What's wrong with American higher education? Are colleges corrupt? Greedy? Woke?

I worked for 12 years to earn my BA, MA, and PhD in History. I'm now a professor at one of the more conservative Christian colleges in America.

A 🧵 on what US colleges get wrong. 1/27 I've worked in higher education as a student and professor since 2012. I see four main problems in American higher education today:
Bureaucracy
Pedigree
Ideology
Entitlement
To prepare American students in the 21st Century, colleges need to address these four crises. 2/27

What would the mighty Romans have said about the ridiculous "fur babies" of the 21st Century?

Well, the results might surprise you.

TL;DR: the past isn't all one thing the further you go back. how much people cared about dogs depends on class, culture, and the type of dog. 1/25 Of course, an early example of this in the western tradition is Homer, who described the relationship between the hero Odysseus and his dog, Argos.

As they were speaking, a dog that had been lying asleep raised his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Odysseus had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any enjoyment from him. In the old days he used to be taken out by the young men when they went hunting wild goats, or deer, or hares, but now that his master was gone he was lying neglected on the heaps of mule and cow dung that lay in front of the stable doors till the men should come and draw it away to manure the great close; and he was full of fleas. As soon as he saw Odysseus standing there, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not get close up to his master. When Odysseus saw the dog on the other side of the yard, dashed a tear from his eyes without Eumaios seeing it, and said:'Eumaeus, what a noble dog that is over yonder on the manure heap: his build is splendid; is he as fine a fellow as he looks, or is he only one of those dogs that come begging about a table, and are kept merely for show?'

'This dog,' answered Eumaios, 'belonged to him who has died in a far country. If he were what he was when Odysseus left for Troy, he would soon show you what he could do. There was not a wild beast in the forest that could get away from him when he was once on its tracks. But now he has fallen on evil times, for his master is dead and gone, and the women take no care of him. Servants never do their work when their master's hand is no longer over them, for Zeus takes half the goodness out of a man when he makes a slave of him.'

So saying he entered the well-built mansion and made straight for the riotous pretenders in the hall. But Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years.—Homer, Odyssey, Book 17, lines 290-327

2/25

Just had a great talk with some reenactors: Basically, they were asking, if musketry was as accurate as revisionist historians would have us believe, then why are casualties so relatively light during battles of the eighteenth century?

🧵1/14 On average, about 14% of combatants were killed and wounded in eighteenth century battles. In some fights, like Oriskany in the AWI, or Zorndorf in the European SYW. If muskets could hit fairly accurately out to about 100 yards, why would this be the case? 2/14

I've worked as a military historian for 10 years, teaching undergrads and ROTC cadets.
The thing that many students get wrong about war is focusing on a tactic or piece of technology. Single technologies rarely revolutionize war overnight. You have to take a broader look. 🧵1/25

https://twitter.com/brandan_buck/status/1861555248482963789

Today you see this in conversations about Elon Musk and the F-35. Futurists ask: Should we ditch the F-35 for drone swarms? Will drones make it impossible for infantry to operate on the battlefield? Will all future combat systems be autonomous? 2/25

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1860574377013838033

Nuclear weapons have been around for ~80 years, about the lifespan of a woman in the United States.

Historically, a blink.

They're gonna be here forever. Barring world peace or calamity, our descendants will live alongside them. 🧵1/25 This week, we saw significant nuclear posturing from the Russian Federation, who used a non-nuclear missile, designed to carrying multiple nuclear warheads (MIRV) in combat for the first time in world history.

A lot of people freaked out, or said it was no big deal. 2/25

Historians are tasked with exploring the past and presenting it to the public, "as it essentially was."

On Twitter I find that understandings of the past frequently break down into: the past was trad, chad, and chiseled, vs. the past sucked 100% of the time. Maybe both? 1/20
If you are engaging with and thinking broadly about the past and it is constantly making you feel great/proud, and never making you uneasy/sad, that isn't history, that is heritage. 2/20

As promised, I'm going to be paying a bit more attention to fashion history going forward, so here is a thread on one of the ways that military and elite men tried to look sexy in the eighteenth century: how they wore their hats. A thread on cocked hats. 🧵1/17 People living in 2024 frequently called the hats worn by eighteenth-century men (and sometimes women) tricorne or three-cornered hats. English-speaking people alive in that time didn't use the term, instead referring to them as "cocked hats." 2/17

So, with the greatest respect to Derek for his fashion sense, which in a modern setting completely outstrips my own, I do want to offer a few thoughts on this thread, as a professional historian who has constructed many reproduction items of clothing from the 18th Century. 🧵1/20

https://twitter.com/dieworkwear/status/1854969654948905355

The general premise of this thread is correct! The period of the second British Empire DID see a great flattening of fashion throughout the globe, resulting in the suit, but it is made in a odd way which concerned me as someone who studies this period, and sews its clothing. 2/20

As Halloween nears in the United States, let's get spooky with a story of vampires from Austrian military border in the 1720s.

Tales of the supernatural combined with frontier tensions to create a vampire crisis for the Habsburg government in the early 18th century. 1/25 Our story begins in the aftermath of Prinz Eugen von Savoyen's victory at Belgrade in 1717. After this victory and the resulting Treaty of Passarowitz, the Austrian government ruled part of Serbia and northern Bosnia via direct military control. 2/25

The Plains of Abraham.

When discussing 18th century military history with Americans, it's so common to encounter the idea that what the British did was the norm throughout Europe.

In order to understand tactical practices, you've got to read widely. A Friday Firepower🧵. 1/21 When you read on the 18th century wars, you here again and again that troops fired at very short ranges. And certainly, compared with weapons today, the capabilities of the smoothbore flintlock musket were modest. 2/21

A thread on those statue accounts, that always have something to say about peasant days off, or life under feudalism, or Cortes taking over Mexico, or what is wrong with the modern west. You know the ones I mean.

My best advice is love/enjoy history but be careful. 🧵1/22



For those of you who don't know me, I'm an assistant professor of history at one of the more conservative universities in the United States. You can look up my bio and my resume.

I study military history, specifically 18th century military history. 2/22

https://x.com/KKriegeBlog/status/1809738790820253779

I ran a couple of demo wargames at Historicon this year. Scale modelling nerd 🧵

As happy as I am with the progress of the large battalion ruleset I am working on, I'm even more happy with how the terrain looks. Replicating early modern villages takes work. 1/10





When I started wargaming, my overwhelming focus was getting troops painted. The uniforms, etc. If I got some houses down on the table, or painted some fields, that was a win. I couldn't help but notice, though, my villages didn't look right. 2/10

A picture of George Washington standing on a cannon (in a hull down position no less) as an eagle flies above.

Of course, totally fictional, but amazing.

So I want to use this to tell you about a time a Prussian general rode a cannon into battle. 1/17
🧵 I think everyone has a historical figure off the beaten path they love to think about. Mine is this guy named Johann Dietrich von Hülsen. Born into a minor Prussian noble family in East Prussia in 1693, Hülsen had a long and varied military career. 2/17

A thread of threads. 20 misconceptions about the Revolutionary War (or American War of Independence). Americans (proud to be one) are often quite ill-informed about the military struggle which led to our independence from Great Britain.

This isn't your father's rev war. 1/25 I'm a history professor who studies the military history of George Washington's time: ~1739-1789. I teach at a small liberal arts college with a revolutionary mascot, and absolutely love my job, and our history. Spent the week in Philly, seeing cool Americana. 2/25

Happy early July 4th, everybody. A 🧵on how Americans see foreign policy and the world through the lens of history, specifically the history of the American War of Independence. Americans love to view ourselves as plucky underdogs.

But we aren't underdogs anymore.
1/25 Christopher Duffy, writing under the pen-name Hugh Faringdon, described his motivation to write "Confrontation: The Strategic Geography of NATO and the Warsaw Pact" with the following anecdote: "The speaker hailed from an anglophone foreign country,..." 2/25

For students, wargamers, reenactors, etc, I think one of the hardest things to grasp about the eighteenth-century wars that I study is the lack of nationalism on the part of combatants. Modern films, games, etc, usually filter this layer in, when it wasn't there. 🧵 1/ Christopher Duffy argues that patriotism in its modern form was most recognizable in Russia and Britain, and the letters of British soldiers do occasionally express semi-patriotic sentiments: Thomas Plumb wrote home to his family in Feb of 1777, speaking about Americans: 2/20

The brainwashing of pedigree (where you went to college, how prestigious it was) is everywhere in academia. This has never been brought home further than when I lost a colleague (a good friend, veteran, and wonderful man) in January. 1/11 This scholar (an emeritus in his 70s) was close to the end with terminal cancer. He had a wonderful career, publishing four books, and securing a professorship. Our department went to visit him in the hospital, four days before his death. 2/11

Waterloo, Waterloo, Waterloo. With greatest love and respect to my Napoleonicist friends, June 18th is also the anniversary of the Battle of Kolin in 1757, so I'm going to do a thread on a battle you haven't already heard everything about. 1/28 The battle is often remembered as "Frederick the Great's first defeat", but it is much more significant than that, reshaping the possibilities and aims of belligerents in the Central European Seven Years War. A bit of background. 2/28

For the last 10 years, I've been interested in the history of the British Regiment that fought the Revolutionary War in the American Midwest, the 8th (King's) Regiment.

I was able to present on the history of the regiment at a conference last year (video below). Short🧵1/8 The 8th (King's) Regiment gets a bad wrap as a result of 3 things: 1) pithy comments from other units 2) their status as essentially a garrison regiment 3) comments from their officers. I try to address all of these things in the lecture, as well as explain their successes. 2/8

Were the industrial revolution and its consequences a disaster for the human race? Were we better off pre-capitalism? Was life better before nationalism?
The post below combined with the pesky resurgence of "medieval peasants had more days off than you" has inspired a 🧵. 1/25

https://twitter.com/SchattigeDer/status/1786493907699696010

I'm a historian who studies the last part of human history before these developments (1600-1789), in the North Atlantic World (Europe and NA) with a focus on the lives of ordinary people (peasants) and especially soldiers drawn from that peasant class between 1730-1790. 2/25

Ok. Manor Lords review time, @LordsManor. In short, I LOVED IT. But, maybe not for the reasons you might initially think. A review 🧵on the indie peasant sim/city builder that took the internet by storm. It's been compared to Total War, but is something else. 1/25 So, I'm currently 13 hours in, and I think I have enough of a feel for it to give you my impressions. I'm not reviewing this as a gamer first, but as a history professor who has read, written, and thought about peasants in German History in the period just after this one. 2/25