Time to sit down with the little one to watch the best version of A Christmas Carol.

This right here is a significant part of why it is a problem that you have so many universities - including prestigious, elite private universities - without a military historian, because their colleagues or the deans think military history is 'icky.'

The study of war requires understanding it in all its aspects: cultural, social, political, economic and military. That’s what makes it difficult and therefore worth doing. The cultural historian who can’t be bothered to study operational realities is self-handicapping no less than vice versa.

ALSO. Military history classes DO fill up! With excited non majors! Who study battles! And also art! And also the lives of the people who fought (social history)! And economics, and politics, and poetry, and literature, around the wars! Military history contains all of it! It has to!

Part of the pleasure of running a broad First World War course is introducing a student who is interested in the invention of the tank to measuring the impact of blockade by children’s heights and one interested in ‘war poets’ to evolving techniques in counter battery fire. They tend to like this.

At Columbia, the two most popular undergraduate history courses by far were military history and a survey of ancient Egypt. Both enrolled hundreds of students. The department didn't have a single tenure line devoted to either field.

I don't understand the point of this comment. Because from where I'm sitting, it is actually not a Good Thing for a world class university--situated in a democracy that is frequently at war, where a disproportionate number of future policy makers are educated--to NOT teach military history.

Since we're apparently debating the popularity of military history, the department I generally teach for probably fills close to 300 seats of military history each year. It also has no tenure lines assigned to the field and no intention to assign any in the future.

This is exactly right. The single biggest reason we aren’t teaching more “traditional” topics is that, following two decades of retirements, most of us lost 50-75% of those faculty positions.

These are staggeringly bad Bush-in-07 kind of numbers. And the grim part of me wonders how unstable things are going to get when this administration plows forward and these numbers probably keep getting worse. We're not quite in uncharted unpopularity territory yet, but we're fairly close.

Impressed by the very on-point pun the flared response (the top one) worked in at the end.

Further Superman thoughts: It only just now occurred to me that the 'three notes' of the John Williams score (you know them, 'duh duh dah daaaah duh, duh duh dah daaaah duh, duh duh dun dun da daaaaaaah!) are Superman's 'Up, Up and AWAY!' rendered into musical form.

Been frustrated - as we all have - with this court, but this seems like a pretty remarkable ruling. I rather suspect the court does not rule this way without the collapsing approval numbers, without No Kings, without the Dems sweeping special elections.

Worth answering on main: infantry depth is primarily psychological and only secondarily about replacing losses or changing out ranks. But that psychological factor is so important that functionally all contact infantry fight with depth and usually quite a lot of it (4 to 10 ranks being normal).

Honestly 'R&D trojan horse that never gets built but is instead a box to smuggle various actually useful projects past this administration' is probably the best case for this 'battleship.'

the Czech Legion needs to be adapted into more settings, because "we're a third party in this civil war and we're going to fight our way to the other side of the world to get home" is awesome (and a great gaming premise)

Since it’s official. Thanks 🙏 @newyorker.com. This feels pretty surreal.

This is a fair point. Also worth noting that a strong economy generally has only one direction to change (though it can also stay strong for a while). That said, I am curious why consumer sentiment and employment have decoupled from GDP growth. 'k-shaped' economy, I guess.

128+12 cells on 30,000 tons is embarrassing tbh

As an ancient historian, I am in equal parts relieved and bummed that we effectively do not have archives to go to (except, to an extent, for some epigraphers and papyrologists).

Looking forward to the rush of articles from Heritage* and Hudson explaining that sure carriers were dead *last week* but *this week* a massive 30,000 ton battleship with modern, paper armor is not just going to be deleted by an anti-ship missile within minutes. (*if anyone still works at Heritage)

Well and we all know that splitting turrets port and starboard to fire over the deck is a great idea that always works. Also the bridge is low on the superstructure - there's a reason we don't do that - and in the picture it is actively obscured by the plume from the VLS cells.

All the Odyssey movie “inaccurate” versus “who cares” arguments are both fun and exhausting. But the trailer shows them rowing a clinker built Viking ship. That is like depicting Columbus crossing the Atlantic in a Chinese junk.

So I assume - let me rephrase - I hope to God this idea is something they're going to announce, give a name to and then never actually, like, build. Because it is extremely dumb. And dumb in ways that will offend all sides of the carrier-drone-missile-wars.

I want everyone who hasn’t done historical research to read this thread. You’ll learn so much about what the field of history is. And why it’s so so so cool.

What is striking here, of course, is that no one was apologizing for being white at any point, outside of some very unusual academic hothouse environments. What the experience as 'apologizing for being white' is actually just 'accommodating non-white people living as full citizens and equals.'

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Can it be true that 'loom-weight' doesn't have ready equivalents in other European languages, or do philologists just not talk to archaeologists enough? Surprised to see these lengthy explanations.

Naturally it is always the time you have been good and gotten to the airport with plenty of time that your flight gets delayed.

Extra wild sprinkles on the bananas sundae of citation--and as thread notes, it's automated from Google scholar's end, not the library's fault

i really think there is legit political space for running on "we are going to dismantle ICE"

Finally watched the James Gunn Superman (on a plane) and man does that guy know how to cut to the core of what these characters are. Also not a particularly novel, but the use of the Superman (1978) motif to basically scream "actually, this IS your daddy's Superman" is just inspired.

I've already been hearing faculty discussion adapting to this policy by basically writing stripped down syllabi that include *only* the required boilerplate and nothing else, with things like course themes, reading schedules and such kept in separate documents to avoid the university owning them.

✨New Episode - The Gallic Sack of Rome - Part Three ✨ Things are heating up as the Gauls enter the city of Rome itself in our coverage of the dramatic events of 390 BCE.

The academic jobs crisis can only be remedied through organizing and building power. The path of white grievance is not only racist and wrongheaded; it’s counterproductive, as it emboldens the reactionary forces that seek to demolish higher education altogether.

If you want to understand how fucked the academic job market is - I still don't have a job, but I did have a major publisher cold email me to ask if I wanted to write a book for their series. That is not the right order! It's not DEI - there are no jobs.

DEI isn't why you didn't get a job. THERE ARE NO JOBS. YOU DIDN'T GET A JOB BECAUSE THERE ARE NO JOBS. If all the older professors retired? You still wouldn't get a job! Not in the humanities! Because they'll replace at best half of those lines! There will still be no jobs! None!

”Colleges and universities are in the middle of a massive reorganization of long-term labor investments away from providing a well-rounded education and toward market-based vocational training.” Concluding that like other fields, academia is better served by union power than the lure of tenure.

Butlerian jihad against the cult of the operator

The VDH Challenge: can you fit every single cliché of ‘Roman decadence’ into 200 words or fewer?

@bretdevereaux.bsky.social and I lighting up the world with our erudition about video games in the economist (though Bret made out better than I did; but then again, Bret plays a lot more EU than I do) www.economist.com/christmas-sp...

It is just wacky to me that they are still doing this Cult-of-the-Leader nonsense (because they think they have to do keep their jobs) even as the regime is pretty transparently failing to consolidate. Renaming the deck chairs on the Titanic.

if tumblr dies I need this video to make it's seasonal rotation here instead just in case, Happy holidays 🎄

UNC-Chapel Hill is closing all six of its area studies centers to save $7 million dollars. UNC's football coach, Bill Belichick, makes $10 million a year. In total, the football team now has a $40 million budget. Make this make sense.

Why do these articles never ask the basic question of "does the president have the power to do that?" because the answer is obviously and clearly no.

techbros: we have created AGI cognitive scientists: you fucked up a perfectly good spreadsheet is what you did. look at it. it's got anxiety

What is insane about these graphs is that for that insane dive in federal government employment, they haven't actually managed to spend any less money.

I've seen some responses to this dismissing the idea that doing Roman military history could be a disadvantage in the job market because it is so popular with the public. There absolutely is a hiring bias against military history in the field, but it has nothing to do with being white or male.

At the risk of hugging the third rail, the truth of the academic job market, at least in history or classics, is neither DEI or anti-DEI. It is that that 1) there are no jobs and 2) our hiring culture treats candidates like they 'spoil' after a few years. No one knows who is mediocre or not.

Testing, testing, 1-2-3. After much fafftootling around in the guts of Wordpress and PHP, prodding of reluctant backups, and many, many very, very naughty words, you can try out our restored website here: rme45762.live-website.com