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“Don’t forget your roots, Yank”
I typically reserve these conversations for the battlefield. The toxicity of the Confederacy mixed with the Internet and long-held beliefs is a recipe that I prefer to avoid. Instead, I wait until I am with friends, family, or coworkers at Gettysburg or Antietam. There, I can talk freely about military strategy and tactics, and provide…
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Genghis Khan at the Franklin Institute
The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia has a Genghis Khan exhibit through the rest of 2015. Here is what you can expect. The exhibit focuses on the rise, dissemination, and fall of the Mongolian empire, paying particular attention to the amalgamation of cultures—Mongolian, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and European. For example, there is one fourteenth-century sword sporting…
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King Sargon II’s Warning to ISIS
Among the ancient cities ISIS bulldozed and blasted this past March was Dur-Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad in Iraq), a capital city founded by Assyrian King Sargon II (r. 722-705 BC). Like all ancient Assyrian kings, Sargon left a clear warning to those who destroyed his work. Safe from destruction was a 9-sided prism describing Sargon’s founding…
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A Case against Battlefield Preservation
I have trekked battlefields dating back to the Greco-Persian Wars and made more than three dozen trips to Gettysburg, so I am avid supporter of battlefield preservation. Until recently, I thought the only enemies of preservation were apathy or necessity. Quite simply, people do not know about the ground upon which they want to build an…
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Artemisia between Herodotus and the High Middle Ages
After the extreme fictionalization of Artemisia in the blockbuster 300: Rise of an Empire (2014), I wondered how historians depicted her throughout history. What survives leaves massive gaps in the historiography, but what remains creates a narrative that remains true to Herodotus’s original depiction of Artemisia. After Salamis, the fate of Artemisia remains lost to history. Based…
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The Artemisia of Herodotus was Complex
Historians were less than disappointed with the portrayal of Artemisia in the Hollywood blockbuster 300: Rise of an Empire (2014). In order to understand their disappointment, it is necessary to establish Herodotus (c. 484-425 BC) and his work, The Histories, as the basis for most of what we know of Artemisia today. Among surviving ancient…
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Will anyone remember Artemisia, Themistocles, or Salamis?
It can be difficult to quantify the impact a historical film has on popular memory, especially with a film such as 300: Rise of an Empire (2014) that merely appropriates historical names, places, and events. While it gained mediocre reviews at best and failed to live up to 300 (2007), the film still grossed $330…
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Book Review: Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life
MacDonald, Eve. Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 323. ISBN 978-0-300-15204-3. $38.00. Using the prisms of the Roman perspective and the Hellenistic world (chapter 1), Eve MacDonald crafts a narrative that follows Rome and Carthage through the First Punic War and Carthage’s own civil war (chapter 2), the rise of…
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Alexander’s heroic and divine nature on my middle finger
Among the countless tourist shops in Athens, I stumbled across a jeweler who had the perfect decoration for my finger. The jeweler made a replica of a famous coin depicting Alexander the Great on one side, or so I thought. The other side depicts Zeus. After I had time to do some digging, I learned…
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Barry Strauss’ storytelling drives ‘Death of Caesar’
It took 60 conspirators guarded by as many as 100 gladiators to assassinate Julius Caesar in the middle of a Senate session. Of his 23 wounds, only one was fatal. Meanwhile, the rest of Rome – including Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and Cicero – was clueless.
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Greek Depictions of Augustus in Life and Death
I was fortunate to come across two strikingly different depictions of Roman Emperor Augustus (r. 27 BC – 19 AD) while in Greece last year. These depictions, one made during his rule and the other after his rule, give us a clue as to how Augustus wanted to be portrayed and how people portrayed him…
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Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I, Military Theory, & Empire Strikes Back
After seeing The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I, I have not stopped thinking about the movie, mulling over the events and concepts, the sure sign of a good movie. Unlike the book purists out there, I have not read the series and I do not care how closely the movies stick to the book…
