Terek Region and the Civil war. Outside of a few more physical monographs (in total about 4) and a number of articles in almanacs, this is the entire academic body of work in the region during this period since 1991 ImageImageImageImage
Jun 30, 2022 8 tweets 3 min read
Prime Example of historiography wars: In exile, Ukrainian historians typically didn’t mention who fought the Bolsheviks in October 28th-30th or make it generalized “the Kiev military district of the Russian army and its commander.”

The reds say who it was, but sensationalize ImageImage “A drunken mob of Officers, Cossacks from the Cossack Congress (held in Kiev) and junkers were preparing to pogrom our workers!”

Meanwhile the Cossacks who were there wrote a book that casually detailed the situation that was locked away for 70 years in 10 copy obscurity.
Jun 29, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
General Skoropadsky had created a core of 40,000 more or less reliable forces from the 300,000 that “nationalized” after the February Revolution, but he was met with hostility from the Rada. Recreating the events from September 1917 to May 1918 in Ukraine as they happened in every major location could make a three volume history itself with just the effort to track down and summarize what happened from all the periodicals, memoirs, and papers in every language.
May 23, 2022 11 tweets 7 min read
In a long overdue thread, I will be slowly posting the differences between the Russian Original Printed version of Wrangel’s memoirs to the English translation “Always With Honor” reprinted by @MysteryGrove First a little background for the unitiated. Always with Honor represents about 1/6 to 1/8 of what Wrangel originally wrote. Until I’m able to physically go to the Hoover Institute, I won’t be able to see the much expanded drafts. Wrangel had to cut at least half of his book.
Mar 25, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
Yakov Slashchov-Crimsky gets a lot of mention in Wrangel’s memoirs. He is the officer who Wrangel finds in a dissolute state with a parrot in a train car. He had been one of the fiercest combat commanders, but during the civil war he became addicted to morphine and cocaine. ImageImage Wrangel had to take him out of active duty, despite awarding him the St. Nicholas and giving him the honorary surname, and this was the cause of much bitterness with Slashchev and his staff officers. They would break with the ROVS and return to the Soviet Union.
Feb 28, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
I finished listening to this and it was very good for me to hear. He makes some very good points about the lessons of the book and his takes are exactly what I was looking for to form more commentary for an American audience who may have read a few things on Rev/Civil War But have not gone to a specialized knowledge of reading 50 sources or more on a specific time/front within the War. I think there’s a lot of room to expand on the themes he brought up about the leadership cadre’s professional quality versus its political outlook and actual means.
Feb 28, 2022 13 tweets 8 min read
Stanitsa Luganskaya, Decossackification and Ukraine. After the capture of Kazan by Ivan IVth, the territories of the Northern Donets were secured for the Early Cossacks who had come to aid from the Don. Several settlements sprang up around the modern Stanitsa, often having to rebuild after raids from the Tatars or Nogais.
Feb 26, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
Soldiers who are fighting are not Reddit, even if they lie to themselves. But the leadership and information classes of the Ukrainians certainly is. They never took the concept of Ukraine seriously except to gaslight themselves and their people without preparing them. Like I’ve said before a Ukraine that took the Cossack LARP seriously could have built up layered defenses and reserves by revitalizing that system of military service and decentralized reserves.

If you must have 2 revolutions in 20 years, at least revolutionize your society.
Feb 4, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
In the interwar, there was an entire Emigre Cossack Archive and Press house in Prague, it had tens of thousands of documents, some of the State Voisko archives too evacuated from Crimea or through Georgia. It disappeared after 1945. I don’t think it’s been “reconstructed.” George Fischer was one of the chief Americans overseeing the creation of the Russian Collection of the Hoover Institute, General Golovin who wrote a 7 volume Anti Denikin History was the purchasing agent for Europe.

They competed with the Czechoslovak Zemgor Archive
Feb 1, 2022 8 tweets 4 min read
“Belyi Arkhiv” was published by Yakov Markovich Lisovoy, an odd character who repeatedly built and lost archives. During the war he collected thousands of newspapers, books, orders, and copies of documents. His intent with “White Archive” was to create a mirror to “Red Archive” ImageImageImageImage Red Archive would collect increasingly redacted and edited materials over the 30s, before being shut down in 1941. Still it had 106 volumes and the stuff before 1930 is somewhat more reliable. Lisovoy wanted to use his own massive collection he had saved from Crimea to compete. ImageImage
Jan 3, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
Part of it is creating an ideological basis of the American people through the interpretation that American radicalism has yet to be fully realized. He’s better than Foner, in the Oxford history of the US series which he is the chief editor of, but I like this anecdote: The Oxford History of the United States was started in the 1970’s and is still being written, most volumes are quite good information sources.

But what volumes have come out?
The easiest ones to write from their perspectives have come out first. The last was Reconstruction.
Jan 3, 2022 7 tweets 6 min read
Talking about Taylor & Foner versus the Oxford history was fun here,

For anyone who might think I went to fast with recommendations at the end, I want to give you a more expanded list.

Starting with my own introduction to US Colonial History, the standard textbook 100 years ago Oliver Perry Chitwood was one of the greatest early 20th century colonial historian scholars, though he looks more at the evolution of political institutions and religious communities more than ethnology, which David Hackett Fisher is a good but incomplete study.
Oct 27, 2021 16 tweets 9 min read
After waiting for the better part of the year I got British Intelligence officer David Footman’s info pamphlets on the Russian Civil War and the Baltic. Image Unlike most sources published in Britain, Footman does not attribute the Baltic Freikorps as being agents of the German state, which is found in works of much later date.

He says they are much like the young English men who joined the Black and Tans, and gets their POV correct.
Oct 27, 2021 4 tweets 3 min read
Article by Peter Holquist on Decossackization.

Typical apologetic explanations of the policy have said that it was the conditions of the Civil War that set the methods of the future Soviet Union towards the social Volksgemeinschaft, Holquist argues that it was innate. The peasant attitudes to the Cossacks became increasingly hostile, but it was the “materialist” and “class reductionist” intelligentsia-nomenclatura of the senior party that conceptualized the liquidation of the Cossacks as a zoological prerogative and not a class/cultural one.
Oct 26, 2021 9 tweets 4 min read
I got this today, it’s Rutych’s life long effort at collecting biographical information from the Northwest Army in Immigration. It’s a historical dictionary with an introductory essay I’m going to share because it has information not in any English source. Yudenich spent most of 1918-first half of 1919 in Finland lobbying Mannerheim to assist in a drive on Petrograd through Karelia. They had reached an agreement by June but Mannerheim withheld publicly announcing it because he wanted to win the July Finnish Presidential Election.