seangabb
Published 16 Feb 2026The Persian Wars begin not in Athens, but in Miletus. In this lecture we explore the failed Naxos expedition, Aristagoras’ desperate gamble, and the outbreak of the Ionian Revolt in 499 BC. We examine Aristagoras’ appeals to Sparta and Athens, Herodotus’ famous scene before Cleomenes, and the fateful decision of Athens to send twenty ships.
We also analyse the burning of Sardis, Darius’ calculated response, and the suppression of Ionia. This is not yet a world war — but it is the moment when Athens introduces itself to empire.
July 22, 2026
The Ancient Greeks 03 – Enter the Persians 4 – The Ionian Revolt and the Fatal Intervention
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QotD: Burnside’s Army of the Potomac
It was not a genteel, restrained, orderly country that was feeling this changed emotional current. It was a nation with the infinite raw strength of graceless youth, moving with gigantic careless energy into a future that was not known to have any bounds whatever. It was feeling its oats and it was flexing muscles bigger than anybody else ever had, and if people got hurt along the way it was not even going to notice. It had been like that from the beginning and it had not yet grown mellow and thoughtful, and it was not for nothing that its national air was a little tune called “Yankee Doodle”, which has no words to speak of and expresses no sentiment on earth but sheer perky impudence.
This was the country of the boisterous forty-niner, the hell-roaring lumberjack, and the riverman who was half horse and half alligator. Without rancor (and also without the slightest hesitation) it annihilated Indian tribes so that it could people a wilderness, asserting that the only good Indian was a dead Indian and remarking casually of its own pioneers that the cowards never started and the weak died along the road. As it faced the cathedral aisles of endless virgin forests it shouted for immediate daylight in the swamp, even if whole generations must be brutalized for it. It was the country that invented the bucko mate and the Shanghai passage, and if the skysails of its incredible clippers gleamed on the farthest magic horizon they were taken there by men under the daily rule of clubs and brass knuckles. This nation accepted boiler explosions as the price of steamboat travel and it would boast presently of a dead gandy-dancer for every cross-tie on the transcontinental railroad. It wore seven-league boots and scorned to look where it planted them, and each of its immense strides was made at immense human cost. And the army of this country, buckling down to it at last in a fight which had to go to a finish, was going to be very rough on enemy civilians, not because it had anything against them but simply because they were there.
Of genuine hatred this army had practically none. The wild young men who ruined ancestral portraits and pranced in the smoky streets wearing the embroidered undergarments of gentlewomen were expressing nothing but plain hooliganism, which somehow was the obverse side of the medal that had laid nine hundred corpses in front of the stone wall west of town. Both sides of the medal bespoke raw youth which cheered and guffawed by turns, whose noble best forever went arm in arm with its ugly worst.
Bruce Catton, Army of the Potomac: Glory Road, 1952.
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July 21, 2026
Frederick the Great’s 1741 book, The Anti-Machiavel
At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman continues his look at all things Machiavelli, including Prussian king Frederick the Great’s polemic against the author of The Prince:
Frederick the Great, 1781
Oil portrait by Anton Graff (1736-1813) in the Sanssouci Palace collection via Wikimedia Commons.
Maybe Machiavelli’s teachings have no relevance in any remotely civilized political system. Maybe they’re far worse than irrelevant: maybe they’re all entirely evil (as they appear), and in addition, would prove the ruin of both the people and their ruler.
This was, as it happens, the view espoused by one important ruler: the Prussian king Frederick the Great. In his 1741 book, The Anti-Machiavel, he claims Machiavelli’s book is “one of the most dangerous that ever appeared in the world”, in that the political crimes it encourages would impose “a lasting misery upon whole nations”. Truly great rulers, says Frederick, aren’t the avaricious, amoral, self-serving, shape-shifting demons that Machiavelli describes. Rather, they are those “whose business it is to administer justice, and to set examples of justice to their subjects; and who, by their magnanimity, mercy, and goodness, ought to be the living images of Deity”. Thus, Frederick sees his rebuttal as “a defense of humanity against a monster who would destroy it”; it is “an antidote to poison”.
Frederick ruled Prussia for nearly 50 years. Most historians rate him a success. On the face of things, he seems like the kind of critic who knows what he’s talking about.
But Machiavelli would say, not so fast. What did Frederick do almost immediately after assuming power? Without any provocation, he launched a war to seize the large, prosperous, populous province of Silesia (now in southwestern Poland) from the Habsburg Monarchy. And he did so on a convoluted, centuries-old dynastic claim which sounded as unconvincing to his contemporaries as it does to us now. In the three Silesian wars which followed (the third turning into the Seven Years War), well over a million soldiers died fighting. Millions more wound up maimed, psychologically scarred, or otherwise ruined. Of course, millions of non-combatants also suffered: wives lost husbands, mothers and fathers lost sons, children lost fathers and uncles and brothers. Those non-combatants also suffered displacement, terror, deprivation, and injury. Over two decades, Frederick’s wars — particularly the Seven Years War — convulsed Europe. Frederick gained 30% more territory and 50% more citizens, but the cost was losing 10% of the Prussian population to combat or disease (the modern equivalent of 35 million Americans, 6 million English, or 3 million Australians). The point is: if his actions are anything to go by, Frederick didn’t oppose Machiavellian power moves as much as he professed, if at all. Machiavelli might even argue that in taking pains to proclaim his opposition to Machiavelli even as his wars of acquisition injured and killed millions, he was doing exactly what Machiavelli had advised: seeming to be good even as he was doing whatever the hell he wanted, for his own purposes. Most people will buy the act anyway, says Machiavelli, so why not?
This brings me back to Machiavelli’s claims about how rulers do in fact act, and how they must act to avoid ruin. And that in turn brings me back to the original wording of The Prince, and what real-world credibility Machiavelli might have as a political commentator.
As it happens, Machiavelli was no armchair quarterback. Even if he hadn’t spent nearly fifteen years at the highest levels of Florentine government (which he did), he might well have qualified as a political expert just by virtue of growing up in the tumultuous time and place he did. Between the jockeying Italian states, the myriad (and ever-changing) foreign alliances and enemies and designs, the political influence of the papacy, and Florence’s own internal politics, Machiavelli’s home city furnished more than enough lessons in how the political world could, and often did, operate.
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Mauser M90 DA: Not Mauser and Not a High Power
Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Feb 2026In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Mauser firm was not in good shape. It had no new products, and its ability to survive marketing its name and legacy pistols was waning. Without much vision for the future, it turned to rebranding production from other companies, like Renato Gamba in Italy and FÉG in Hungary. From FEG they got the “Mauser Model 80” — a licensed copy of the Browning High Power — and the “Mauser Model 90” — a rebadged FEG P9R.
The P9R / Mauser 90 is often assumed to simply be a double-action modification of the High Power, but this is not true. The slide is almost identical in appearance to the High Power slide except for the decocking lever, but the frame has several important differences. The barrel lockup is taken from the S&W series of automatic pistols instead of the High Power, and the trigger mechanism is a stirrup around the magazine well instead of moving through the slide like a High Power.
In total, FEG made 26,000 of these pistols for Mauser. The plan was to sell them in Europe, but by 1995 sales remained poor and about 18,000 remained in Mauser inventory. In order to get rid of them, they were offered on the American market, where they were gobbled up by importers like Century between 1995 and 2001.
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July 20, 2026
“Blame Canada”: evergreen. “Invade Canada”? It’s been done before
Upper Canadian Cavalier points out the obvious … that the United States absolutely could invade Canada and there’s not a lot the Canadian Armed Forces could do to stop them. But that would be the easy part:
“A mere matter of marching …”
The question of “could America ever invade Canada?” is wrong before it is even asked. Picture the MAGA politicos huddled in D.C. and the anon poasters spamming maps of how America could take Canada, as if it were even a question, as if the border were a wall and the wall the point. The whole conversation is midwits who never grasped what America already occupies.
Occupation is the crude instrument of the conqueror who arrives too late, who finds the ground already held by another and must break it by force, and that has never once been the American position in the north. The American position is that of the covert shareholder rather than the invader, and a shareholder does not knock down the door of a house whose deed already sits in his desk.
Empire in its highest form neither occupies nor marches, because it has learned to administer instead, and it does not plant a flag on the palace, since the flag is a confession that the palace was not yet yours. The genius of the modern Global American imperium has been to take without ever confessing, to hold Canada so completely that Canadians experience the holding as their own free choice. To reach for the army now would throw all of that away, trading a profitable and invisible dominion for a visible and bloody one, and teaching the empire at ruinous cost the difference between owning a country and holding it.
The republic was born reaching north with a bayonet, and it should remember how that went. In the winter of 1775 it sent Brigadier General Richard Montgomery and Colonel Benedict Arnold (yes, that Benedict Arnold) up through the snow to seize Quebec. The spirit of the country rose up in the snow to meet them, and Quebec killed Montgomery in a blizzard at the walls, the land itself passing sentence on the invasion before a single treaty could be signed.
That was first offensive act of the American project, it was a failed invasion of Canada that froze to death in the cold for its own arrogance. There is a symmetry waiting at the end of this essay that the reader should carry from the beginning, because a republic that opened its history reaching north may yet close its history the same way. America could invade Canada, but then it would not be able to conquer it, and in that attempt it would destroy the very thing that made its northern dominion worth having, because the soft empire cannot survive being seen and that invasion is nothing other than the act of trading quiet profits for overt pain and suffering.
Eating the Food of Homer’s Odyssey
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Jul 2026Skewer of roast pork covered in seasoned barley meal, accompanied by the Ancient Greek potion, Kykeon
City/Region: Greece
Time Period: c. 1650-1100 B.C.E., Mycenaean PeriodWhen Odysseus finally makes it back to his home of Ithaca, he goes to the home of the swineherd Eumaeus. Disguised as a beggar, Odysseus is welcomed into Eumaeus’s home, and Eumaeus prepares skewers of roasted pork sprinkled with barley meal.
While I could just make plain roast pork sprinkled with plain barley flour, let’s assume that Eumaeus does the disguised Odysseus the courtesy of seasoning the meal. Archaeologists have found evidence that the people living in Greece during the Mycenaean Period, when The Odyssey is supposed to have taken place, commonly used coriander, cumin, celery, and fennel, so that’s what I used to season the barley flour coating.
This dish is very simple, and surprisingly flavorful. I made mine in the oven, but if you can cook it over an open fire, it would be even better. The cumin and fennel seeds are both very strong flavors, so choose one or the other so as not to completely overpower everything else.
Eumaeus went off to the sties where the pigs were penned. Choosing two sucklings, he carried them in, slaughtered and singed them both, then cut them in pieces and spitted them on skewers. Then, when all was well roasted, he served it to Odysseus piping hot on the skewers, sprinkling the meat with white barley meal.
— The Odyssey, Book XIV
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Eight Great Powers Invade China: the Boxer Uprising 1900-1901
Real Time History
Published 20 Feb 2026After the defeat in the 1st Sino-Japanese War, the Qing Dynasty is under pressure: Some are calling for domestic reforms and ousting Western influence, while the Great Powers want to further open up China for their businesses. Violence erupts when the so called Boxer movement kills several Westerners.
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QotD: The real, but unacknowledged, Global American Empire
Not for sentimental reasons, I hasten to add. What am I, a Liberal, and / or a girl? I’m an Historian; I have no problem with Empires.
What I do have a problem with — an enormous problem, yuuuuuge, the biggest — is empires that don’t acknowledge themselves as such. A LOT of the 20th century would’ve gone very, very differently had the USA either acknowledged herself to be an Empire starting in 1898, or stuck to her anti-Imperial rhetoric and bowed out of the international power game. But — as we always do — we tried to have it both ways, acting like the most bellicose Empire on the planet while deliberately undermining the Imperial policies of everyone else. Woodrow Wilson, for example, tried to run the entire Western Hemisphere as an American satrapy while promising any micro-group with their own goulash recipe in the Balkans a State of their very own.
Consider what all our Middle Eastern adventures, 1948-present, would look like if the American Empire declared itself to be such. We might still be bombing Iran, but the “exit strategy” is simple: They’ve made sufficient obeisance to the Imperial standard; we’ll be sailing away now. “Air policing” is still retarded — it’s the kind of idea only your best Old School Tie toff could come up with, over tea and crumpets at Eton — but it works ok as a publicity stunt. Things get fuzzy out there on The Fringes of Empire, and while you occasionally have to slap the wogs around, just to remind them that you can, it doesn’t have to be anything more than that.
But alas.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2026-04-03.
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July 19, 2026
How to Set a Militia Free on a Minority – Death of Democracy 24 – Q4 1938
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 18 Jul 2026In this episode of Death of Democracy, Spartacus Olsson examines Germany in Q4 1938 — the quarter in which Nazi persecution exploded from exclusion and intimidation into open, state-sponsored terror.
From the occupation of the Sudetenland and the Polenaktion, to the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, the orchestrated violence of Kristallnacht, the mass arrest of 30,000 Jewish men, the acceleration of Aryanization, and the first Kindertransport, this episode traces how the Nazi regime turned antisemitic hatred into systematic plunder, social death, and mass fear.
It is also the quarter in which the illusion of “peace in our time” began to unravel. While Britain and France clung to the hope that Munich had preserved peace, Hitler was already preparing the next stage of expansion — and the wider road to war.
This is the story of how a dictatorship unleashes paramilitary violence against its own citizens, how ordinary people react, and how appeasement abroad helped convince the regime that it could escalate even further.
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Rome’s Greatest Enemy: Bloodbath in Africa | EP 3
The Rest Is History
Published 9 Feb 2026Would the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio successfully march on Africa? What happened when Hannibal and Scipio — the greatest commanders of their age — came head to head at the Battle of Zama, in the ultimate showdown? And, what would be the fate of these two titans of the ancient world?
Join Tom and Dominic, as they discuss the Roman Republic’s audacious invasion of North Africa under the leadership of the dashing Scipio, and his clash with Hannibal.
00:00 Scipio’s night attack in Numidia
02:16 Hannibal as a commander
08:07 The rise of Scipio Africanus
13:05 The Roman invasion of Africa begins
21:56 The Battle of the Great Plains
25:29 Hannibal recalled from Italy
28:18 Preparing for the final showdown
33:02 The Battle of Zama begins
36:03 Could Hannibal have won?
40:25 Hannibal urges acceptance of defeat
42:40 Hannibal as a civilian reformer
44:22 Scipio after the war
46:45 Cato’s rise and the conservative backlash
49:29 Rome turns east after victory
52:32 The Hellenistic world after Alexander
56:45 Hannibal and Scipio compare great generals
58:31 Rome defeats Antiochus
1:00:18 Hannibal’s final flight and death
1:01:40 Scipio’s death and exile
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July 18, 2026
The Top WW2 Spy Was a Disabled Woman
World War Two
Published 16 Jul 2026Virginia Hall was one of the most extraordinary spies of World War II. An American operative for Britain’s Special Operations Executive and later the OSS, Hall built resistance networks in occupied France, coordinated intelligence, organized safe houses, helped escaped prisoners and airmen, and supported maquis fighters who sabotaged German operations during the liberation of France.
Known to the Gestapo as “the Limping Lady”, Hall worked with a wooden prosthetic leg she nicknamed Cuthbert. After escaping over the Pyrenees, she returned to France in 1944 in disguise, operating a radio, arranging parachute drops, and helping organize resistance forces against the German occupation.
This is the true story of Virginia Hall: the disabled American spy who became one of the most feared Allied agents in Nazi-occupied Europe — and one of the most important women in WWII intelligence history.
Jevons and Baumol, and why they matter now
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Matt Ridley talks about the ideas of William Stanley Jevons and William Jack Baumol, whose ideas have become far more important over the last few decades:
English mystery novelist Agatha Christie (1890-1976) at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on 17 September, 1964.
Photo by Joop van Bilsen for Anefo via Wikimedia Commons.
Agatha Christie once remarked that she had never expected to grow rich enough to own a car or poor enough not to have servants.
The reason this strikes us as bizarre today boils down to two names that you hear invoked a lot in the tech industry: Jevons and Baumol. One is shorthand for the expansion of products or professions with rising efficiency, the other for the shrinkage of products or professions with stagnant efficiency.
There’s a pleasing chronological symmetry between these twin ideas: William Stanley Jevons coined the Jevons paradox in 1865; William Jack Baumol described Baumol’s cost disease exactly a century later in 1965.
… For every industry that experiences efficiency gains, there’s another that does not. And this latter industry inevitably becomes less affordable. Baumol’s first example was string quartets: violinists are no more productive but you have to pay them more to prevent them running off to become software engineers. The productive industries drive up the labour costs in the rest of the economy.
Marc Andreessen jokes that if a hole appears in the wall of your house in California these days it is probably cheaper to glue a flat-screen television over it than hire a builder to repair it: a Jevons-deflated cost beats a Baumol-inflated one.
The big question of our age is can AI drag Baumol-shaded industries back into the sunlight of Jevons? Can it make things like healthcare, education, or government switch from rising costs to falling costs?
I fear not in the case of government because of a bureaucratic version of the Jevons and Baumol effects. As Cyril Northcote Parkinson put it in an article in the Economist in 1955: “Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced.”
Since 1997, the British public sector has seen zero increase in productivity. That is to say, the average civil servant generates about the same output today as he did three decades ago.
Think about this for a second. Thirty years ago fax machines were high-tech, the internet was in its infancy, emails were new, Wi-Fi was scarce, mobile phones were voice-only. How is it remotely possible to be no more productive today than then?
We know the answer. Each email is now copied to a dozen people, each report is pasted and copied till it is twice as long, each Zoom call has five times as many attendees, each mobile call is followed up by three times as many WhatsApp messages – and each day at the desk is interrupted by a training session on transgender anticolonial sustainability. That’s a sort of Jevons-Baumol effect: a Jevol?
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QotD: Britain’s National Trust wants to eliminate the “outdated mansion experience”
Well, it seems not. Seek out the National Trust’s Strategy to 2025, and the first words you read are: “Our 21st-century ambition is to meet the needs of an environment under pressure, and the challenges and expectations of a fast-moving world … Underpinning this is our renewed commitment to diversity and inclusion and playing our part to create a fair, equal society, free from discrimination.”
In their “10-year Vision”, written in the same hideous identikit jargon, they talk about a “revolutionary” move away from the “outdated mansion experience”. The Trust provides little evidence that stately homes are becoming less popular; reading between the lines the main problem that the Vision’s authors seem to have with the English country house is that it is old and traditional and popular with comfortably-off white people.
I don’t particularly want to get stuck into the National Trust. But they do provide a particularly interesting example of a problem afflicting institutions in modern Britain, namely the relentless politicisation of parts of life which should represent an escape from politics.
Niall Gooch, “What is the point of the National Trust?”, UnHerd, 2020-10-19.
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July 17, 2026
British logistics in the Falklands, 1982
A new post at the Operational Art of War considers the amazing achievements in logistical support that allowed the British to re-take the Falkland Islands so soon after the Argentine invasion in 1982:
This post is largely highlights from a book I think everyone should buy, called Logistics in the Falklands War: A Case Study in Expeditionary Warfare by US retired MGen Privratsky.
[…]
I read the book as part of a long term project on the history of command and communications in the Falkland War. I couldn’t figure out how the British managed to pull off victory given the logistical challenges, so I purchased this book hoping to find answers.
Having now read the book I know WHAT the British did to win the war, but I have ZERO clue how they managed to make it work. The conditions and limitations they faced were so much worse than I thought.
I can honestly say this is the most interesting book I have read in years, which is a shock to me as I’m typically as bored by logistics as the next non-logistician. It was genuinely more engaging and entertaining than the battlefield accounts of that war.
The Logistics Challenges of the Falklands War
The task eventually given to the British task force was to retake the Falkland islands from the Argentines. This was a daunting task, both logistically and in terms of the actual ground combat.
Strategic Logistics
Strategic logistics is providing the lifeline of supplies, personnel, maintenance and health care between the home country and a staging area about 300km outside the combat zone. British strategic logistics involved a link from England to a small British held island half way between Brazil and Africa called Ascension. This link was 4,300 miles (6,900 km) by sea from Portsmouth. It had an airport and one jetty capable of handling one or two small commercial ships.
The next link was a further 3,600 miles (5,800 km) from Ascension to a logistics loitering area about 200 miles (320 km) short of the Falkland Islands. This was just a box drawn on a map in the middle of the ocean where the larger supply ships would loiter, outside the range of the Argentine air force.
[…]
Tactical Logistics
Tactical Logistics holds a few days’ supply (eventually the BSA/DSA held about 30 days supply ashore at San Carlos) but it’s main job is to move supplies, broken equipment, replacements and injured personnel between the BSA/DSA and the manoeuvre units.
Normally the backbone of Tactical Logistics is trucks. Here there was a problem, as the image below is a comprehensive of all the paved and unpaved vehicle capable roads in the Falklands, excluding those in the vicinity of Port Stanley.
“Roads? Where we’re going Marty we don’t need roads.”
The details of tactical logistics take up several chapters of the book. The brief version is:
- The troops marched from the DSA to the Objective;
- For the attack on Port Stanley two days supply of Ammunition, Shells, fuel and shells were brought to the two Forward Support Areas (FSAs) along with skeletal field hospitals;
- Helicopters spent about 2 weeks bringing the artillery from the DSA to outside Port Stanley; and
- Limited emergency resupply of ammunition and casualty evacuation was available from the FSA to the troops in combat. However, most of the ammunition going brought and casualties evacuated rearward was done on foot over what can charitably be described as walking tracks.
Tactical Logistics in the Falklands was so difficult because there were no roads and the distances involved were enormous. While the orange arrows above give a sense of the distances involved, the image blow shows the size of the Falkland Islands superimposed over England.
[…]
Conclusion
Prior to reading Logistics in the Falklands I couldn’t quite figure out how the British managed to pull a victory out the hat, given the challenges of projecting power literally on the opposite end of the globe. Having read the book I am now convinced the British military in 1982 was either the best improvisational armed force in history or under some kind of Divine mandate.1
- Maybe both.
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Why Did the Best Woodworking Vise Disappear?
Rex Krueger
Published 16 Jul 2026AI-generated video summary: Rex Krueger investigates the historical evolution of woodworking vises, comparing modern metal clamps with traditional wooden designs inspired by an 1812 manual. By constructing a classic English face vise, the process examines how economic pressures and shifts in manufacturing trades influenced the tools favored by woodworkers across several centuries.
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