Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Mar 2026In the fall of 1914 it became apparent that the minor fracas in Serbia was going to stretch a lot longer than anyone had expected, and governments began scrambling to secure weapons production. Japan was one source of small arms for the Entente powers, and Britain purchased about 150,000 Arisaka rifles and carbines from the Japanese in late 1914 and early 1915. These were used to equip Royal Navy crews and Army raining and reserve units, but by late 1915 Enfield production had caught up and the guns were no longer needed.
In the fall of 1915, the British sent most of their Arisakas (about 128,000) to Russia, which had also been purchasing large numbers from Japan. There they were again used to arm second-line units, including troops occupying the Grand Duchy of Finland. When Finland declared its independence in December 1917, most of the Russian soldiers went home and left their weapons in Finland. As a result, the Arisaka was the second most common type of rifle available at Finland’s independence, and was used by the Civil Guard until about 1927.
This particular Type 38 Carbine was made at the Tokyo Army Arsenal in 1910, then sold to the British where it was given a set of unit marks on the stock. It was subsequently transferred to Russia, where a metal clip was added to prevent accidental magazine release. It stayed in Finland through the Finnish Civil War and afterwards, only being imported into the US recently by Postrock of Garden City, Kansas.
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July 28, 2026
Adventures in Surplus! Type 38 Arisaka Carbine in World War One
July 25, 2026
Civil War Gwyn & Campbell Carbines (aka Cosmopolitan, Union, & Grapevine)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Mar 2026The first version of this carbine was the Cosmopolitan, designed and patented by Henry Gross in 1859 and manufactured by Edward Gwyn and Abner Campbell. It is a single-shot .52 caliber carbine that loads from the breech with a paper cartridge and a separate external percussion cap. After producing a batch of the guns, Gwyn and Campbell realized that the breechblock design could be much simplified, and they patented that simplification — essentially pushing Gross out of his own invention.
Several successive contracts for the carbines were fulfilled during the Civil War, with about 8,200 produced in total. It was not the most popular or most numerous cavalry carbine of the war, but it is rather remarkable for actually being reliable and delivered consistently on time.
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July 22, 2026
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.
July 20, 2026
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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July 16, 2026
How Few Remain: The Second War Between the States
Feral Historian
Published 13 Mar 2026Let’s take a look at Harry Turtledove’s How Few Remain and its many themes and historical extrapolations. And probably argue about the Civil War a little along the way.
If there’s enough interest, this may be the start of a dive into the entire sprawling series that follows.
00:00 Intro
01:37 A War Unfinished
07:09 Adapting and Evolving
10:12 Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass
13:15 The Horace Greeley Letter
15:40 Freddie’s Louisville Adventure
18:07 Turtledove, Lost Cause, and Spoilers
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July 8, 2026
QotD: The Wilmot Proviso
The Wilmot Proviso attempted to scotch that, which forced the Senate, at least, to come right out and say it. People always underestimate the power of words and symbols, and professional historians are among the worst offenders. With the newer generations of pros it’s ideological enstupidation that causes it, but the older folks were almost as bad. It’s a structural issue — we rely on documents, so even though “the temper of the times” is real obvious in the aggregate, unless you can pin it down to specific statements in archival sources it’s hard to make your case.
If it helps, think of the couple whose marriage is obviously on the rocks. They fight constantly, they all but live separately, everybody knows their relationship is doomed … but when one of them finally comes out and says “I want a divorce”, things often change radically. Temporarily, most often, but how many people have you seen suddenly make all-out efforts to patch things up only after somebody finally says the D-word?
You can hear the capital letters in their voices. Before, all that stuff — romantic weekend getaways and the like — were attempts to “get back on track” or “spice things back up” or whatever. As soon as someone says Divorce, though, all those things become capitalized — we’re Saving Our Marriage.
The Wilmot Proviso was like that. Somebody finally said the D word.
Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.
July 2, 2026
QotD: The US federal election of 1848 and the resulting inevitability of the US Civil War
The Democrats’ candidate, Lewis Cass, pushed the idea of “popular sovereignty” in the territories. It wasn’t a bad move — since California was the only soon-to-be-state up for grabs, and since some parts of California are above the Missouri Compromise line, let them decide the terms on which they want to enter the Union. The problem with that, obviously, is that the Senate could become radically unbalanced very quickly, depending on how fast the rapidly-expanding population of the territories got their act together. Iowa and Wisconsin had just entered the Union (1846 and 1848, respectively), as free states under the Compromise. They were counterbalanced by Florida and Texas (both 1845), but obviously the balance was very delicate.
Cass was of course defeated (by Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor), so wrangling over California continued. Taylor wasn’t the greatest leader anyway, and when he died in office he was replaced by everyone’s favorite placeholder, Millard Fillmore. Fillmore gets an undeserved rep for incompetence; in reality, he was exactly the kind of president the Second Party System was designed to produce, even though he was never elected to the office. Most real political power before the Civil War was at the state level, so the President was supposed to be the steward and figurehead of his Party, not a strong national leader. (You can still see echoes of this as late as the early 20th century — William Howard Taft supposedly said “I forgot I ever was President;” he was much more concerned with his reputation as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court).
But slavery was a federal issue, indeed THE federal issue. In the absence of strong leadership at the top — and again, in all fairness to Fillmore and the rest, the system was designed to prevent strong Presidential leadership — it fell to Congress. Which a) is where it should’ve been, under the federal system the Founders designed; but b) meant that it was guaranteed to be a cock-up, because like all debating societies Congress was dominated by Very Clever Boys.
Worse, the immediate antebellum Congresses were dominated by the Very Cleverest Boy of them all, Stephen Douglas. I don’t think there has ever been a Cleverer Boy in American politics than Stephen Douglas, which is really saying something. (A case could be made for Lyndon Johnson, I suppose, and look how that turned out). Douglas’s signature “legislation” was the Compromise of 1850, which did a lot of things, including bringing California into the Union as a free state. It’s easy to get lost in the historical weeds here, so I’m keeping this deliberately superficial. Here are the highlights:
First, it’s important to note that nobody except Stephen Douglas knew they were voting on “the Compromise of 1850”. You have to hand it to the bastard, it’s a really slick piece of politics. He put together a whole bunch of bills, horse-trading parts of each of them among the competing factions to cobble an overarching program together. Nobody would’ve voted on an omnibus bill called “The Compromise of 1850”, but when the dust settled and all the votes were tallied on a bunch of separate measures, that’s what emerged.
Second: Douglas swiped Lewis Cass’s idea of “popular sovereignty” for the new territories (New Mexico and Utah) carved out of the Mexican Cession. At the time, this looked like a band-aid, a procedural quick-fix — those territories wouldn’t be coming into the Union as states anytime soon, and since cotton doesn’t grow so well in the desert it didn’t matter that much anyway. “Popular sovereignty” was just a way to kick the can down the road. Please note, however, that now the precedent was set: The Missouri Compromise is now officially a dead letter, though nobody will come right out and say it.
Third: The Fugitive Slave Act essentially federalized slave-catching. The details aren’t important; the principle is. The US government is now officially the enforcement arm of what many folks were openly calling “the Slave Power Conspiracy”.
Fourth: What looked like a purely symbolic measure, outlawing the slave trade in Washington DC. Here again, we misunderestimate the power of symbols at our peril. The practical effect of this was nil, since DC is tiny and if you wanted to buy slaves, the big markets literally right across the road in Maryland and Virginia would be happy to sell you some. But look at the glaring contradiction — Federal marshals can (and will, and did) dragoon local law enforcement into catching runaway slaves on the planters’ behalf, but the slave trade itself is outlawed in the Capitol’s sacred precincts, because freedom.
The term “fake and gay” hadn’t been invented yet, but since the Compromise of 1850 was the product of the Very Cleverest Boy of all, it was by definition fake and gay, and you can see it clearly with the DC slave trade ban.
So Very Clever was he, that he torpedoed his own signature achievement just four short years later in order to make a buck. Some Chicago railroad boys had him on the payroll, and while the details of the Kansas-Nebraska Act don’t matter, the principle very much does. Remember “popular sovereignty?” It didn’t matter in Utah or New Mexico; it mattered very much in Kansas, where fanatics from both sides flooded into the territory in order to vote.
Think about what kind of guy would uproot his entire life to move across state lines just to vote on shit, and Bleeding Kansas suddenly makes sense.
Here again, one is tempted to blame the President for not showing leadership, and Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan have well-deserved reps as do-nothings … except again, “doing nothing” was pretty much the President’s job description back then. That’s not to let them entirely off the hook — James Buchanan was very much a Current Year Democrat, in that even though he wouldn’t actually take any action he couldn’t stop shooting his mouth off; you have to get well into the 20th century to find a major political figure who stepped on his own dick as hard and as often as James Buchanan.
Finally, the coup de grace, the Dred Scott decision. I’m going to stop with this one, because even though things like John Brown’s Raid and the Caning of Sumner are important, they follow, as it were, from the logic laid down by Dred Scott. Some kind of Really Bad Shit was inevitable after that ruling; the precise form of the Really Bad Shit was incidental (n.b. the Caning of Sumner preceded Dred Scott (May 1856 vs. March 1857), but they were very much of a piece).
Here again, it’s easy to get lost in the details, so here are the two big takeaways:
First, Dred Scott was decided correctly as a purely legal matter. The issues surrounding the case were as broad as possible, but the narrow issue at law was this: In granting Dred Scott standing to sue in a federal court, the State of Missouri had implicitly granted him United States citizenship, which is the sole prerogative of Congress. It’s in the Constitution and everything, and back then the guys on the Supreme Court actually bothered to read the fucking thing, so they ruled against Scott on those very narrow grounds (from which all else flowed, legally).
But that’s the second big takeaway: Chief Justice Roger Taney didn’t stop there. If you only got Dred Scott in school, you got the stuff Wiki spends most of its time on — the whole bit about Taney ruling that blacks aren’t, and never can be, citizens of the United States. But the truly important part is this:
Now, … the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. … Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the [36°N 36′ latitude] line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void.
In other words, not just the Missouri Compromise, but the Compromise of 1850, and indeed the very possibility of compromise over slavery, is now officially unconstitutional. Slavery is now de facto legal everywhere in the United States, because any law prohibiting it runs afoul of the 5th Amendment as interpreted by Dred Scott.
What other outcome could there be at that point? Flip the script in 1860 — let the Democrats have their shit together, and the Republicans split three ways. Stephen Douglas is now President, and while that’s a truly horrifying prospect (never, ever let a Very Clever Boy occupy the big chair), the outcome would’ve been the same, or near enough — it’d be the Yankee fanatics in the North seceding, not the Slave Power Conspiracy in the South, but somebody was calling it quits.
Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.
June 7, 2026
How Hitler Tested His Next War in Spain – Death of Democracy 18 – Q2 1937
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 6 Jun 2026Berlin, June 30, 1937. Hitler has not staged a major diplomatic shock this quarter — but beneath the surface, Nazi Germany is preparing for war.
In Spain, the Condor Legion helps Franco’s Nationalists and the bombing of Guernica gives the world a terrifying preview of modern aerial terror. At home, the regime escalates its assault on the Catholic Church, begins the purge of “degenerate art”, tightens the link between courts and concentration camps, and hides rearmament behind spectacles of economic success.
This episode of Death of Democracy looks at Q2 1937: the quarter when Nazi Germany normalized aggression abroad while deepening tyranny at home.
00:00 Berlin, June 30, 1937
00:05 No Hitler Surprise — But War Preparations Continue
00:51 The Hindenburg and the Shadow of Modern War
01:50 The “Give Me Four Years” Exhibition
02:25 Guernica and the Condor Legion
02:55 The Bombardment of Almería
03:11 Case Green and Case Otto
03:54 Degenerate Art and Cultural Cleansing
04:22 The Judiciary and the Concentration Camps
05:13 The Nazi Assault on the Catholic Church
06:07 Goebbels, Propaganda, and the Morality Trials
07:45 Autarky, Rearmament, and Hidden Austerity
08:52 Mood Inside the Nazi Leadership
09:48 Ordinary Germans and Apathy
12:15 Analysis: War Abroad, Tyranny at Home
14:19 Conclusion: Nazi Double-Talk
May 20, 2026
QotD: “Gilded Age” Robber Barons didn’t have access to what even working-class Americans have now
… but the robber baron knew he needed the serfs. Their relationship was purely dialectical. Without his factory hands, no robber baron. And in a strange but very real way, the higher up the food chain your Gilded Age robber baron went, the more he was dependent on his serfs for his lifestyle. J.P. Morgan is usually credited as being the first guy to become a Robber Baron purely through finance. Carnegie, Rockefeller, all those guys had most of their wealth in financial instruments, of course, but those financial instruments rested on control of a physical product — Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil.
I’m probably being unfair to Jay Cooke, the Michael Milken of his day, but since more people have heard of J.P. Morgan let’s roll with it. Even though Morgan’s wealth was entirely on paper — he was nothing but a securities trader — his lifestyle utterly depended on a battalion of servants. In a very real way, you yourself, right now, live much better than J.P. Morgan did in his heyday. And not just because you have aspirin, antibiotics, and air conditioning, three taken-for-granted things ol’ J.P. would’ve given half his kingdom for. But because you have more time. If you’re hungry, you can open the fridge or the microwave and have all the food you need in a matter of minutes.
J.P. couldn’t. J.P. had to deploy an army of servants every time he wanted a snack, and those servants were constrained by things like “availability of ice” and “when is the fishmonger at his stall”. You’re hungry at 2am, you jump in your car and get some Taco Bell. It takes ten minutes. J.P.’s hungry at 2am and it’s tough titty, J.P., your ass is going hungry. Because even though you’re the richest man in the world and have legions of manservants at your beck and call, Taco Bell just isn’t there. Even if someone had had the brilliant idea to create a Gilded Age Taco Bell, it still would’ve taken hours:
Wake up the manservant. Wake up the groom and stableboy. Hell, wake up the horse, then saddle the horse, ride to the drive thru window … which in this case means “the house of the guy who runs Gilded Age Taco Bell”. At which point he has to fire up the oven, start pounding the tortillas, send his own legion of valets and stableboys and whatnot out to get the refried beans …
And that’s the other thing, J.P. — you’d best not pull that shit too often, because those people know where you live. Not only do they know where you live, they live with you. Literally under the same roof. You want to sleep easy? You’d best not beat the servants too often, buddy.
There’s only so much “class consciousness” one can develop in that world. Oh yeah, J.P. thought of himself as one of the Masters of the Universe, there’s no denying that. But J.P. lived in what was still a brutally physical world, in a way we PoMo people really can’t grasp. If you can’t imagine what it would take to get some Gilded Age Taco Bell, maybe geography will do the trick. Ever seen Gangs of New York? Even if you haven’t, you’ve probably heard the name “Five Points”. The worst slum in America in the 19th century, and 19th century American slums were world class …
That was right down the street from Wall Street. Literally. I am not in any way joking, and if I’m exaggerating a little for effect when I say “J.P. could’ve hit Five Points with a five iron from his swanky digs on Central Park West”, I promise you I’m not exaggerating much. You can look it up for yourself. The main reason the Union rushed troops straight from the Gettysburg battlefield, and no-shit shelled parts of the city with gunboats, during the Draft Riots was because Five Points (et al) was right fucking there, and they might’ve gotten it into their heads to lynch a few Masters of the Universe. Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight, right? Let’s see how you like it, you bankster bastards …
The PoMo “information economy” removes all that. The other day I joked about colleges like Bennington and Goucher. I cracked some jokes, yeah, but I wasn’t really joking. Those places aren’t for us. Wall Street is still a physical location, but it might as well be on the dark side of the moon for all any of us have access to it. J.P. couldn’t beat the servants too hard, or too often. The modern equivalent of J.P. isn’t even aware that he has servants. He just clicks on a website, and stuff appears at his door. Like magic. Hell, it IS magic for all he knows, and he surely doesn’t care, because all that shit is his by right. He went to Bennington, after all. He has achieved full class consciousness.
All of which suggests, of course, that while Marx was wrong about the end state — the State will not, in fact, wither away — he might well have been right about the solution to the “contradictions of capitalism”, if you follow me. And if that makes me some kind of godless pinko Commie subversive, well … I’ve been called worse by better.
Anybody got the lyrics to La Marseillaise in English?
Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.
Update, 21 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
May 18, 2026
The American Civil War was “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”
Ben Duval looks at the implications of the quote above (attributed to Moltke the Elder) and shows that there were indeed lessons to be learned from that conflict:
Chief of the Prussian General Staff Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800-1891).
Photo by Carl Günther via Wikimedia Commons.
A famous, if apocryphal, quote attributed to Moltke dismissed the American Civil War as “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”. There were certainly lessons to be learned — it could hardly be otherwise in so long and intense a conflict. The war showcased many new technologies on a large scale, including rail and telegraph, while the growing accuracy of firearms showed the growing importance of field fortifications in pitched battle. It also gave witness to many expedients and innovations, including the first known employment of indirect fire (although that would take much longer to be appreciated).
Nevertheless, the readiness with which Moltke’s spurious quote was accepted is suggestive of fundamental differences between Europe’s large professional armies and the hastily-raised volunteers that fought for both North and South. The Civil War saw a mobilization of unprecedented scale, expanding from a pre-war regular army of 15,000 to a total of nearly 2 million at its peak.
At some critical battles, like Antietam, many regiments had mustered bare weeks before. At best, these soldiers could handle their weapons reasonably well; large-scale maneuvers in the heat of combat were out of the question. Even long-serving formations did not have much of a chance to redress these deficiencies, as demonstrated by the disjointed conduct of Pickett’s Charge. What immediate lessons could the Prussian and French, efficiently maneuvering under fire at Gravelotte or Mars-la-Tour, have learned from Civil War armies?
Prussian attack at Gravelotte on 18 August 1870.
Lessons at the Right Level
Perhaps not much at the tactical level, but there was plenty to be learned at the operational. Never before had railroads been employed at such scale to shift troops within and between theaters; nor the telegraph, which was used to coordinate such movements. Efficient logistical services allowed both sides to undertake bold maneuvers involving massive numbers of troops (it is noteworthy how many generals had previous experience working for railroad companies, and how many more went on to high management or board positions after the war).
Union supply wagons loading up at a railhead.
But the point also holds more broadly, beyond the particular technical specialties of 1860s America. Whenever tactics alone cannot suffice—either because both sides are extremely skilled, as in the First World War, or because organizational breakdowns rule out more complex maneuvers — decisive action can by default only occur at the operational level. This was an essential point in Saladin the Strategist. Muslim and Crusader armies, through long experience fighting each other, had developed unique fighting styles tailored to blunt each other’s edges: barring a fluke, decision could only be won through some higher-level maneuver.
In such cases, the fighting capabilities of an army matter less in any absolute sense than in their ability to effect a particular operational scheme. Tactical proficiency is but one variable among many, and not necessarily the most important. Whether a general is dealing with poorly-trained militia or long-serving professionals, it is above all their relative odds that factor into his calculations.
May 2, 2026
QotD: Yes, the US Civil War was about slavery
Preliminary: Yes, the […] Civil War was about slavery. I know it’s fashionable for the Very Clever Boys […] to deny this, but that’s the difference between “a grownup’s understanding of complex events” and “being a sperg that should’ve been shoved in a lot more lockers in high school”. There’s a difference between “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions, as well as between “proximate” and “final” causes.
Slavery was the proximate cause of the First Civil War, the sufficient condition. The final cause, the necessary condition, was the same one that causes pretty much all the really nasty wars — two not-dissimilar-enough peoples living too close to each other. It’s the same reason English and Scots have never gotten along (feel free to go re-read Albion’s Seed here) — familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saying goes. They’re close enough to each other that outsiders really can’t grok what the big deal is, which is always a recipe for disaster.
Same thing between the Puritan religious fanatics of New England and the honor-obsessed planters of the Old South. Had the US developed horizontally instead of vertically — if they’d been able to put the Rocky Mountains between them, say — they’d be two separate nations, with fairly cordial relations …
Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.
April 28, 2026
Echoes of Spain in the 1930s
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Christian Heiens discusses how the Spanish Republic disintegrated in the lead up to the Spanish Civil War:
After the Spanish Right won the 1933 elections, Communists in Asturias launched a revolution, killing thousands before the army was deployed to finally put an end to the chaos.
They did the same thing in Catalonia, and when that too was quelled, they engaged in a low-level terrorist campaign all over the country, planting bombs, sabotaging infrastructure, assassinating newspaper editors and political figures, and staging general strikes all over Spain.
They kept doing this until they finally won the 1936 election, at which point the Left went full mask-off and began unleashing thousands of criminals into the streets, ransacking businesses, dragging conservatives out of their homes to beat them, and going into the countryside to expropriate private property. The entire country descended into a state of near-total anarchy in a matter of months.
The Left spent years agitating for a Marxist revolution in Spain and refused to obey the legal system because they saw the Spanish Republic as a mechanism to achieve Leftism, not as a neutral system intended to uphold democracy, the constitution, or the rule of law.
And thus, any deviation from the march towards Leftism was seen as an illegitimate act of treason and proof of an imminent fascist takeover of the state. As a result, ANY electoral victory by the Right was inherently treated as illegal by the Left, and ANY attempt to actually govern in accordance with Right-wing principles was seen as just cause to engage in violent insurrection.
You cannot have a country like this for long. If one side treats the process as illegitimate unless it produces their desired ideological outcome, they will inevitably win unless they’re physically stopped.
March 15, 2026
Killing CAESAR – the Ides of March and the conspiracy against Julius Caesar
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 12 Mar 2025With the Ides of March a few days away, we take a look at the final months of Julius Caesar’s life and the conspiracy led by Brutus and Cassius. Both had fought against Caesar at the start of the Civil War, but later surrendered and were treated well by him. They were joined by men who had served Caesar in Gaul and during the Civil War, like Decimus Brutus and Trebonius and Sulpicius Galba. Why did they want to kill Caesar and how was the plot organised?
March 14, 2026
Palmer Cavalry Carbine
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Jun 2015The Palmer was the first bolt action firearm adopted by the US military — it was a single-shot rimfire carbine patented in 1863 and sold to the US cavalry in 1865. The guns were ordered during the Civil War, but were not delivered until just after the end of fighting, and thus never saw actual combat service. The design is very reminiscent of the later Ward-Burton rifle, using the same style of interrupted-thread locking lugs. The Palmer, however, has a separate hammer which must be cocked independently of the bolt operation.
March 2, 2026
QotD: King Stephen and “the anarchy”
At this point, I ought to mention that the year is 1120; the young man is William Adelin, heir to the throne of England; and the “ferry” is the infamous White Ship.
Anyway, back to the story: the wine keeps flowing and, before long, the crew are drunk too. Not far out of port, the ship hits a submerged rock and rapidly sinks.
In all, hundreds are drowned — and yet that is just the start of the tragedy.
William’s father, King Henry I, had gone to great lengths to proclaim an heir. As the son of William the Conqueror, he knew just how messy succession could get. He had himself inherited the throne from his brother, William Rufus. This second William had died of a chest complaint — specifically, an arrow in the lungs (the result of a hunting “accident”). Henry was determined that his son would inherit the throne without mishap — and so carefully prepared the ground for a smooth transfer. Indeed, the name “Adelin” signified that the third William was the heir apparent.
The sinking of the White Ship left Henry with one remaining legitimate heir, his daughter Matilda. She was a formidable character, also known as Empress Maud (by virtue of her first marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor). She was, nevertheless, a woman — a big problem in an age when monarchs were expected to lead their men in battle. When Henry died in 1135, Maud’s cousin — Stephen of Blois — seized the throne. This was widely welcomed by the English nobility, but Maud wasn’t giving up easily, and she had powerful allies. Her second husband was Geoffrey, Count of Anjou; her illegitimate half-brother, Robert of Gloucester, was a wealthy baron; and her uncle was King David I of Scotland.
Stephen was assailed on all sides — by Geoffrey in Normandy, by Robert in England, by invading Scots and rebellious Welshmen. The civil war (if that’s what you can call this multi-sided free-for-all) dragged on for almost 20 years. There weren’t many set-piece battles, but there was lots of looting and pillaging in which countless nameless peasants perished.
In the end it was the death of another heir — Stephen’s son, Eustace — that opened the way to peace. The war-weary king agreed that Maud’s son (the future Henry II) would succeed him. And thus “The Anarchy” came to end: two decades of pointless devastation — and all because some young fool got pissed on a boat.
Peter Franklin, “Why Boris needs an heir apparent”, UnHerd, 2020-08-17.
