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Miscellanea: The War in Iran
This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)
A look at history and popular culture
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Visit acoup.blog → RSS feedOn Hacker News Nov 2019 – Jul 2026
History & Retro Computing 64Society, Policy & Culture 7Games & Graphics 4Math & Algorithms 1Career & Management 1Tech Industry & Business 1
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Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire
This week we’re looking at a specific visual motif common in TV and film: the arrow volley. You know the scene: the general readies his archers, he orders them to ‘draw!’ and then…
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Why no Roman industrial revolution?
This week we are taking a look at the latest winner of the ACOUP Senate poll, which posed the question “Why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?” To answer that,…
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Late Bronze Age Collapse
This week, by order of the ACOUP Senate, we’re talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (commonly abbreviated ‘LBAC’), the shocking collapse of the Late Bronze Age state system …
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Understanding the War in Ukraine
This week, I want to break from our usual format and respond to the fairly unusual global events. I expect a lot of my readers are trying to get a grasp on what is happening right now in Ukraine an…
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The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics
(Note: Thanks to the effort of a kind reader, this post is now available in audio format! The playlist for the entire series may be found here.) This is the first part of a six-part (II, III, IV, V…
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Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications
We’re going to be a bit silly this week (in part because the ending of this compressed semester has left me with little time) and talk about the recently released historical action-RPG comput…
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Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have…
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How the weak can win – A primer on protracted war
Thanks to our volunteer narrator, this post is now available in audio format. This week, in an effort to fill in some of the theoretical basis for thinking about how weaker powers think about fight…
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Addendum: Crucible Steel and Cast Iron
This week, as an addendum to our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) look at pre-modern iron and steel production, we’re going to look at two alternative regional processes, where th…
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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining
This week we are starting a four-part look (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) at pre-modern iron and steel production. As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron producti…
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The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
Fireside this week! We actually haven’t had one of these in quite a while; we had a gap week in April but the last Fireside looks like it was in March! In any case, here we are and here’…
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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II
This week we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we prospected our iron ore and extracted it from the ground and did some…
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The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part V: Ladders Are Chaos
This is the fifth part of a series taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII) from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers (1954) and Peter Jackson…
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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions
This is the second of a three part (I, II, III) series tackling the complicated and still very much debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In the last part, w…
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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things
This is the third and final part (I, II, III) of our series tackling the complicated and still debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In our first part, we lo…
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Roman Egypt was a strange province
Welcome back! We are back from our November hiatus and thus back to regular weekly posts! This week we’re going to answer the runner-up question in the last ACOUP Senate poll (polls in which …
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVa: Steel Yourself
This week, we continue our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week, we looked at how a blacksmith reshapes our iron from a spo…
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Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?
Hey folks! Fireside this week, but next week, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the blog (the first post went up May 3rd) we’re diving into a look at Helm’s Deep in both the book…
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Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III: On the Move
This is the third part of a three part (I, II, III) look at some of the practical concerns of managing pre-industrial logistics. In our last post, we outlined what ‘foraging’ actually e…
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Life, Work, Death and the Peasant: Family Formation
This is the first part of the third part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the patterns of life of the pre-modern peasants who made up the great majority of al…
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Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?
This week, we’re going to talk briefly about why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries – have generally eschewed the systematic…
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How to Roman Republic, Part IV: The Senate
This is the fourth part of our planned five part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) on the structure of the Roman Republic during the third and second centuries, the ‘Middle’ Republic.…
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When is a ‘tank’ not a tank?
(There were some technical difficulties with this post when it first went live. They should be resolved now. My apologies for anyone who got multiple email updates as a result of efforts to get the…
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Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight
This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems te…
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Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem
In this three-part series (I, II, III) we’re going to be bowing to reader demand and taking a close look at the nuts and bolts of maintaining an army in the field. In our last series, after all, w…
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Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool
This post is also available in audio form, thanks to the efforts of our volunteer narrator. This is the first half of the fourth part of our four part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) look at the production …
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Part III: Hammer-Time
This week, we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we took our ore and smelted it into a rough, spongy mass of iron called…
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Spartan School (2019)
This is Part I of a seven part series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, Gloss., Retrospective) comparing the popular legacy of Sparta (embodied in films like 300) with the historical ancient state. Toda…
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Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?
This week we’re going to take a detour into understanding the structure of academia, in particular the different kinds of ‘professors’ and their academic ranks in the American sys…