March 2022 Research Update

Amici!  It is April!

The past month has been a bit of a blur.  As you might imagine, I have been trying to keep track of the current conflict in Ukraine (if for no other reason than the students in my Global History of Warfare class ask about it regularly) as well as everything else.

But we do have some positive news on the research front: article II (on Roman mail armor) has been accepted (with limited request revisions) for publication in Chiron so at long last our nomadic armor article has found a home.  The timeline for revisions is very quick though (April 25) so that is going to push around a number of other things I'd be working on this month.  It is also going to be my first adventure at acquiring image permissions for publication, though I don't expect problems there.

Meanwhile my history-and-video-games work has been showing up everywhere.  Earlier this month I made another visit to the Three Moves Aheadstrategy gaming podcast to talk about imperialism and empires (https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/empires-and-imperialism-with-bret-devereaux).  And then just recently my public scholarship work on the same topic was featured heavily in an article in The Atlanticby Luka Ivan Jukic (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/history-video-games-europa-universalis/622892/).  And on top of all of that, I wrote a review of Expeditions: Rome for Foreign Policy(https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/06/videogames-history-rome-expeditions/).

All of which has been a terrible hardship because of course Elden Ring is out.  I'm sure at some point I'll find an excuse to talk about it on the blog.

Speaking of which, in terms of what is coming up, there's actually a fair bit of history-in-video-games planned for ACOUP.  This week (it will already be up by the time you see this) we're looking at Total War: Warhammer III's new(ish) focus on 'hybrid' melee/ranged infantry along with the strange aversion Creative Assembly has to infantry units that combine multiple troop/equipment types.  After that (though probably with some firesides thrown in) I am planning a longer and more detailed take on Expeditions: Rome as well as a look at how battlefield command worked in the pre- and early-modern world, using the Total War series as a jumping-off point.

Finally, though i haven't yet had a chance to go back and update them, I want to note here first (and I'll be sure to include it in the next fireside) that our kindly narrator has been very busy, producing narrated audio versions of:
How the Weak Can Win: A Primer on Protracted War (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY45xqu9o3k)
and How Did They Make It: Bread (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcIwe3bxds8YEy9-kqvQbwW-g--96Brlg)

For my musing here, I want to briefly talk about how we teach complex topics because I think this is something often misunderstood (sometimes willfully) in the general discourse.  One of the commonplaces that you see these days is the 'Your teachers lied to you!' article.  They're not always unjustified - in some cases they really are shining a spotlight on often uncomfortable things that have been left of out school curricula precisely because public school curricula are political documents designed, in theory, to offend the smallest number of voters.  I am, to be clear, not writing a defense of white-washed history: if your history class isn't uncomfortable, it isn't being done right.

But just as frequently, what is being focused on is not really 'lies' but necessary simplifications.

Actual academic subjects are complex.  I find this is something that folks often have difficulty grasping: they recognize that the subjects they know are complex but fail to appreciate that subjects they do not know are equally complex even if the complexities are lost to them.  History is often the victim of this: the assumption that 'anyone can do it' because there are no special skills, knowledges or masteries to doing history.  Right now the public discourse is full of recently minted military experts making the same mistake; war is actually really very complicated and very difficult (or, as Clausewitz says - drink - "in war, everything is simple, but the simplest thing is very hard") and it takes a lot of work to be in a position to be able to understand many of the nuances.  I, in theory, have a doctorate in understanding the nuances of conflict but still rely heavily on subject matter experts because of course I am not an expert in Russia or Ukraine.

But you cannot start students off at that level of complexity, especially if you are dealing with younger students.  In actual fact, even at the college level where basically all of your students are already quite bright, not all of the students (indeed, probably not most of the students) are going to have the right mix of intellectual horsepower, driver, diligence and curiosity to master the full complexities of any academic discipline.  Which, to be clear, is fine!  These students are undergraduates after all; mastering a discipline is what you do in graduate school.  That's why its called a 'Masters' degree.  But if you start trying to teach students the material at maximum complexity, all you will do is confuse them.

Consequently in almost every field, students begin by learning a simplified model of the field which is, in many aspects, wrong.  We practice our physics in frictionless vacuums with point-masses, we learn our chemistry with electron orbits instead of clouds and we give early writers a lot of hard-and-fast rules which are, for more experienced writers, at best more like guidelines.

And we do the same thing in history too: we begin by building our broad narratives about the country's history or the world's history that are necessarily simplified.  This often blends in with the demands of time and attention: if you have to do all of world history in a single year, sure the Romans and Greeks are going to end up a bit blurred together.  More broadly, history is going to get presented as a single 'story' which tends to end up as a story of 'progress' (what historians call 'Whig history') because the key question a class like that has to answer is 'how did we get to the world of today?' and that's the simplest way to do that.  And for middle or high school kids, simple is the order of the day.

But I think we can run into two problems there.  The first problem is the hot-take problem which misunderstands that simplification - processed through some hazy memory - as the actual history being taught and declares that your teachers 'lied' to you.  They weren't lying - they were trying to lay the foundation for a more complex view of the subject to be acquired later.  Some simplification was necessary.

The other even more common danger is that the student walks away as an adult assuming that they learned all there was, rather than that they learned merely a foundation on which they ought to expect to expand.  That can play into the 'everything but my specialty is simple' cognitive bias I mentioned above, but it also conditions many of the fights over things like history curricula.  

Regular folks get angry and complain about 'revisionist' history when what is happening is that they are merely encountering long-settled actual history.  It isn't that history has been revised, but that this is the first time they encountered the adult version which doesn't mince words about the violence or unpleasantness nor does it shy away from the complexity of actual events.  Often the supposedly 'revised' history in question are interpretations that are decades old.

In any case, the solution is to remember that in every field of human knowledge, what we teach to students as beginners conceals an ocean of complexity and proceed with a level of epistemic humility.

And that's the month.  Finally, here is a picture of the cats, Percy up top and Ollie below: